The Times Companion to 2017
Page 34
Seated in the room with us as we talk is another of Saif’s cousins, 25-year-old Omer Abdulhadi Khader. This gaunt-faced young man is a key witness and a rare survivor of Isis jails, having been imprisoned and tortured on several different occasions during the caliphate’s three-year era.
Omer’s father and brother had been captives murdered by Isis, and he gives a chilling description of his own time in jail with Saif’s family shortly before their execution. He found the men covered in blood, their fingernails torn out, and so badly tortured that guards dragged them around the floor on blankets because they could not walk.
No one could escape from the villages in the area, Omer tells me, because Isis were quick to seal off the zone with huge, improvised minefields that effectively kept much of the caliphate’s population hostage. Among the trapped populace inside Juruf and the surrounding villages were numerous former soldiers and police officers, who had been forced to repent at local mosques in return for amnesty. Yet that repentance was never enough to guarantee survival.
“After the first few months, if Daesh wanted to make an example of someone, or needed some prisoners to execute somewhere, they would just raid a few houses of former policemen, take them away and kill them,” Omer says. “It didn’t matter whether or not you had repented. We lived our lives in permanent fear of death.”
Yet the most penetrating detail Omer describes of Isis rule relates not to a well-known video atrocity, but to the banality of systematic execution. Omer’s own father, a local council member in the pre-Isis era, was taken away from the village and executed in an Isis prison on May 5, 2015, four days before Saif’s family were arrested. Two days later, Omer was told to collect his father’s body from a Mosul hospital. Yet when Omer arrived at the mortuary he found the refrigerators were so full of execution victims that the administration office had stopped keeping records.
“So I had to wade through 200 bodies in a single refrigeration unit before I recognised the corpse of my own father,” Omer says. “And they were just the most recent executions. Not people killed on video; we never got those bodies back. Just normal people the Daesh chose to execute in the daily routine, shot in the head and heart like my dad. There were two huge refrigeration blocks in that hospital, and they were both stacked full of bodies.”
The fortunes of war ebbed and flowed after Mosul’s fall to Islamic State. Word of their victory there caused the complete collapse of Iraqi units in the north of the country, who were pursued in headlong retreat towards Baghdad, thousands of soldiers dying or falling into Islamic State hands in a matter of days.
These battlefield gains were slowly reversed over the next two years with intense coalition airstrikes in support of Iraqi units defeating Isis in the cities of Tikrit, Fallujah and Ramadi, before the operation to liberate Mosul eventually began in October 2016. Juruf, Saif’s village, was liberated on November 3, but victory there seemed empty with so many of his family dead and the perpetrators gone.
Yet vengeance, so long promised, finally came the day Abdullah Aboud was found in the Old City eight months of fighting later.
I look again at the second photo of Aboud and notice more than just the details of his death. Other changes have occurred, too, since the first photo. He has been interrogated. The old man’s hands, tied behind him in the first image, have been bound to his front in the second photo. His face, gaunt in the first picture, is swollen in the second. That could be the effect of being shot. Or it could be the result of being beaten. His right eye seems damaged. There are puncture wounds to his right cheek and upper lip. Someone had some time with Abdullah Aboud before they killed him, leaving him to stare out of the frame in death, mouth agape, blood pooling around the back of his head.
I never do discover exactly who killed him. Saif, with respect to his position as one of General Jubouri’s bodyguards, does not want to discuss the specific details of Aboud’s death, and I do not believe he was there when it happened.
“Forget about it,” he says tersely when I ask him to detail the final moments of Aboud’s life. I am slightly surprised. In other ways he speaks so openly about what has happened and his desire for vengeance. Iraqi troops are hardly shy in posting photographs of vengeance killings in Mosul; they are proud of it.
But there is no shortage of those who did discuss Aboud’s death, posting images of the killing on Facebook, with telling comments written beside. Others spoke out in private satisfaction over what had happened.
It seems that immediately after he was caught in the Old City, Abdullah Aboud was taken for provisional interrogation by Iraqi troops at a screening centre just behind the front line, where males were whipped with cables as a matter of protocol while a row of military intelligence officers checked their identities against databanks on laptops.
