Morgue men endured worst of IS butchery
MOSUL, IRAQ » The young man ended up on the morgue’s examining table in two parts.
He had been seized for selling cigarettes, a crime usually punished by flogging by the Islamic State group extremists who had occupied Mosul. But while he was being whipped, he shouted a curse insulting religion. On the spot, they cut off his head for blasphemy.
Sameh al-Azzawi, the 35-year-old medical assistant examining him, was sick of seeing Mosul’s youth butchered for the slightest reason. The man was a newlywed. His family was waiting outside; it was one of the occasional times when the fanatics allowed the return of someone killed by the group. So al-Azzawi violated the rules: He picked out some thick thread and quickly sewed the man’s head back on, then zipped him up in the body bag. He could sew a head back on a body in four minutes.
The family quietly thanked him.
The morgue in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was where atrocity met bureaucracy, the processing point for the machine of butchery that the Islamic State group created across its territory in Iraq and Syria. Every day, the doctors and staff witnessed the worst of what the militants were capable of inflicting on a human being, constantly fearing they could be next.
Yet the morgue men of Mosul found ways large and small to defy their captors by honoring the dead as best they could.
“Our profession as doctors is all about humanity,” said the morgue’s senior examiner, Modhar al-Omari. “They were doing the exact opposite.”
The staff sometimes faced up to 60 or even 100 corpses a day. As pickup trucks laden with bodies did three-point turns to back through the morgue’s gates, hands, legs or heads fell off onto the ground.
Some were the mangled bodies of civilians and IS fighters killed in bombardment by the U.S-led coalition or fighting with Iraqi troops. Others bore the marks of IS’ brutal enforcement of its radical version of Islamic law. A broken skull on a man with internal bleeding could mean he was thrown from a rooftop, the punishment for those suspected of being gay. A woman with a split skull from a blunt force was likely stoned to death, the sentence for accused adulterers. Then there were punishments for spying or blasphemy: a gunshot wound through the head or decapitation.
Convinced its “caliphate” was here to stay, the Islamic State group was keen on keeping records like a government. As they put together death certificates, the examiners quietly documented IS atrocities . They surreptitiously put an Arabic letter alif to mark a member of the group, and an M, the first letter in the Arabic word for “executed,” for the group’s victims.
One Excel sheet shows more than 1,200 people shot in the head, a likely sign of IS “executions,” between June 2014 when IS took over Mosul and January 2017, when Iraqi forces were fighting to take the city back — an average of 11 a week. The list has 12 women marked as “stoned to death.” It also lists 95 people who were beheaded and 50 men and boys who died from a “fall from a height,” likely hurled from rooftops.
The staff operated under close scrutiny by IS officials and threat of punishment if they broke the rules or tried to leave. Among those rules: The bodies of those “executed under religious law” could not be returned to their families, except in cases where an IS commander allowed it. Instead, they were dumped in mass graves. Thousands more went directly into mass graves without ever coming to the morgue ad IS brought at least 1,000 bodies to the morgue that they did not allow the staff to examine, so they have no idea who they were and did not record them.
Al-Azzawi managed to sew the heads back on about 10 bodies, he estimates. It had to be quick. He did it after midnight in the washing area, which IS fighters tended to stay out of because it was the worst smelling part of the morgue.
He stopped when one militant saw a body with the head restored. “We cut it and you put it back?” the fighter shouted. He warned that any examiner caught doing it would himself be beheaded.
“He’s still alive!”
A pickup truck dumped nearly a dozen bodies onto the pavement of the morgue courtyard, the latest delivery. “Get up!” an IS fighter screamed at the staff, summoning them to begin their daily task of sorting through the dead.
As the medical assistants went to work, one of them stopped short in surprise: Among the bodies, a young man in a soccer jersey and training pants who had been thrown off a rooftop was breathing.
“He’s still alive!” the assistant shouted instinctively.
He hardly had time to realize his mistake. The IS fighter opened fire with his automatic rifle, spraying the bodies. Bullets thumped into the already dead and finished off the young man.
“It’s a lot of pressure. Pressure, pressure, pressure,” said Raid Jassim, the chief medical assistant. “I always expected them to come at any moment and kill or behead us.”
In 2005, Jassim was overjoyed to get a government posting at Mosul’s Forensic Department, the morgue. The pay was several times more than what he’d earn in a government hospital. He was a graduate of a medical institute, a two-year diploma after high school, and had gone on to serve as an army nurse. At the morgue, he carried out examinations of bodies under supervision of doctors like al-Omari.
But no training prepared him for what he saw under the killers ruling his city.