Till Mayer in Baghdad
Often it is difficult to find the right words. Sometimes impossible.
Ali Ismael Ahmed knows all too well that there is nothing to be said when a father finds the lost son he has been looking for, the son he has raised for 13 years, and all that remains is a charred body.
Ali Ismael Ahmed is a tracing officer for the Iraqi Red Crescent. He is tall and strong. But there are some things that no man can bear. When Ali sees the grief in the eyes of a bereaved parent, a sadness that words cannot express, this 43-year old aid worker feels utterly helpless.
Being a Red Crescent tracing officer is a very heavy duty these days in Iraq.
“All I can provide is the terrible news about the fate of a loved one,” he says, sitting in his sparsely furnished office in the Baghdad branch headquarters. “My news strikes grief in the heart every time I deliver it, but at least it brings an end, a painful certainty.”
Certainty. Closure. This is what one young woman has spent the last two months looking for in the searing, merciless Baghdad summer.
She is searching for the remains of her brother, even digging with her bare hands in the hard brown earth by the roadside. Dust covers her black veil and sweat drops like silent tears from her face. Someone had told her that some war victims were buried in this place. One more lost soul.
There are many missing persons in this capital of six million people. Sometimes a simple metal shard, a wooden stick or a small pile stones will mark a grave. Like the rusty piece of metal stuck in the earth beside a monument to “Revolution Heroes”.
Great iron statues are lined up in rows just ten metres behind this humble grave, standing guard over the unknown bodies hastily buried beneath them.
No more bombs are falling on Baghdad now. Nevertheless, death still makes its presence felt. Shootings continue daily between organized gangs, and between Iraqis and the occupation forces.
The morgue in the Bab Al Mua’dam district of Baghdad is a plain-looking building, its warm yellow paint and flourishing green bushes lending it a serene and peaceful look in the bright sunlight.
Yet this first impression is a cruel deception. Just inside the entrance, an open wooden coffin leans against the wall. Flies are stuck where the sun quickly dried the blood. Every day, 20 to 30 dead bodies are delivered here, victims of the previous night’s violence.
Farther inside the building, a sense of hopelessness pervades. The stench of death steals away the breath. As the senses of the visitor adjust to the smell, the dim lighting and the air conditioning, he becomes aware of the new tasks piling up for tracing officers such as Ali Ismael Ahmed, trying to establish the identity of yet another dead loved one.
“Yes, the war is over, but we get fresh cases to follow up every day,” Ali says with a sigh. Every case represents a tragedy for some family, like that of the 13-year-old who was travelling in one of the ancient minibuses one sees everywhere in this country, so well-known as the most affordable way to travel.
There was no chance for the boy to escape. An exchange of gunfire between two rival gangs transformed the minibus, which was refuelling, into a fireball. The entire petrol station exploded in a split second. The fire burned until the following morning.
No one was able to extinguish the fire until the next morning. The boy’s remains were barely recognizable. So much so that another family wrongly claimed him as their own, and transported the body to Mosul, hundreds of kilometres north of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the real father was desperately looking for his son’s body, knowing he had been on that minibus, so as to at least give him a dignified burial.
“It was difficult to find the family that spirited away the boy’s body,” explains Ali, “and even more difficult to convince them to give it back. I will never forget all the pain and tears.”
But he cannot dwell on this incident. Today’s tasks are awaiting him. There are still graves of Iraqi soldiers in the compound of the Republican Palace and elsewhere. Soon, more families will receive their own painful certainties.
Meanwhile, the shadows of an older war are touching the Red Crescent branch in Baghdad. Ashes and fragments of bones were found in a looted government warehouse.
These were the remains of victims from the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s. They had been carefully packed in named envelopes, but the authorities had never informed the relatives, or delivered the envelopes.
“Someone gave me a plastic bag with the fate of 15 dead people inside. It weight less than one kilogram,” laments Ali, “but to carry it demanded all of my energy.”
Related links:
Iraq humanitarian crisis
ICRC in Iraq
Make a donation