In The Dark - Episode 9: Patient #8

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

For years, we’d thought what everyone thought: that there were twenty-four civilians killed by Marines in Haditha on November 19, 2005. But maybe everyone was wrong. To find online-only features, visit newyorker.com/season3. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For years while reporting on the Haditha killings, I thought what everyone else thought, that there were 24 civilians killed by Marines on November 19, 2005. 24 victims. That's what's been reported in basically every news story about Haditha. Allegations that U.S. Marines murdered 24 Iraqis. 24 civilians died. 24 unarmed men, women.

Deaths of 24 Iraqi citizens. Civilian deaths of 24. Deaths of 24 Iraqi citizens in the city of Haditha. It's the number the military gave in press conferences. 24 Iraqi men, women, and children. The number that members of Congress used when they talked about the killings. Women and children, 24 people they killed. Now, this is the kind of stuff that's kind of stressful. But as we got deeper and deeper into our reporting, we began to wonder if maybe that number was wrong.

was wrong. This is the final episode of Season 3 of In the Dark. Patient Number 8. One day, our producer Samara was reading through the thousands of pages of documents that we'd received by suing the military, when she came across something that got her attention. Samara called to tell me about it. Hey Madeline. Hi Samara.

So I was calling you because I found something that's kind of interesting. Hmm. Samara had found a reference to something else that happened in Haditha on the same day that the 24 people were killed, something else the Marines had done that hadn't resulted in any charges and that none of us had ever heard of. The reference Samara had found came in one of the statements Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt had given to NCIS agents during the Haditha investigation.

Most of Sherritt's statement was about things we already knew about. But there were a few lines about this other thing. The exact time that this is happening is a little unclear, but it's maybe an hour or so after the ID has exploded. And so this would be after the Marines went into some of the houses and killed some people. Yes. Sherritt described for investigators how after the Marines went into the first two houses, there was a pause in the shooting. Sherritt and Wuderich were outside looking around when, Sherritt said, they spotted a man on the road, a few hundred meters away.

And Wuderich just opened fire. Samara read to me from Sherratt's statement. Wuderich took his first shot but missed. I went to fire because Wuderich had fired, but my weapon failed to fire and jammed. Wuderich took a second shot and hit the individual, and I saw him fall. I did not see a weapon, and no one had shot at us. Why did they shoot him? Why did Sherritt say they shot him? Sherritt does not give a good explanation. He basically says, like, Wuderich started shooting, so I started shooting.

Sherritt said he never asked Wuderich why he shot at the man. And as far as Samara could tell from the records we had, Sherritt never mentioned the shooting to investigators again. Wuderich never talked to investigators about it at all. Samara went back to the documents, looking for any other references to this shooting, trying to figure out what had happened. And as she read, she realized this man who was shot apparently survived. Samara found documents that described other Marines finding him later that day in a

nearby house. But as Samara kept reading, she realized that this shooting was only the beginning of the story. Because it turned out that the man Wuderich and Sherratt shot at wasn't alone that day. He had been with several other men at the time. And it was what happened to one of those men that really got her attention. Most of the information Samara was finding came in a series of interviews NCIS investigators had conducted with a different squad of Marines. A group of Marines who weren't involved in the killings in the houses. This group was called Second Squad. Second Squad had been posted a little ways away from where Sherritt and Wuderich had been, and the Marines of Second Squad

pick up the story from where Sherritt left off. They describe hearing the gunfire coming from Wuderich and Sherritt's position and spotting two men running. Running through the area, fleeing Wuderich and Sherritt. It appeared that what had happened was that after Wuderich shot the first man, the men who were with him started running away. And they ran right into the path of 2nd Squad. Some of the Marines of 2nd Squad spotted these two men running. According to their statements to NCIS, they thought it looked suspicious.

