Mosul .. The smell of death tightens the nose

Mosul .. The smell of death tightens the nose

Seven months after the fighting stopped ...

Rezan Ahmad  06/02/2018 - 00:42 Reports



BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The destruction of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq and the massive spread of bodies on the city's streets have made the situation "unbearable", a Reuters investigation revealed on Monday.

Iraqis who returned to the old neighborhood of Mosul were aware that it was difficult to live amid the rubble left by the battle with the Islamic state, but one thing in the region was unbearable seven months after the fighting stopped, the agency said.

"I do not want my children to walk next to the bodies of dead people on the street every day," said Abdul Razzaq Abdullah, who returned with his wife and three children to the neighborhood, which saw the last militant battle in July with Iraqi and US-led coalition forces.

"We appreciate living without electricity, but we need the government to remove the bodies. They spread diseases and remind us of the atrocities we have experienced. "

The investigation indicates that the smell of death is crammed with noses from pillars filled with rubble in the rubble of the western part of Mosul and rust-ridden cars still packed with explosives and abandoned houses after those who escaped the bloody end of the three-year rule of militants fled.

Most of the bodies lying in the open in the streets of many of the extremists of the organization, who retreated to the adjacent buildings in the old neighborhood, which is only about 5000, who are narrowed the world and had to return from its population before the war, which numbered 200 thousand people.

Residents and officials in the mainly Sunni city of Mosul say the bodies of thousands of civilians have yet to be removed from the rubble, but the Shi'ite-led government refuses to do so.

"There are no other bodies for civilians to retrieve in Mosul," said Brigadier General Mohammed Mahmoud, head of the city's civil defense forces. The Civil Defense of the Ministry of the Interior is responsible for the exhumation and the issuance of death certificates.

Civil Defense says it has collected the bodies of 2,585 civilians by mid-January and that many of its owners have not been identified and completed operations. Civil defense does not want to waste its resources on the bodies of militants.

"Why do we give the terrorists the chance to bury them?"

The dispute over the bodies of the dead threatens to increase the anger of the city's residents, who have been embroiled in a difficult war and the harsh rule of hardliners in a place where the organization initially found some sympathy. The final number of civilian deaths is a political issue with a major sensitivity in Iraq and beyond.

Mass graves

The municipal administration was forced to set up its specialized team to receive requests from the city's residents to find more than 9,000 missing persons, most of whom were last seen in the old quarter and supposedly buried under rubble.

The team is currently working on requests for the removal of 300 bodies and sends groups to retrieve them whenever possible. But these bodies were seen by neighbors, family members or pedestrians and identified their locations.

"We do not know the number of other bodies under the rubble," said Duraid Hazem Mohammed, head of the exhumation committee at the municipal administration. "If a family or a witness does not call us to see people dying to tell us specifically the number of bodies at a site, Or five or 100 buried in it ».

Local residents say mass graves have been dug as the battle intensifies. Residents say that 100 of their neighbors were buried in mass graves in the courtyard of the Umm al-Tisha mosque in the old neighborhood.

"I myself was buried between 50 and 60 people, with my hands, while planes were flying overhead and bombing the city," said Karim Karim.

Many families have arrived to exhume the bodies of their relatives for burial in appropriate graves. "But others do not know where their families are," Karim said. Some of them have died while others are still in the thousands who are still in refugee camps or rented expensive accommodation in other parts of the city.

The municipal administration in Mosul did not say the exact number of civilian casualties, but its head, Abdul Sattar al-Habbo, told Reuters it agreed with estimates that some 10,000 civilians were killed during the battle based on missing reports and information on the dead. The figure includes victims of ground fighting and victims of coalition bombing.

In response to a request for comment, a US coalition spokesman referred to available reports on the events. The US military has admitted killing 321 individuals based on "credible allegations" of dozens of reports of civilian deaths and injuries caused by coalition air strikes near Mosul.

The report said that the investigation is still ongoing in 100 other reports of casualties of coalition strikes near Mosul, each of which refers to the death or several dead.

Fighters

Although the most prominent problems in Mosul are the bodies of fighters left in the streets, residents say they have also found the bodies of suspected members of members of an organization calling in their homes.

A homeowner in the old neighborhood told Reuters to withhold his name for fear of officials' reaction that he had been waiting weeks for civil defense to come and remove two bodies from the main bedroom in his basement home.

The bodies have been dislodged but it is clear from the clothes that they are for a woman and a child.

"The Civil Defense refused because they said that the woman and the child were a thief," the man said. "They said they punished me because they thought I supported an advocate."

The municipal team has collected 348 bodies of militants so far, but many remain. People are on their way to fetch water from temporary pumps on a street while young children are playing not far from two bodies on the threshold of a house.

Some of the fighters could be identified, while neighbors of the government revealed the identity of some, and some bodies were found for fighters still holding on to weapons they had used in the recent battle against Iraqi and coalition forces surrounding them.

The efforts of the rescue team of the Municipality Directorate are hampered by the lack of funds allocated to it. On several days in January, the team had to stop operations for lack of gloves, masks and body bags.

Some families have dug themselves to extract the bodies of their relatives, such as Mustafa Nader, 23, who returned to search for Abdullah Ahmed Hussein, his father's uncle.

"We were not sure we would find him here," Nader said of the elderly sculptor and tears in his eyes after he had dug an hour until his body was exhumed. I told myself he might have gone or gone to a neighbor's house. "

Others resorted to difficult actions.

Eyad returned in early January after spending six months in a refugee camp and found decomposing bodies of three of his fighters in the living room of his home.

He said: «flies and smell and disease. Something horrible. "

The municipal team said he would not be able to reach him weeks ago, so Iyad asked a soldier in a patrol to make sure there were no explosives in the bodies.

Then he set fire to it.

Because he spent most of his money buying tarpaulins to cover a large gap where the front door of his house borrowed $ 20 from his sister to buy a sterilizer in an effort to remove the effects so his family of ten could return home.

"The smell has not completely disappeared," he says.

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