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

24civilians died.

24 unarmed men, women.

Deaths of 24-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 stuff. That's the stress.

But as we got deeper and deeper into our reporting, we began to wonder if maybe that number was wrong. This is the final episode of Season 3 of In the Dark, Payship Number 8. One day, our producer, Samara, was reading through the thousands of pages of documents that we'd received by suing the military, and she came across something that got her attention. Samara called to tell me about it.

Hey, Madalyn.

Hi, Samara.

I was calling you because I found something That's interesting.

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 Sheret had given to NCIS agents during the Haditha investigation. Most of Sheret'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 Wutter were outside looking around. When Sherritt said, they spotted a man on the road a few hundred meters away, and Wutter just opened fire. Samara read to me from Sherritt's statement.

Wutter took his first shot but missed. I went to fire because Wutter had fired, but my weapon failed to fire and jammed. Wutter 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, Wutterrich started shooting, so I started shooting.

Sherritt said he never asked Wutterrich why he shot at the man. As far as Samara could tell from the records we had, Sherritt never mentioned the shooting to investigators again. Wutterrich never talked to investigators about it at all. Samara back to the documents, looking for any other references to this shooting, trying to figure out what had happened. 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 Wutter and Sherritt 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 Muderich had been, and the Marines of Second Squad pick up the story from where Sherritt left off.

They describe hearing the gunfire coming from Wutter and Sherritt's position and spotting two men running.

Running through the area, fleeing Wutter and Sherritt.

It appeared that what had happened was that after Wutter shot the first man, the men who were with him started running away, and they ran right into the path of Second Squad. Some of the Marines of Second 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 Second Squad opened fire, too, and hit one of the men in the head. The man who had 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 Second 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. 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.

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 Marine 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 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 Second Squad, a man named Francis Wolf. Wolf 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, Wolf 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. I'm so sorry. We're here for the fuck around. 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. Actually, 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 in entirely. They show a man lying on his back 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 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 I've read 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.

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 Manda Amid Hamid.

Manda Amid Hamid. We'll be back after the break. Hey, it's Madelyne. If you're a fan of In the Dark, and you love long-form storytelling, and you've listened to all the serialized investigative podcasts, and you've already watched everything good on Netflix. There is a wealth of stories you're going to love waiting for you at The New Yorker. This story, published just this year by Patrick Radden Keef, about a teen who got mixed up in the London Underworld and then mysteriously fell into the In the four years since Zack'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 Zack 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/dark and become a subscriber today. That's newyorker. Com. Darker. Com/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 Arbeel. We were with our interpreter talking to Khalid Salman Rezief, the lawyer who'd lost 15 members of his family that day. Khalid 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.. 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, and 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. Khalid 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 Hamid. Back when we talked to Khaled, he didn't remember the missing man's name. So Samara texted Khaled and asked him if he could track it down. Right away, Khaled sent Samara a voice memo. Hello.

Mamdou Hamid.

That is his name.

Mamdou Hamid. The document had said Manda Hamid. Not exactly the same, but close. We asked Khalid if he could connect us with Mamdou's family, and he agreed. Mamdou's mother, who'd asked Khalid for help all those years ago, died in 2013. But Mamdou's brothers are still alive. Yes, here, please. So we asked Namak Hoshna, the BBC reporter we are working with, to go with an interpreter to meet them. So, thanks very much for coming. Could you please introduce yourselves, your name? The brother's names are Qasim…

Qasim Ahmed, Ahmed.

And Juma.

They all met at Khalid's house, and the brothers told Namak more about Mamdou and what happened that day.

. Back in 2005, Mamdou was 27 years old.

He was charming, outgoing. His brothers described him as the guy who got along with everyone.

. He was very friendly, used to have jokes with others.

He mixed with people. He established 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 a college family lived.

Before After the war, Mamdou and his brothers worked in construction. But when the Americans arrived, that work dried up. And so the brothers started doing all kinds of odd jobs, just trying to scrape a living together. On the morning of November 19th, 2005, the brothers had a job to do. A guy who ran an operation selling gas around Taditha wanted them to walk to a nearby town to pick up one of his trucks.

.

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 The men walked through the town, out of their neighborhood, and into Khaled Samaan Receifs. 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 Mamedou's brothers were describing appeared to be the moment that Lance Corporal Justin Sheret described in his statement to investigators, the moment he said Wutterrich 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 Marine's bullets hit Yaseen in the stomach and ripped through his back. Yaseen fell face first to the ground. Mamdou stopped running. He checked on Yaseen. Are you okay? Are you alive? Yaseen said, Go, run. A neighbor pulled Yaseen into a nearby house. He was eventually taken to a hospital, and he survived. Mamdou, Juma, and Haider kept running. Unbeknownst to them, they were running right into another squad of marines, second squad.

And then-.

So his brother, Mamdou, was shot in his head.

