When he first heard that US troops had toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraqi engineer Hazem Mohammed thought he would finally be able to find his brother, who had been shot dead and dumped in a mass grave after a failed uprising against Saddam’s rule in 1991.
It was not just Mohammed’s hopes that were raised after the United States-led invasion in March 2003. Relatives of tens of thousands of people who were killed or disappeared under the dictator believed they would soon find out the fate of lost loved ones.
Twenty years later, Mohammed, who was hit by two bullets but survived the mass killing in which his brother perished, and countless other Iraqis are still waiting for answers.
Dozens of mass graves were found, testimony to atrocities committed under Saddam’s Baath Party. But work to identify victims of historic killings has been slow and partial in the chaos and conflict engulfing Iraq in the past two decades.
“When I saw how mass graves were being opened, randomly, I decided to keep the location of the grave secret until a stronger state would be in place,” Mohammed said.
As exhumations dragged on, more atrocities were committed in sectarian conflict and amid the rise and fall of armed groups, such as al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS), as well as Shia Muslim militias.
Today Iraq has one of the highest numbers of missing persons in the world, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which says estimates of the total range up to hundreds of thousands of people.
Source: Aljazeera.com
