One of the many problems that should get solved after the Islamic group ISIS has been beaten in Mosul is now becoming all too clear.
After the liberation of the Iraqi town of Hamam al-Alil about a hundred decapitated bodies were found in a mass grave, which were bulldozed and mixed with garbage.
In the villages, the fields and the desert territory occupied by ISIS there are hundreds and probably thousands of bodies and makeshift graves of those killed by the radicals.
These are the bodies of civilians who spoke out against them, of former policemen and soldiers who refused to pledge allegiance to ISIS or were rounded up recently, of those executed because they were thought to be spies, or because they were politically active before, or for whatever reason the radicals found to kill.
Most of the graves are unmarked, and if marked many are anonymous.
And on the other side, there are the bodies of ISIS fighters killed during battle, or perhaps even killed in acts of resistance by their own side.
It is unclear what will happen to those bodies. Journalists at the front lines tell me they have seen them, but do not know what happened to them. The best chance is that they are quickly buried where they fell, not to hinder the army’s push forward against ISIS.
Unlike the families of Iraqi soldiers, the Peshmerga and the members of the militias receive their bodies for a funeral, relatives of ISIS fighters probably will never have a grave to cry on.
With both sides in the war against ISIS considering the enemy as worthless or even inhuman, war dehumanizes not only life, but also death. Names like ‘the dogs of Daesh’ and ‘the infidel’ are used to belittle the enemy to make it easier to kill, a known strategy in warfare.
What follows is that there won’t be much respect for the dead body of the enemy. On both sides, many have been left outside to be eaten by dogs and wild animals.
Kids in Mosul have been pushing ISIS bodies around, in Kirkuk dead fighters have been dragged through town - which was not an incident, having seen ropes left around feet of partly buried fighters.
Yet whether they were killed by ISIS or the other side, all have families and friends wondering about them, wanting to know if they are dead or alive.
In most wars, the surviving relatives can turn to international NGOs like the International Red Cross for help to find their beloved ones.
But in Iraq so many people were killed in the past couple of years alone, that it will be an enormous task to find all their graves, if buried, and identify all the remains found.
In Sinjar, at least seventy mass graves have been found, and none of the work to identify those inside has started yet – whilst most were killed in the summer of 2014.
We know of families all over the world, who have been denied closure because the bodies of their beloved ones killed in war were never returned to them.
And about the victims that still lie unidentified in the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and in Stalin’s Killing Field outside Warsaw, where a major battle was fought during the Second World War.
Iraq’s killing fields include millions slaughtered in the Iran-Iraq war of the eighties and hundreds of thousands during the Shiite revolution in the south in 1991.
Many of the remains of the thousands of members of the Barzani tribe that the former dictator Saddam Hussein took to the southern deserts to be killed in the eighties, still have not been found.
This has scarred many families who can only mourn their missing, and history will repeat itself.
These scars add to the huge trauma Iraq has collected, and to the explosive mixture of grief, frustration and the feeling of being treated badly.
For the way the dead are treated, mirrors how people felt about them when they were alive, which is undeniably connected to the lack of respect that is so obvious between many Iraqis.
To pull the country out of the swamp of conflicts, war and violence, one thing is badly needed: Iraqis must learn to respect the other, even if he or she is from a different sect, ethnic background or tribe.
Respecting each other is not limited to the living, it also includes the way the dead are treated. Because whatever someone has done, he still has a family that should be able to grief and burry him.
Not caring for the dead, will haunt the living.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