Two men running and being shot at by Marines. They thought the men were insurgents. And so members of 2nd Squad opened fire too and hit one of the men in the head. The man who'd been shot in the head fell to the ground. As the Marines watched, an Iraqi family came outside and picked up the man. They brought him inside their house. A little while later, someone approached the Marines waving a white flag and led the Marines to the house. The Marines of 2nd Squad went inside and found the man that they had shot in the head. He was alive, but badly injured. They get inside and they find this Iraqi man, the man who's been shot in the head. The family of the house has tried to help this guy, like they've tied a towel around his head.

The Marines bandaged the man's head wound. They took photos of him. And then they radioed for a medevac. And they put him on a door that they're using as a stretcher. And they bring him to a medevac site to wait for a medevac. Then the Marines loaded the man onto a Black Hawk helicopter and flew away. Who was this man who'd been shot in the head? What happened to him?

Had he survived? The Marines' statements didn't say. And the man's name wasn't in any of the documents Samara had read. We thought maybe the Marines in 2nd Squad, the squad who shot him, could help fill in the blanks. And so we talked to as many of them as we could. Some of them told us they couldn't remember anything about the shooting. Others were particularly unhappy to see us. Like when our producer, Raymond, stopped by the home of one of the Marines.

That did not go well. The man threatened to call the police, and he appeared to take a photo of Raymond's license plate and said he would be blasting a photo of Raymond to his Marine Corps groups to make sure that no one talked to him ever again. Our producer Natalie went to see the leader of 2nd Squad, a man named Francis Wolfe. Wolfe had told investigators he'd shot at the men because he thought they were insurgents and posed a threat. When Natalie knocked on his door,

Wolfe opened it. And before Natalie could say anything... You get the fuck off my porch. Okay, I'm sorry. Get the fuck out of here. Don't ever come back. Okay, sorry. We don't want to deal with this shit no more. Get out of here.

I didn't mean to bother you. These Marines were definitely not interested in helping us. They just sent their dog after me. Fortunately, the dog didn't seem to be too mean. But then one day, a clue. It came in the batch of photos the military had sent us after we sued them. Most of those photos were of the 24 known victims of the Haditha killings. But there were a few other photos, of someone else entirely.

They show a man lying on his back, on a bright red carpet. The man is wearing white pants on a bright red carpet. The man is wearing white pants and a beige distasha. His head is bloody. Someone had placed a white towel underneath it. His head injury looks serious. But it appeared the man in these photos might still have been alive. There were two other photos of the man, both of them close-up shots, taken of the man's tattoos.

One of the tattoos was on his left hand, a small black circle with some kind of mark in the middle. The other tattoo was on the man's arm. A small but unmistakable letter in black ink. The letter M. Okay, so I am scanning through some of these records we got from NCIS. One afternoon, Samara was reading through another batch of records, recording herself, as we often do. And I've been just going through all of these hundreds of pages and pulling out anything I could find on this guy who was shot in Haditha on November 19th. And deep in the investigative file, she found something. Oh.

Wait a second. A pair of documents describing the man shot by Marines and airlifted out of Haditha. Hold on a second. And these documents, alone out of all the reports we had received, contained... There is

a name in here. A name. Manda Amid Hamid. Manda Amid Hamid. We'll be back after the break. Hey, it's Madeline. If you're a fan of In the Dark and you love long-form storytelling, Thank you. you at The New Yorker. Like this story, published just this year by Patrick Radden Keefe about a teen who got mixed up in the London underworld and then mysteriously fell into the Thames. In the four years since Zach's death, the family has had to confront the extent to which the boy

they thought they knew had been living a double existence. None of the Brettlers had ever imagined that Zach might be moving about London pretending to be someone else altogether. imagined that Zach might be moving about London pretending to be someone else altogether. This season of In the Dark took us four years to report. You're hearing it now because the New Yorker believes in what we do. So go to newyorker.com slash dark and become a subscriber today. That's newyorker.com slash dark. This mysterious other shooting of a man with a tattoo of the letter M. This man whose name, according to those documents, was Manda Hamid, made Samara think back to a story we'd heard more than a year earlier, back when we were in Erbil. We were with our interpreter, talking to Khaled Salman Rasif, the lawyer who'd lost 15 members of his family that day. Khaled had a lot of information to share, about his family, what they were like, what he saw that day, everything he'd done to try to get the killings of the 24 people investigated.