Mamdou was hit, too. Neighbors got Mamdou into a house. His cousin, Haider, went into the house with him. Hyder later told his family what happened inside, how Mamdou, despite his head wound, was still conscious as he lay on the floor of the house, how he Heider is praying and asking Hyder to take care of the family. Hyder told the family how a group of Marines entered the house and carried Mamdou out to an American helicopter.

They took Mamdou and they left.

And that was the last anyone in Haditha ever saw of Mamdu Hamid. In the days and weeks and months, and eventually, years that followed, the family 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, We keep worrying and keep asking every day and night, Where's Mamdou?

Where's Mamdou? Is he still alive?

The family tried everything find him. Mamdou's brothers, Juma and Qassim, 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 Mahmoud.

So he's checking all the computers for Iraqi forces, other Iraqi security forces.

But the search came up empty. The family kept trying. Jumah and Qassim traveled with their mother to prisons all over Iraq, checking to see if Mahmoud was being held in any of them.. But he wasn't. Khassam said their mother refused to stop hoping that Mahmoud 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. Khalid, Baghdad, American, Iraqi forces. She didn't give up.

. And she wouldn't allow Juma and Khassam to stop looking either.

Juma and Qassim 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 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 US 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 García. He'd been wounded that day in a different engagement in another part of town. García 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 Tarazas.

I look over and I'm like, Who the hell is this? And then one of the guys from First Platoon, they're like, Excuse my language, but they were like, That's a piece of shit that pulled the trigger on the IAD. And I'm like, Why? Why is he here? Why? Why? And I remember saying, Fuck you, you piece of shit.

Mamdou, of course, was not the trigger man, but Garcia didn't know that. Onboard 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.

I remember it was a crew chief. He told me, he goes, Hey, I need you to blow the little masting with those little ball. 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. 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 them 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-Assad 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 Mamdou arrived.

He's flown to the hospital at the American base at Al-Assad. When he arrives at Al-Assad, he's in pretty bad shape, but he is still alive. Al-assad doesn't have a name for him, and they have no identifying information at all. The front desk clerk enters him into the patient log as enemy prisoner of war, patient number 8.

At the hospital at Al-Assad, medical staff intubated Mamdou, who they called patient number 8. Then they loaded him onto another helicopter, bound for a hospital in Bagdad, run by the American military. We have a statement that a Marine who was on that flight to Bagdad 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 Bagdad on a helipad near the hospital. The Marine then loaded Mamdu 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 Mamdu's final moments. Or exactly when he died. It seems it could have happened on the second helicopter ride, the one to Bagdad. We requested Mamdu's full medical records from the US military, but they refused to provide them.

We do know that despite his injury, Mamdou 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 Bagdad held Moundou's body for five days, not knowing who this person was, and therefore, having no way to contact the family. On November 24th, 2005, they released his unidentified remains to the Bagdad Morg. Samara wanted to find out if the Morgan, Bagdad, might know what happened to Mamdu's body. So we hired a researcher based in Bagdad to help us.

Hello?

Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Hello? Hi. Hi. I'm trying to reach you.

Yes, I am.

The researcher didn't want us to use his real name.

Because honestly, it is not safe for me, honestly, to show for public that I'm working with American. That will make some trouble for me.

Is there a name that that I could use that would be safe for you just to give me something to call you?

You can just say Mena. Okay, that will be fine.

Mena was familiar with the Baghdad Morg. Its official name is the Medico Legal Institute. Mena told Samara Sarah, 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, like 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 smell death in every corner, in every corridor of this institute.

Muna agreed to go back to the Medical 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 flashes from what happened, from these memories. All the images, even the smells, it was Really shocking me.

Muna 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. The Medical Legal Institute was a place where the bodies of many of these people ended up.

The situation was really bad at the time because they didn't have enough space in the refrigerators to keep all of the bodies. When it was full, they just stacked the bodies outside or in the sidewalk or everywhere. It was really chaotic.

Staff at the Morg couldn't keep up with all the death. They couldn't process all the bodies in any coherent way. They couldn't store them, and almost none of the bodies that were arriving at the Morg came with any identifying information. But the staff at the institute told Mena that there was one thing the workers at the Morg 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 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.

For everyone who was delivered to this institute, they have photos for everyone.

Photos of everyone, labeled 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 US military records Samara had reviewed, the body of Mahmdou Hamid had been turned over by the Americans to the Morgue on November 24th, 2005.

Do they have photos from November 24th, 2005?

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah, So basically, according to this, we might find the body of the man that we are looking for.

The Morgue told Mena, 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, and this year's New Yorker Festival returns October 25th through the 27th. We'll be joined by Rachel Maddow, Sara Borellas, Atul Gawande, Seth Myers, Mohsin Hamid, Aldrich McDonald, The National, Julio Torres, Hyatt Akhtar, and many others. Plus, live podcast recordings and panels on politics, literature, technology, history, and much more. You can learn all about it at newyorker. Com/festival.

