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AFP
Mosul, Iraq
In Mosul, the missing are everywhere, their families hunting through the ruined Iraqi city for traces of lost husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters.
Squatting on the edge of a crater under the burning sun of an Iraqi summer, Khaled Fizaali watches as a digger of the Civil Defence service pulls up a jumble of iron bars, concrete and wood.
The smell of decay rises as the excavator reveals human remains and Fizaali quickly descends from his perch of rubble in west Mosul. But it's not his wife Sarah, 31, or his seven-year-old girl Touqa, who he has been desperate to find for the last two months.
"It's a neighbour, I recognise the clothes,"he says."I know they're under there. My brother was with them when it was bombed."
Nineteen members of Fizaali's family died in the May 19 air strike on the building, where militant fighters had taken up positions on the roof. Only his brother survived.
Seventeen bodies were found in a first search a month ago, including the remains of Fizaali's 10-year-old son. Fizaali has no illusions; his wife and daughter are dead."But what's important for me is to find their bodies, this would bring me peace. I could visit them when I wanted to. When I go to my son's grave, I feel calmer."It took more than eight months of heavy fighting, air strikes and shelling to dislodge the Islamic State group from Mosul, Iraq's second largest city and once the militants'biggest urban bastion.
In the process significant parts of the city, and especially west Mosul's Old City, were pulverised, leaving months of work ahead for Civil Defence workers to clear out the debris and search for the many still missing. There are likely still hundreds, possibly even thousands, of bodies left to find.
"We don't have any estimates,"says Major Rabia Ibrahim Hassan of the Civil Defence, as his team works in the rubble nearby.