In the middle of all this, Khaled briefly mentioned that there was a woman in Haditha who'd come to him for help shortly after the killings. He ran into a mother who told him about her missing son on the same day of the incident. The woman told Khaled that her son had gone out that morning and never came home, and she hadn't seen him since. She asked Khaled for help figuring out what had happened to him, and Khaled tried. He told us he asked the Marines about the woman's son multiple times. He asked the Marines about the woman's son multiple times.

Khaled, all the time when he was meeting with the Americans, he was asking about him, and they all the time told him that we don't know this person, we don't know what happened to him. We know nothing about him. Khaled said that for years, this mother would come to him asking about her son. And he was very shy from her because he didn't have any information about the son.

Nobody knows anything about him. Khaled said he felt ashamed that he was never able to give the mother any answers. Khaled told us this story almost as an aside. We moved on to other things. But now Samara wondered, could there be a connection between this missing man and that mysterious other shooting of a man named something like Manda Hamad? Back when we talked to Khalid, he didn't remember the missing man's name. So Samara texted Khalid and asked him if he could track it down.

And right away, Khalid sent Samara a voice memo. Hello. Mamdouh Hamad. That is his name. Mamdouh Hamad. The document had said, Manda Hamad. Not exactly the same, but close. Not exactly the same, but close. We asked Khalid if he could connect us with Mamdou's family mother, who'd asked Khaled for help all those years ago, died in 2013. But Mamdouh's brothers are still alive.

So we asked Namak Hoshna, the BBC reporter we were working with, to go with an interpreter to meet them. So, thanks very much for coming. Could you please introduce yourselves? The brothers' names are Qasim and Juma. They all met at Khaled's house, and the brothers told Namak more about Mamdou and what happened that day. Back in 2005, Mamdouh was 27 years old. He was charming, outgoing. His brothers described him as the kind of guy who got along

with everyone. He was very friendly. Used to have jokes with others. He mixed with people. He established a quick relationship and friendship with others. A cousin later sent us a picture of Mamdou. He's looking right at the camera, grinning a huge grin. A person next to him is giving him bunny ears.

A lovely guy. The family lived in Haditha, in a neighborhood a little ways away from where Khaled's family lived. Before the war, Mamdou and his brothers worked in construction. But when the Americans arrived, that kind of work dried up. And so the brothers started doing all kinds of odd jobs, just trying to scrape a living together. trying to scrape a living together. On the morning of November 19, 2005, the brothers had a job to do. A guy who ran an operation selling gas around Haditha wanted them to walk to a nearby town to pick up one of his trucks.

He works. He brings gas from Beji to Haditha. Ask him to take the truck, go to Beji to bring gas. Mamdou and his brother Juma set off on foot with two of their cousins, Haider and Yassin. The men didn't know that anything out of the ordinary had happened that morning. They'd been too far away to hear the IED explode. And too far away to hear any of the shooting that followed. They didn't know there was an incident. The men walked through the town,

out of their neighborhood, and into Khaled Salman Receif's. The streets were quiet, and then out of nowhere. The Americans started shooting them. There were Marines on the street, a few hundred meters away, firing at them. What Mamdouh's brothers were describing

appeared to be the moment that Lance Corporal Justin Sherritt described in his statement to investigators. The moment he said Wuderich opened fire on a man, and so he tried to shoot too. Sherritt hadn't given investigators a clear reason why they were shooting at the man, and the men told Namak they had no idea why the Marines were shooting at them.

They said they weren't carrying weapons or anything that could have been mistaken for a weapon. They're just walking through town. The Marines didn't call out any warning. They just started shooting. The men ran, trying to escape. But one of the Marines' bullets hit Yassin in the stomach and ripped through his back. Yassin fell face-first to the ground. Mamdouh stopped running. He checked on Yassin. Are you okay? Are you alive?

