Syrians recover remains of war dead buried at zoo
Victims of Islamic State deserve ‘dignified place’
RAQQA, Syria – At Raqqa’s zoo, families once visited the peacocks, gazelles and leopards.
They are long gone. What remains between the pockmarked structures that once housed them are trenches, a dozen of them about 200 yards long, where workers extract bodies thinly covered by topsoil.
The zoo is one of the sites where nine mass graves have been found, local authorities and international observers said. It’s where the most heartbreaking of work goes on as Raqqa struggles to dig itself out from the legacy of the Islamic State group and the campaign to oust it.
“Usually, we find one or two bodies wrapped in a blanket, but in one of these trenches, three to four bodies were found barely covered by a single shared blanket,” Mohammed Assad, the on-site doctor, said as he supervised exhumations for the Raqqa Civil Council Emergency Team.
There are even more chilling finds. “There was what seemed like an executed body, where the head was placed separately from the body,” he said.
For nearly three years, this city of 300,000 in north-central Syria served as the capital of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, a territory spanning Syria and Iraq and nearly as large as Italy.
Liberated in October 2017 by a coalition campaign after three years of being terrorized by the militant group, the population is trying to rebuild from rubble and restore basic services such as water and electricity. But first, many of them must find their loved ones and bury their dead.
Since this spring, Assad and other members of the team have found hundreds of bodies buried by IS fighters and civilians caught up in the conflict. Tens of thousands remain missing as corpses decompose in public parks and under the rubble of homes. Mines placed by IS make it difficult to access some of the dead.
Most of the attention is focused on the mass graves used by IS but also by families.
“Because of the intense fighting, both victims’ families and the Islamic State fighters buried people in the quickest and simplest way possible, digging shallow graves and wrapping bodies in blankets,” Assad said.
Less than a mile away from the zoo, Raqqa physician Abdul Rauf Ahmed supervises the exhumation of bodies at the city’s Al-Rashid Stadium, where thousands once gathered to cheer on their team. That ended when IS took over the city almost four years ago: During their rule, IS commanders turned the stadium’s gym and team locker rooms into prison cells and interrogation rooms.
Doctors and team members are looking for those prisoners.
“There are at least 600 bodies in this area alone,” Ahmed said. “Most of the bodies are of women and children and are totally unrecognizable.”
Among the many gruesome slay- ings, one stands out in the memory of Raqqa’s survivors: the execution in July 2016 of four members of the popular Al Shabab soccer club who played at the stadium. The teammates were accused of spying for a secular Syrian Kurdish group. Children were brought to witness the executions.
“Later, they savagely murdered hundreds of other civilians who wanted to flee to areas under SDF control,” said Ahmed, referring to the predominantly Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed military group. “Many of these people were thrown by IS into mass graves.”
Some worry about the excavations: Human Rights Watch, which has sent observers to Raqqa’s mass grave sites, said the teams are in dire need of technical assistance.
“If workers continue to exhume the graves without adequate technical training, equipment and support, families may lose the opportunity to accurately identify the remains of their loved ones,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, acting emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. “Evidence regarding crimes in the area, including IS crimes, may be lost.”
Finding the remains of their loved ones and giving them proper burials remains a top priority for many Raqqa residents, and not only because Islamic tradition demands it.
At the zoo, the team members, some of whom are looking for family members themselves, said they are exhausted and grief-stricken by their finds. But they are motivated because they are able to provide some closure, and find it for themselves, too.
“When the city was surrounded, people couldn’t go to the cemetery to bury their relatives, so they came here to the zoo,” said Hamed Mustafa Hassan, 23, of the Raqqa Civil Council Emergency Team. “We thank God it’s now safe to bury them in a dignified place.”
Wirtschafter reported from Cairo.