Here, Aboud’s name was registered as being that of an Isis suspect, sought in connection with the high-profile murders in the infamous Islamic State video. By then it was already well known across Iraq that the victims killed in the video included the cousins of one of the most respected and powerful Iraqi generals commanding the Mosul operation, so there was already an extensive cast of people wanting to avenge themselves against Abdullah Aboud.
The first photo of him, his head raised by a captor’s fist, was taken as part of the identification process. Next, according to details that emerged from west Mosul just after the battle finished, a phone call was made by one of the interrogating officers to another member of the victims’ family, who was told of Aboud’s capture.
That man duly arrived, interrogated Aboud as to the whereabouts of others involved in the killings, then shot him dead. The second picture was taken straight after Aboud’s death, to show that revenge had finally been taken.
This should be the end of the story. Yet it is still unfinished. Humans are seldom satisfied. Revenge is imprecise, and its greatest flaw is that it feeds a cycle, rather than concludes a matter.
Do you feel satiated by Aboud’s death, I ask Saif. “The level of my desire for revenge is still the same in me,” he replies. “I cannot forget it while there is still a single Daesh left alive in my country.”
He still has the footage of his family’s murder on his phone.
PHOTO SECTION
Jeremy Corbyn cast himself as the scourge of the establishment in his first big speech of the general election campaign at Church House in Westminster. Richard Pohle photographed the Labour leader in April as he left the venue after the speech in a throng of supporters and cameramen: an early sign of the surprising popularity his party would gather during the short campaign
Tony Bellew assails David Haye in the tenth round of their heavyweight fight at the O2 Arena in March, captured by Marc Aspland. Haye was knocked through the ropes in the next round.
Richard Pohle photographed Dan Mothersole stoking the furnace of the tugboat Portwey during its 90th anniversary on the Thames
Ladies Day at Royal Ascot always means an abundance of exotic headgear. These were some of the more restrained examples, pictured by Richard Pohle in June
North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb and fired ballistic missiles capable of hitting US territory. President Trump responded with a threat of “fire and fury”
The Times political cartoonist Peter Brookes was appointed CBE but that did not stop him making fun of the establishment. Top: Theresa May says goodbye to the EU. Above: the Grenfell Tower fire inspired a more serious message
Two gifts to cartoonists, the North Korean and US leaders, continue to provoke disbelief months after this depiction in April.
Brookes had some fun with the troubled publication of the Labour Party manifesto in May
Armed troops were deployed on the streets of London in May in response to the terrorist attack at Manchester Arena. Richard Pohle photographed them in Westminster, where Khalid Masood had killed five people in an attack two months earlier
The cracks are showing in the government’s economic policy according to Morten Morland’s
cartoon after the Grenfell Tower fire.
Morland seemed to find some sympathy for Donald Trump’s beleaguered aides
Theresa May’s change of direction on social care did not play well with voters during the election campaign.
Morland linked the terrorist attack in Barcelona with the solar eclipse in August to create a haunting illustration
James Glossop photographed this eye-catching great grey owl at the Scottish Owl Centre in Bathgate, West Lothian, in April.
Theresa May suggests another species of bird at the Conservative Party manifesto launch in Halifax the following month, captured by Richard Pohle
The centenary of the battle of Passchendaele was marked at the end of July at the Menin Gate in Ypres. Richard Pohle photographed this serviceman in front of some of the more than 54,000 names inscribed on the monument remembering Commonwealth casualties who have no known grave
Jack Hill photographed this group of internal refugees in the Siixawle camp, Sool province, Somaliland. A devastating drought had robbed the families of their livelihoods and homes.
The Ship Inn cricket team has to time its matches at Elie Beach, Fife, to avoid the incoming tide. Bradley Ormesher caught this game in August
A firefighter, photographed by Jack Hill, keeps up the search for bodies in Grenfell Tower the day after fire devastated the block in June.
Tony Blair appears to be alone with his thoughts in this image by Richard Pohle from the dedication in March of a memorial in Horse Guards Parade to Britons who served in Afghanistan and Iraq
Usain Bolt strains every sinew during the 100m heats at the World Athletics Championships in London in August. Marc Aspland caught the determination on the sprinter’s face during one of his last solo races. Bolt was left only with a bronze after Justin Gatlin and Christian Coleman cast a shadow over his farewell appearance
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