Yassin said, Go, run. A neighbor pulled Yassin into a nearby house. He was eventually taken to a hospital, and he survived. Mamdouh, Juma, and Haider kept running. Unbeknownst to them, they were running right into another squad of Marines. Second squad. And then... So his brother Mamdouh was shot in his head. Mamdouh was hit too.

Neighbors got Mamdouh into a house. His cousin Haider went into the house with him. Haider later told his family what happened inside. How Mamdouh, despite his head wound, was still conscious as he lay on the floor of the house. How he was praying and asking Haider to take care of the family. Haider told the family how a group of Marines entered the house and carried Mamdou out to an American helicopter. Mamdou's brother Juma watched from a distance as the helicopter lifted off. They took Mamdouh and they left.

And that was the last anyone in Haditha ever saw of Mamdouh Hamad. In the days and weeks and months, and eventually years that followed, the families searched for Mamdou. They had no idea what had happened to him. They didn't know if he was alive or dead, if he'd been treated by the Americans, or if he'd been arrested and was now in prison. We keep worrying and keep asking every day and night, where is Mamdouh? Where is Mamdouh? Is he still alive? The family tried everything to find him. Mamdouh's brothers, Juma and Qasim,

would go with their mother to the American base over and over again, begging for any information, good or bad, about what had happened to their brother. The Marines didn't offer them any answers. At one point, someone at the base told them, He was handed to the Iraqi forces. Maybe Mamdou had been handed over to Iraqi forces. And so the family found a relative who had access to the computer database that contained records of the people the Iraqis were holding. The man ran a search for Mamdou. So he's checking all the computers for Iraqi forces, other Iraqi security forces. But the search came up empty.

The family kept trying. Juma and Qasim traveled with their mother to prisons all over Iraq, checking to see if Mamdou was being held in any of them. But he wasn't. Qasim said their mother refused to stop hoping that Mamdou might still be out there somewhere and that one day they might find him. She didn't stop looking for him. She knocked all the doors.

Mr Khaled, Baghdad, American, Iraqi forces. She didn't give up. And she wouldn't allow Juma and Qasim to stop looking either. Juma and Qasim never gave up hope they might one day find Mamdou. But after their mother died, they did stop searching. They told Namak that they wanted to end this anguish of not knowing. If Mamdou was dead, they wanted to know, maybe even find his body and bring it home for a proper burial. And of course, if their brother was still out there somewhere alive, they wanted to find him.

But it had been so long, almost 20 years. They'd tried everything, looked everywhere, talked to everyone. But they'd never been able to find Mamdou. And so, we decided to try. The last time anyone in the family had seen Mamdou, he was being put onto a U.S. military helicopter after being shot by Marines in the head. But he was still alive at that point, even still talking, according to his family. We actually managed to find a Marine

who was on that Black Hawk helicopter that day. His name is Pedro Garcia. He'd been wounded that day in a different engagement in another part of town. Garcia remembers being told by someone that the Iraqi man being loaded onto the Black Hawk with him was responsible for the IED that killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas.

I look over and I'm like, who the hell is this? And then one of the guys from 1st Platoon they're like, excuse my language, but they're like, that's a piece of shit that fucking pulled the trigger on the IED. And I'm like,

why? Why is he here? Why? And I remember saying, fuck you, piece of shit. Mamdou, of course, was not the trigger man. But Garcia didn't know that. On board the chopper, Mamdou was hooked up to oxygen. He didn't look good.

