The Syrian city, before rebuilding, is dead again
The Syrian city, before rebuilding, is dead again
RAQQA, Syria. At 11 a.m., eight blue bags of corpses had been placed on the concrete. Its contents had been unearthed by hand row upon row of mostly anonymous corpses buried hastily in a public park.
The men from Raqqa's civil defense team put on surgical masks, a jet of pink disinfectant on their hands and plastic gloves, and returned to the trench. They swayed on the slippery edge of work boots or sneakers and resumed their work: another day of digging into Panorama Park, an impromptu graveyard that was filled when the US-backed coalition fought last year to capture the de facto capital of the self-declared caliphate of the Islamic State.
First they took out the lower half of a man. His thick belt and cargo pants suggested he was a fighter, most likely from the Islamic State. His torso followed him. And then, finally, his skull.
There could be 1,500 bodies buried in Raqqa's Panorama Park, an area somewhat larger than a football field, according to the crew responsible for recovering the remains.
"In some of the tombs we find three or four people buried one on top of the other," said Hassan Muhammad, a former interior decorator and house painter, taking a break from the sun in the shade of a large flower-shaped dried fountain. and red "Pressed together because it was done in such a hurry."
The workers' navy blue uniforms read "first responders" on the back, but their work has made them more gravediggers and carriers of portals for many small, hurried funerals that mark the end of years of conflict and tyranny in this city.
The mission of the team, overseen by the city council of Raqqa and paid with foreign funds, is to collect and account for the bodies. It is a basic step in an effort to make the city, now run by Kurdish forces backed by the United States, work again. Some neighborhoods still have bodies under the rubble. Other parks have also become cemeteries.
One year from Islamic State was expelled from Raqqa.The number of people who died during the reign of the group here and during the four months of the battle of the coalition led by the United States to capture the city is still not counted. But just as the work to exhume and identify bodies continues slowly, so does a partial return to routine for the residents of Raqqa, where 300,000 lived before the Syrian conflict began. There is no large-scale reconstruction here, only signs of gradual progress.
Civil defense teams have recovered more than 2,500 bodies in and around Raqqa, many of them civilians killed by both sides during the battle for the city. Around 2,000 of them have not been identified.
The working day of the civil defense workers of the city offers a grim journey through the Raqqa after the conflict.
The Syrians sit next to a relative's grave this month in the Raqqa cemetery, where militants smashed gravestones during the Islamic State government.
On the second floor, mostly destroyed, of an apartment building, a row of brightly colored clothes hangs to dry. Children climb and play on piles of rubble. The graffiti on the walls of the city are now increasingly linked by "100% clear" or "OK 100%" scribbles, indicating that the building has been cleaned with improvised explosive devices or IEDs.
The ongoing effort within the city only hints at the enormous task that must be done beyond Raqqa, as the caliphate of the Islamic State extended through much of Syria and Iraq, and the parallel civil war in Syria largely left of the country in ruins.
The workers say the Islamic State threw out many bodies, probably including hundreds of people they executed, in a gorge north of Raqqa that people call "the abyss." The abyss of steep walls culminates in a deep hole.
Since becoming the dump of the Islamic State, "the abyss" has acquired an aura of foreboding. The locals warn visitors not to get too close or that the hole can pull them.
Before Panorama Park became a cemetery, Raqqa families used it to picnic and smoke hookah pipes. At the start of the coalition's offensive to capture the city, the road to the city's cemetery had become too dangerous, forcing people to find an alternative cemetery for a growing body count. The parks, and even the zoo, became makeshift cemeteries.
In Raqqa, as in much of the country, the war has forced many things to be reused. "This was a good place to sit," said Hamza Amaiwa, a former tailor, who used to come to Panorama Park with his family.
The recovery team estimates that 1,500 bodies could be buried in the park, an area somewhat larger than a football field.
"The Abyss", a gorge north of the city of Raqqa, where militants of the Islamic State deposited some of their victims.
Today, a forensic doctor, a former bus driver who worked in Saudi Arabia and has no medical training, stands out from the newly exhumed body and takes note of the details that could indicate an identity: the belt; the pants; The silver teeth.
Occasionally, workers find suicide belts or grenades buried with bodies and bring local forces to help get rid of them.
Written notes of the coroner are filed because the body will soon be returned to the ground. Raqqa lacks a morgue, partly because the city does not have enough electricity to power the refrigeration necessary to preserve the bodies.
"Our job is to record anything that could indicate who the person was and that could help families identify it someday," said Dr. Mahmood Hajj Hassan, another of the forensic doctors and the only one with a medical history. "Our work is rudimentary."
Civil defense has more than 660 open files of missing persons, many of them including entire families, which makes the actual number of missing persons thousands.
Resident Hussein al-Muhammad, wearing a tattered purple T-shirt, sweatpants and dusty sandals, entered the park and approached the men as they pulled out their ninth bag of corpses of the day.
"How much do you charge?" He asked.
The men assured him that they exhumed bodies and buried them in the cemetery for free.
Syrian students are returning to school in Raqqa. The forces backed by the United States took the city of the Islamic State a year ago.
Mr. Amaiwa, the former tailor, asked the man how many members of his family he had. Mr. al-Muhammad counted on the fingers that died when he said that his home was hit by a coalition air strike. Even then I was not entirely sure: "Five or six."
The US-led coalition says 104 civilians were killed during the offensive, an estimate far below that of human rights groups. The coalition is still analyzing cases, a spokesman said. He could not confirm, with the available information, what happened to Mr. al-Muhammad's family.
After the ninth body was exhumed, the recovery team waited for people with missing relatives to examine and identify the day's disinterest. Two of the victims were infants.
The men took a quick lunch near the shadow of a downed water tower, which the Islamic State had exploded before retreating.
When no one else entered the park to look at the bodies, the men loaded the bags into the back of a minibus.
The same team that extracts the bodies must lead them through the city, through streets full of rubble and destroyed buildings. At a roundabout where the Islamic State once showed bodies executed, a tattoo parlor was opened next to restaurants and a hookah cafe.
A view of the northern district of Raqqa shows part of the destruction caused by the four-month battle for the city between coalition forces and Islamic State militants.
In the cemetery, anonymity in death is not reserved for those who died during the Syrian conflict. Under the rule of the Islamic State, the tombstones were considered forbidden and crushed by religion, the fragments of stone still scattered in the old part of the cemetery. The family members who come to visit their loved ones stay to wander through unmarked graves, not knowing where they are buried.
As their day ends, the men of the civil defense team perform the Islamic prayer for the dead and return the nine bodies to earth, still in anonymity but in a more appropriate resting place. Each bag of blue corpses slips into another common grave, nested to make room for those who will join them in the coming days.
There are no tombstones or markers, just a notation quickly scribbled on each bag with the same grim description of where they were discovered and when: Unknown man. Panorama. October 9, 2018
Write to Raja Abdulrahim in raja.abdulrahim@wsj.com
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