BEHIND THE LINES
park their ambulances under trees so
American planes wouldn’t blow them
up. (An American coalition spokesper-
son told me that the laws of war allow
for targeting any object that “makes
an effective contribution to military
action,” and that “normally protected
structures” like mosques and hospitals
may be attacked if “they are misused by
the enemy for a military purpose.”)
In an attempt to clear the city before
the battle, the coalition dropped leaf-
lets warning civilians to leave, but many
people couldn’t get out. Wael remem-
bers isis fighters forcing some refugees
to burn their own cars. During the final
stages of battle, isis forced civilians
back into the city so their presence
would frustrate the coalition’s target-
ing. “They were betting on the morals
of the Americans,” Wael says.
The American military has pushed
back vigorously against accounts of ex-
cessive civilian casualties in Raqqa. “I
challenge anyone to find a more precise
air campaign in the history of warfare,”
former coalition commander Lt. General
Stephen J. Townsend wrote in September
2017, shortly before the campaign ended.
“We apply rigorous standards to our tar-
geting process and take extraordinary ef-
forts to protect non-combatants.”
Yet on the ground, there is little indi-
cation that the coalition was held back
by the presence of civilians. “The coali-
tion bombed everything,” Hamed says.
“If a building had one isis sniper in it and
50 civilians, they would bomb the build-
ing to get the sniper.” To make a building
collapse, he says, jets would strike the
ground floor multiple times. He points
to a collapsed building near the school.
“We heard people screaming there for
four days after. There was nothing we
could do to get them out.”
Even when the responders could pull
survivors from the rubble, there wasn’t
much that doctors at the hospital could
do to help. Hamed says there wasn’t a
secure humanitarian corridor for aid to
get in or for civilians to get out. “Most
people who were injured died. There was
nothing we could do but amputate,” he
says. (“The coalition takes all reasonable
measures to minimize civilian casualties,”
its spokesperson told me, adding that
the coalition provided an opportunity
for “those still in Raqqa to escape” and
helped provide aid to those who got out.)
Seven months after the city was taken
from isis, Hamed is still recovering
corpses. Today, the civil council’s First
Responders Team is digging in a park
near the school. When the children leave
to go home, a boy shouts to Hamed. “Did
you find the body over there?” he asks,
pointing to a corner of the park. “There
is a smell.” The men have been digging
in another section, where they uncover
a skeleton wrapped in a blanket, its limbs
in various stages of decay. Based on the
uniform, one of the team’s doctors notes
that the corpse was an isis fighter and
the puncture in his skull indicates he was
most likely killed by a shrapnel wound.
Just 16 men are responsible for re-
trieving bodies throughout the city.
The director of the First Responders
Team, Yasir Khamis, shows me its log-
book. There are records of each body
found, its location, what the person
was wearing, and what the presumed
cause of death was. He says the team
has recovered 750 bodies over the past
five months; about half were civilians.
He estimates there are 4,000 or 5,000
remaining. The team rarely has access
to bulldozers or excavators, so it works
mostly with shovels and picks, which
means bodies inside the large, collapsed
buildings stay buried.
One of the team’s doctors tells me
that most of the bodies found inside
ruined buildings are civilians. The team
has discovered nine mass graves so far,
most of them dug during the siege. Thelargest was full of civilians who proba-
bly died at the hospital; the team has
recovered several hundred bodies from
it. Some of the long parallel ditches held
only women and children.
At the park, the men put the corpse in
a body bag and carry it to the six others
they have dug up today. One of the doc-
tors squats and opens a bag that appears
to be full of dirt. He grabs a handful and
lets little pieces of bone fall from his
hand. “It’s the body of a child,” he says.
“Maybe a year old. Completely burned.”
He stands up and looks at me. “From a
chemical agent. Phosphorus.” One of
the first responders shows me a video
on his phone taken during the coalition
campaign. Long scattershot balls of fire
trailed by thick white smoke stream
down from the sky.
White phosphorus can be used le-
gally to illuminate the battlefield or as
a smoke screen, but because it burns
indiscriminately, the United Nations’
1980 protocol on incendiary weapons
prohibits it in areas populated by civil-
ians. When white phosphorus comes in
contact with oxygen, it ignites and burns
at temperatures up to 1,500 degrees
Fahren heit. It can cause burns down to
the bone, and wounds contaminated by
white phosphorous can reignite when
they’re reexposed to air.
In 2005, journalists uncovered the
United States’ deployment of white phos-
phorus in Fallujah during the Iraq War,
our military’s first reported use of the
substance since Vietnam. While white
phosphorus is considered a conven-
tional weapon when used in accordance
with the incendiary weapons protocol,
some said the US military had essentially
used it as a chemical weapon in Iraq.
(When Saddam Hussein was thought
to have used white phosphorus against
Iraqi Kurdish civilians in 1991, a classi-
fied Defense Department document de-
scribed it as a “chemical weapon.”)“It’s the body
of a child,” the
doctor says.
“Completely
burned.”During the
coalition attack,
Hamed says, white
phosphorus “would
fall on us like rain.”