Someone asked Garcia if he would squeeze the oxygen bag to help Mamdou breathe. And I remember it was a crew chief. He told me, he goes, hey, I need you to blow the little mast thing with those little ball to you squeeze and it pumps air, pump air into him to keep the circulation. He wanted me to do that to him, to the Iraqi guy. And I literally told him, it might have been cold, but when they told me who that person was,

and then knowing that one of my buddies is killed, I told him, excuse my language, but go fuck yourself. Fucking let him die. Mamdou didn't die. Another Marine ended up squeezing the oxygen bag. And Mamdou was still alive when the Black Hawk landed near the hospital at Al-Asad Air Base. Samara found records of interviews that NCIS investigators did with medical personnel who worked at the hospital on the base. And they tell what happened after Mamdouh arrived.

He's flown to the hospital at the American base at Al-Assad. And when he arrives at Al-Assad, he's in pretty bad shape, but he is still alive. And Al-Assad doesn't have a name for him, and they have no identifying information at all. So the front desk clerk enters him into the patient log as enemy prisoner of war, patient number eight. At the hospital at Al-Asad, medical staff intubated Mamdou, who they called patient number eight. Then they loaded him onto another helicopter, bound for a hospital in Baghdad, run by the American military. We have a statement that a Marine who was on that flight

to Baghdad gave to investigators. This Marine's job was to guard Mamdou on the helicopter ride. He was accompanied by a nurse. The Marine told investigators that the chopper landed in Baghdad on a helipad near the hospital. The Marine then loaded Mamdou into a six-wheel ATV and drove to the hospital. They went inside. It was full of military personnel. A second lieutenant told the Marine he'd have to fill out some paperwork about the patient he was guarding. The Marine asked if he could use the bathroom first. When he returned, the second lieutenant told him, don't worry about the paperwork. The man you brought us is dead.

It isn't clear exactly what happened in Mamdouh's final moments, or exactly when he died. It seems it could have happened on the second helicopter ride, the one to Baghdad. We requested Mamdouh's full medical records from the U.S. military, but they refused to provide them. We do know that despite his head injury, Mamdouh was considered stable when he left al-Assad, headed to Baghdad. The limited records we did manage to obtain say that he died, quote,

as a result of a penetrating injury to the brain. The American Military Hospital in Baghdad wrote out a death certificate. They didn't have any identifying information. So on his death certificate, he's just listed as an unidentified John Doe. The hospital in Baghdad held Mamdouh's body for five days, not knowing who this person was, and therefore having no way to contact the family. On November 24, 2005, they released his unidentified remains to the Baghdad morgue. Samara wanted to find out if the Morgan Baghdad might know what happened to Mamdou's body.

So we hired a researcher based in Baghdad to help us. Hello? Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Hello? Hi. Hi, I'm trying to reach... Yes, I am. The researcher didn't want us to use his real name.

Because, like, honestly, it is not safe for me, honestly, to show for public that I'm working with Americans. That will, like, make some trouble for me. Is there a name that I could use that would be safe for you, just to give me something to call you? You can just say Manaa. Okay, that would be safe for you just to give me something to call you? You can just say Manah. Okay, that will be fine. Manah was familiar with the Baghdad morgue. Its official name is the Medical Legal Institute. Manah told Samara that unfortunately, everyone who lived in Baghdad during the war was familiar with the Medical Legal Institute because it seemed like everyone had known someone whose body ended up there.

Especially Baghdad residents, they do have bad experience about this institute because myself, my friends have lost their relatives, their friends in this institute. Mina had actually gone to the institute himself sometime back in 2007 or 2008 to help a friend search for a missing family member. They'd sorted through mounds of bodies piled on the floor, but the body they were looking for wasn't there. You can like smell death in every corner, in every corridor of this institute. Manah agreed to go back to the Medico-Legal Institute and see what he could find out about what had happened to Mamdou's body. Two weeks later, Samara got back on a call with him. What was it like to go back there?

Oh, I got like flashes from what happened, from these memories. Like, you know, all the images, like even the smells, it was like really shocking me. Mina told Samara what he'd learned during his trip to the institute. He said the staff there told him what it was like back in the mid-2000s, at the time Mamdou was killed. The country of Iraq back then was in chaos, triggered by the American invasion. Civil society had collapsed. There was basically no functioning anything.

