Rising from the rubble: ‘If we don’t rebuild Mosul, maybe Isis will come back’
Even if we work every day for the next six months, we still won’t finish this job – we don’t have enough support or equipment,” says Muhammed Shaban, an officer of the Civil Defence Force in west Mosul, in the exhausted tone of someone who is unable to separate his life from his work. Shaban and […]Cathy Otten writes for The Guardian:
Even if we work every day for the next six months, we still won’t finish this job – we don’t have enough support or equipment,” says Muhammed Shaban, an officer of the Civil Defence Force in west Mosul, in the exhausted tone of someone who is unable to separate his life from his work.
Shaban and his colleagues were recovering as many as 30 bodies a day in August last year, one month after the fighting ceased. More bodies still lie under the rubble along the banks of the Tigris river, where the last bloody battles were fought. “We are working with our hands and it is so hard,” says Shaban. He is still waiting to be paid.
Thoughts of rebuilding Mosul are far from the minds of the men tasked with recovering the dead. The true number of the lives lost in the battle against Isis here – when, in the final months of the campaign, families trapped by Iraqi forces had no escape from airstrikes and snipers – is not known, but the Associated Press reported nearly 10,000 civilian deaths; the UN found the figure to be 2,521 at a minimum. The old city, once Mosul’s economic centre and beating heart, became a burial chamber.
