Battle for Mosul sends baby to her desert grave
Hazem Meshal walked out into the desert carrying his niece in one hand and a shovel in the other. Selecting a site near the rubble of a destroyed building, he laid her down – a tiny figure swaddled in a makeshift shroud – and looked to the sun to determine the direction of the grave. Then he began to dig. A small hole, two feet long and a foot wide.
He was joined by his brother Qassem, who hacked at the earth with a pick to loosen the stones. The girl’s father, Mohamed, stayed with 40 other men squatting in the shade of a wall, too numbed by grief to bury his twomonth-old daughter. Artillery boomed on the horizon.
Earlier that day, they had travelled five miles through the desert from the south-west outskirts of Mosul, fleeing on foot after an explosion had destroyed their home, killing the baby girl, and five others nearby. An air strike perhaps, or artillery, they weren’t sure. The baby’s mother, Asia Sami, was gravely injured. “Her face fell off,” Qassem said. “Half of it is gone.” His own hair was matted with dust and blood, which had congealed on his neck and jacket.
The funeral scene was one expected to be repeated many times in the days ahead – in the renewed offensive to capture west Mosul, civilian casualties are likely to be extremely high.
In surrounding areas, counterterrorism troops and federal police units have taken a series of villages and the airport on Mosul’s southwestern outskirts and are now fighting in densely populated neighbourhoods inside the city.
Yesterday, Lt Gen Abdul-Wahab alSaadi of Iraqi special forces said that his troops were “moving very slowly” into western Mosul and that Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighters were responding with car bombs, snipers and armed drones.
The advancing forces were less than two and a half miles from the mosque in the old city where Isil leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate spanning Iraq and Syria in 2014.
The Meshal family arrived at Salam, a tiny hamlet off Highway One south of Mosul, among a column of people and livestock that trailed a cloud of dust back across barren hills. Among them bleating lambs, sobbing children, and a howling mother beating her chest in anguish. The roughly 300 people who arrived on Thursday afternoon were among the first in an exodus from west Mosul that the United Nations fears could reach 250,000.
As the procession fled, Isil militants fired mortars at them. By the time they reached safety, there were at least 16 injured and five dead – four children and a man whose corpse was slung over a donkey. The civilians said they had left behind other dead in the ruins of their bombed homes.
Civilians have made up nearly half of all casualties in the offensive to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the biggest in Isil’s so-called caliphate.
Between November, when the Mosul operation reached the city limits, and January, the latest month for which data is available, the UN estimates that 1,238 civilians were killed in Nineveh Province. (In comparison, during the four-year siege of Sarajevo, just over 5,000 civilians were killed.) More than 4,300 casualties have required treatment in hospitals outside Mosul, including 1,500 in a single fortnight over the new year. Casualty numbers inside Isil-controlled west Mosul are unknown.
At Salam, the men were separated from the women and children, their names checked against a database of Isil suspects. One man was detained immediately and four others without identification were held apart. The wounded were treated at a rudimentary military casualty collection point – a line of cots in the dust where medics struggled with the influx of patients.
After they had waited in vain, the Meshal brothers and female relatives washed the baby and decided to bury her.
It was not the first time the family had been forced to flee their homes. Originally from the refinery town of Baiji in Salahuddin governorate 130 miles north of Baghdad, they left for Mosul on orders from Isil in 2015 after the Iraqi military began an offensive to recapture the city.
“We left because of air strikes,” Qassem said. “We were afraid the Iraqi military would rape our women and violate our dignity,” he told an Iraqi soldier watching the burial.
Life in Mosul had been “a tragedy”, Hazem said, that only deteriorated as food supplies ran out in the past few months as the Iraqi military closed in on the city and Shia militias cut supply lines to Syria.
When the fighting neared, they had hung white flags outside their homes.
When the hole was deep enough, another brother, Hamid, and father Meshal Abu Qassem joined the others at the grave. Humvees roared past heading towards the sound of enormous explosions from a distant battle where Iraqi Special Operations Forces were fighting to regain the Ghazlani military base.
They lay the body in and wedged flat rocks over it, then mixed water with the soil to make clay to seal the tomb. They mounded the earth, smoothed it down and sprinkled over water in keeping with an Islamic tradition.
Hazem scratched a message on a rock with a piece of shrapnel, the metal screeching like nails on a chalkboard. Then they walked away without looking back, stoic forms in dusty robes.
“This is a child’s grave,” the inscription read. “Hajar Mohamed, 2017.” There hadn’t been time to recite a prayer.