There were insurgents and warring militia groups. The city of Baghdad was filled with the sound of constant blasts from car bombs, shootings, explosions. Hundreds of people were dying each day. And the Medico-Legal Institute was a place where the bodies of many of these people ended up. The situation was like really bad at the time because they didn't have like enough space in the refrigerators to keep all of the bodies. So when it was full, they just stuck the bodies outside or in the sidewalk or everywhere. It was really chaotic. Staff at the morgue couldn't keep up with all the death. They couldn't process all the bodies in any kind of coherent way. They couldn't store

them, and almost none of the bodies that were arriving at the morgue came with any identifying information. But the staff at the Institute told Manah that there was one thing the workers at the morgue back then were able to do in the midst of all this chaos, something that now seems pretty remarkable. The workers at the morgue looked ahead to a time when things might be less violent, less chaotic, a time when people might be less violent, less chaotic. A time when people might be better able to come looking for information about their dead loved ones. And so the workers at the morgue took photographs of all of these bodies.

Pictures for the bodies. Like for everyone who was delivered to this institute, they have photos for everyone. Photos of everyone, labeled with the date that the body had arrived. After the morgue workers would photograph an unclaimed, unidentified body, the morgue would coordinate with cemeteries to arrange to have the body picked up

and buried in one of them. The morgue kept track of all of this. Even now, they had records of where each body had gone. According to the U.S. military records Samara had reviewed, the body of Mamdouh Hamid had been turned over by the Americans to the morgue on November 24, 2005. Do they have photos from November 24, 2005? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah, so basically, like, according to this, we might find the body of the man that we are looking for. the body of the man that we are looking for. The morgue told Manaa they couldn't show him the pictures, but they said that if a family member wanted, they could come to the morgue and look at the photos and see if Mamdou was in them. And if he was, the morgue would consult its records and be able to tell the family where Mamdou's body was buried.

We'll be back after the break. Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm proud to share the news that three films from the New Yorker documentary series have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. And they are Incident, Seat 31, Zoe Zephyr, and Eternal Father. And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism, exploring themes of justice, identity, and the bonds that shape us. These extraordinary films, which were created by established filmmakers as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge, and move you. I encourage you to watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films at newyorker.com slash video.

Samara wanted to tell Mamdou's family everything she'd learned. But she wanted someone to be there with them, helping to convey this information. So she asked Mina to meet with Mamdou's family in person. Mina met Mamdou's brothers, Qasem and Juma, at Khaled Salman Rassif's house. They all sat down together on a couch in Khaled's living room. They poured some tea, and Minak called Samara in by phone.

Hi, Samara. Hello. I'm with Mr. Khalid and Qasim and Juma. Hi, Mr. Juma and Mr. Qasim. It's very nice to meet you. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you, Samara.

Go ahead. I wanted to begin by telling you how sorry I am about what happened to your family and to Mamdou. For the past several years, me and my team have been brother Mamdou and what happened to him that day. Would you like me to share with and what showed through this document? We want to know what happened to Mamdou. The only wish that they have, they want to know eagerly what happened to their brother. Okay. Okay. So the records that I have show that Mamdouh, as you know, was shot by Marines on the morning of November 19th in Haditha. Samara told Juma and Qasim how Mamdouh was flown out of Haditha.

He was medevaced to Al-Assad Air Base. How he was taken to Al-Assad and treated there. He was treated at Al-Assad for about an hour. And then put on another helicopter. And sent on to the American Military Hospital in Baghdad. But before he could be treated at that hospital, Mamdouh died from the gunshot plane to Baghdad. I'm so sorry to be the one telling you this news. I know this is probably not the news that you wanted to receive,

