Time Sept. 2–9, 2019There is 3-year-old Nishtiman, with
eyes like her father’s and the same stub-
born spirit, and his sons Nashwan, 5, and
Nashat, 6, all battling for a place on Mu-
rad’s lap. He can touch them, talk to them,
and he is as happy as he has ever been.
Then Murad wakes up, and they are
gone. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes
he drinks. Sometimes he thinks about
the life jacket that kept him afloat as he
drifted away from the sinking boat just
a few kilometers from the Greek coast,
and how he imagines he had slipped it off
and sunk to the bottom of the Aegean Sea
along with everything he loved.
He tried to tug his life jacket off that
cold, dark morning in December 2015
when he realized that the smuggler’s boat
had gone beneath the waves with his fam-
ily still trapped in the cabin. The men had
been traveling on the deck and were flung
into the rough seas, powerless to help the
women and children as they sank along
with the capsized vessel.
A friend also in the water shouted
over the waves at him to stop—maybe
the Greek coast guard would come soon,
maybe his family would be saved, maybe
they would have a happy life in Europe.
But none of those maybes came true.
Murad has never seen Nishtiman, Nash-
wan, Nashat or his wife Jinar again.
“I am lost,” says Murad, 34, who
owned two shops in the Iraqi city of Sinjar
before Islamic State fighters forced him
to take his family and flee. He casts his
sunken eyes to the ceiling and struggles
to continue through tears.
“Sometimes I talk to myself—I liter-
ally talk to myself—and say, ‘Maybe, just
maybe, they are still alive,’ then I say to
myself immediately after that, ‘But the
sea was very difficult; they did not have
a chance.’ ”
There are many obstacles standing be-
tween Murad and the truth about what
happened to his wife and children: cha-
otic record keeping in countries where
bodies wash up on beaches; an apathetic
public; far-right governments with no in-
terest in the plight of refugees. Now there
is also some hope, not just for Murad but
for all the relatives of the at least 23,000
people who have died or gone missing
since 2011 trying to cross the Mediterra-
nean. After years of lobbying, an interna-
tional organization has persuaded some
countries to start work on identifying the
dead using DNA technology—and finally
giving their families some form of closure.
But behind this outwardly simple ef-
fort are layers of institutional and politi-
cal complexities, which are threatening
the future of the project before it has even
properly started. In the meantime, Murad
waits for news of his family, caught in
limbo between hope and grief.
“I think it would have been better if I
was with them,” says Murad, who even-
tually was resettled in Germany. “I find it
very difficult to live this life.”In a sparklIng whIte buIldIng
alongside a canal in the Dutch city of the
Hague, scientists are at work. In this ster-
ile, highly regulated environment, testtubes and refrigeration units store bone
fragments, blood samples and other DNA
samples from some of the most harrowing
events of the past few decades.
Since its founding in 1996, the Inter-
national Commission on Missing Per-
sons (ICMP) has quietly pioneered some
of the most advanced DNA- identification
technology in the world. It began at the
request of President Bill Clinton to try
and identify the 40,000 people missing
in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In
the past two decades, it has put a name
to 70% of those victims, and its work on
that conflict continues. In 2015 the ICMP
moved its main office from Sarajevo to
the Hague—a city already home to otherWorld
When Walid Khalil Murad
drifts off to sleep, he can feel
the warmth of his three small
children in bed beside him.
They are there in his dreams
too, playing happily together.