but I felt it was really important that you know this is probably not the news that you wanted to receive, but I felt it was really important that you know this. This is his fate, and we are really, really appreciate you telling us what happened to him. And now we can relieve, at least, finally, knowing what happened to our brother. Khaled Salman Rassif was in this meeting, and at this moment, he began to speak. Ever since the day of the killings, Khaled had felt a burden, a burden of being responsible for 24 people. It had shaped his entire adult life. And now, sitting there in this meeting, Khaled was realizing there was actually one more victim to add. His burden had grown even heavier. There were now 25

victims of the Haditha killings. 25 people killed by U.S. Marines that day. Mamdouh's family was grateful to Samara, but also angry. Why had it taken so long for anyone to tell them that their brother was dead. It was clear from the documents Samara was sharing with them that the U.S. military had known for nearly 20 years that Mamdouh was dead. And so that whole time, the family had been asking the Marines, traveling to bases and prisons across Iraq, pleading with anyone and everyone for information. The truth was in the possession of the U.S. military all along.

Juma says like, if only they told us like that he is dead at that time. They did not only kill him. They killed him twice. One when they killed him like in reality and second when they didn't tell about what happened to him. No. No. We asked the U.S. Marine Corps why they didn't tell Mamdouh's family the truth years ago.

They didn't answer. When we asked Major Dana Hyatt, the former civil affairs officer in Haditha, about Mamdouh, he told us he couldn't remember anyone who fit that description. In that meeting with Mamdouh's family, there was one more thing to talk about. They're asking about the body. Samara explained that Manah had gone to the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad

and talked to people who work there, and learned that there might be records of Mamdouh there. and talked to people who work there and learned that there might be records of Mamdou there. They have pictures of bodies that were turned over by the Americans on that day, November 24th. Family members, if they want to, can go to the morgue, to the Medico-Legal Institute, and look at the pictures and try to identify their loved ones. They eagerly want to know what happened and to get the corpse or at least where they buried his body.

On a cool, dry morning in January, Mamdouh's brother Juma woke up early and started off on the long drive from Haditha to Baghdad. The conversation he'd had with Samara had provided some relief. But in the days after that conversation, Juma started to doubt. It had been so many years, years and years of conflicting information, years of being told one thing and then told another thing, and never being able to know anything for sure. Juma still wasn't convinced his brother was dead. In Baghdad, Juma met up with Mina, and they headed to the Medico Legal Institute. On the drive over, Juma told Mina how he was feeling anxious. His emotions were all mixed up.

He said he wanted the relief that he thought would come from knowing for sure what had happened to Mamdou. But Juma said, he's my brother. And sometimes, I don't know, I would rather live with the hope that he's still alive. And maybe one day, he'll walk back in the door of our family's home. When Juma and Mana arrived at the Medical Legal Institute, they were led through the busy halls to a section of the morgue called the Office of Missing Persons. They were shown to a room with a large screen mounted on the wall.

Juma couldn't sit. He was too nervous. And so he stood, gazing at the screen, as an employee started up a computer and a slideshow began. One picture after another of dead Iraqi men delivered to the morgue in the month of November 2005 and never identified. So many dead men. Men dead of gunshot wounds.

Men with their bodies blown apart. Each one with their own family, their own story. An entire life reduced to a photograph of their remains being flashed up on the screen and replaced by another. They kept flipping through photos. Old people, young people, middle-aged people. So many bodies. By one estimate, the war in Iraq left around 300,000 Iraqis dead.

One photo flashed up onto the screen, then another, then another, until Juma called out, that one, that one. And there was Mamdou. You could see the gunshot to his head, but his face was clean, and you could see his features clearly. There was a yellow piece of paper on his chest with a handwritten note saying the body had been delivered by the American military. Mamdou, after all these years, had been found.

Mamdou's family is now working to have his body exhumed from the cemetery where he was buried as an unidentified man, so they can finally bring him home to Haditha. On an afternoon in early spring, Khaled Salman Rasif, the man who lost 15 members of his family, walked down a crowded street in Haditha with Namak,

the BBC reporter we were working with in Iraq. They opened a small metal gate that led into a courtyard. The ground was tan and dusty, and in the dirt, you could see circles of carefully placed stones. These were the graves of Khaled's family members, killed on November 19, 2005. There were larger circles of stones, and next to them, several smaller circles. Parents, buried next to their children. Khaled Salman stood in this graveyard on this crowded street and began to cry. We buried my mother and father, but they were in a special condition.

There was the grave of Khaled's sister, Asma. Asma, who died with her arm around her four-year-old son, Abdallah, in the corner of their living room. Abdallah would now be 23 years old, maybe a university student, maybe considering a family of his own. Instead, he was lying dead in a grave next to his mother and father. There was the grave of Yunus and his wife, Aida, the mother who died on a bed surrounded by her children. The children's graves were there, too. Her eight-year-old son, Muhammad,

10-year-old Seba, 15-year-old Noor, and the youngest children, 5-year-old Zainab and 3-year-old Aisha. Each family, a whole world, gone in just seconds. Khaled Salman Rasif stood there among the graves. He said they had dreams, ambitions, families. The wind moved through the palm trees. The call to prayer rose up over the city. The traffic rushed past. They were people, he said. And there's your love in the night

And there's your love in the night In the Dark is reported and produced by me, Madeline Barron, managing producer Samara Fremark, producers Natalie Jablonski and Raymond Tungakar, and reporter Parker Yesko. In the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter and Willing Davidson. Interpreting in Iraq by Aya Muthana. Additional reporting and investigating in Iraq by BBC Arabic's Namat Koshna, field producer Haider Ahmed, and Manal. Additional interpreting and translation by Aya El-Shikarchi. Additional translation by Shireen Khalid and Lucy Kroening. This episode was fact checked by Shireen Khalid and Ismail Ibrahim. Original music by Alison Leighton-Brown. Shereen Khalid and Ismail Ibrahim.

Original music by Allison Leighton Brown. Additional music by Chris Julin and Gary Meister. Sound design and mix by John DeLore. Our theme is by Gary Meister. Our art is by Emiliano Ponzi. Art direction by Nicholas Conrad and Aviva Michaelov. Research help in London by Samira Shackle. FOIA legal representation from the FOIA team at Lovi & Lovi. Thank you. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild. The editor of NewYorker.com is Michael Luo.

The digital director is Monica Rasek. The head of global audio for Condé Nast is Chris Bannon. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick. A big thank you to our FOIA legal team for their many long hours and commitment to this work. They are seriously the best. Thank you to the entire team. Matt Topic, Josh Lovey, Stephen Stitch-Match, Merrick Wayne, Rachel Unn, Blake Bunting, Megan Schinker, and Becky

Shurtak. And thanks to Ben and Pam Holland at Spotland Productions, Aya El-Shikarchi for her tireless work on this series, Alex Papachristou at Lawyers for Reporters, and Kevin Parmelee for his assistance with the forensic analysis for this series. A special thanks to our former colleagues at APM Reports who contributed to or supported the early work on this series. Dave Mann, Andy Cruz, Will Kraft, Jeff Hing, Tom Scheck, Curtis Gilbert, Sasha Islanian, Shelley Langford, Lauren Humpert, and to Chris Worthington, who's believed in and supported our journalism since the early days

and cares about the people behind the work too. And a big thank you to Sam Wilson and David Kofall for their 3D visualization work for newyorker.com. And to Nathan Burstein, Katie Cleveland, Laura Derzeit, Madison Houston, Whitney Holmes, Lindsay Etterheimer, Ben Richardson, Nico Steele, and Aaron Weaver for all their work to help the show find its audience. And a special thank you to Chris Bannon and David Rem an email at inthedarkatnewyorker.com. And make sure to stay subscribed to In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts, so you won't miss what we do next.

For more on this series, including photos, our database, and much more, go to newyorker.com slash season three. Hi, this is David Remnick, and I'm pleased to share the news that I'm Not a Robot, Thank you. and technology and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. I encourage you to watch I'm Not a Robot, along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films, at newyorker.com slash video.