Samara wanted to tell Mamdu'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, Qasim and Juma, at Khaled Saman Rezief's house.

They all sat down together on a couch in Khaled's living room.

They poured some tea, and Muna 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. For the past several years, me and my team have been working on an investigation into what happened in Haditha on November 19th of 2005, when many civilians were killed by American Marines.

. Yes?

While doing that reporting, we obtained some documents that I believe are about your brother Mamdou and what happened to him that day.

. Yes.

Would you like me to share with you what I've learned from those documents?

.

The only wish that they have, they want to know, eagerly, what happened to their brother.

Okay.

The records that I have show that Mamdou, as you know, was shot by marines on the morning of November 19th in Haditha.

.

Samara told Juma and Khassam how Mamdou 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, Mamdou died from the gunshot wound to his head.

I am 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.

.

. This is his fate, and we are really, really appreciate you telling us what happened to him.

Now we can relieve, at least, finally, knowing what happened to our brother.

Khaled Sumanrassief 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. 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 US Marines that day.

Mamdou'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 US military had known for nearly 20 years that Mamdou 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 US military all along.

If only they told us that he is dead at that time.

.

They did not only killed him. They killed him twice. One, when they killed him in reality, and second, when they didn't tell about what happened to him.

We asked the US Marine Corps why they didn't tell Mahmoud's family the truth years ago.

They didn't answer. When we asked Major Dana Hyatt, the former Civil Affairs Officer in Haditha, about Mahmoud, he told us he couldn't remember anyone who fit that description. In that meeting with Mahmoud's family, there was one more thing to talk about.

They're asking about the Badi. Badi, yes.

Samara explained that Muna had gone to the Medical Legal Institute in Baghdad and talked to people who work there, and learned that there might be records of Mamdu 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 Medical 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, Mamdou'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 Mamdu. 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 Mina 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. I. 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 Mahmoud. You could see the gun shot 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 Racif, 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 Khalid's family members, killed on November 19th, 2005. There were larger circles of stones, and next to them, several smaller circles. Parents buried next to their children. Khalid Salman stood in this graveyard on this crowded street and began to cry.. There was the grave of Khalid'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 Eunice and his wife, Ida, the mother who died on a bed surrounded by her children. The children's graves were there, too. Her eight-year-old son, Mohamed, 10-year-old Seba, 15-year-old Noor, and the youngest children, 5-year-old Zainib, and three-year-old Ayesha. Hamdula. Each family, a whole world, gone in just seconds. Khalid Salman-Rasief, 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.

In the dark is reported and produced by me, Madelyne Baron, managing producer, Samara Freemark, producers, Natalie Jablonsky and Raymond Tunkacar, and reporter, Parker Jesco. In the Dark is edited by Katherine Winter, and Willing Davidson. Interpreting in Iraq by Aya Muthena. Additional reporting and investigating in Iraq by BBC Arabic's Namak Khoshnav. Field producer Hyder Ahmed and Munaal. Additional interpreting and translation by Aya Al-Shikarchi. Additional translation by Shirine Khalid and Lucy Cronin. This episode was fact-checked by Shirine Khalid and Ismail Ibrahim. Original music by Allison Leighton-Brown. Additional music by Chris Julen 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. Foyal legal representation from the Foyal team at Lowy & Lowy. Legal Review by Fabio Bertoni. In the Dark was created by American Public Media and is produced by The New Yorker. This season was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild. The editor of newyorker. Com is Michael Luhot. The digital director is Monica Rasek. The head of global audio for CondeNast is Chris Fannen.

The editor of the Newyorker is David Remnick. A big thank you to our Foyal 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 Lowy, Steven Stitch-Match, Merrick Wayne, Rachel Unn, Blake Bunting, Megan Schenker, and Becky Shirtak. And thanks to Ben and Pam Holland at Spotland Productions. Aya Al-Shikarchi for her tireless work on this series, Alex Papakrish, Christu at Lawyers for Reporters, and Kevin Parmely for his assistance with the forensic analysis for this series. A special thanks to our former colleagues, APM Reports, who contributed to or supported the early work on this series, Dave Mann, Andy Katie Cruz, Will Kraft, Jeff Hink, Tom Sheck, Curtis Gilbert, Sasha Islanian, Shelle Langford, Lauren Humphert, 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 Koffahl for the 3D visualization work for newyorker. Com. And to Nathan Versteen, Katie Cleveland, Laura Dersight, Madison Houston, Whitney Holmes, Lindsay Eterheimer, 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 Fanon and David Remnick for bringing In the Dark to the New Yorker. To send us your thoughts on the series or to give us ideas for what we should investigate next, you can send us an email at inthedark@newyorker. 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 For more on this series, including photos, our database, and much more, go to newyorker. Com/season3.

I'm Irland Woods.

I'm Nigel Poore. We're the hosts and creators of Ear Hustle from PRX's Radiotopia.

When we met, I was doing time at San Quentin State Prison in California.

And I was coming in as a volunteer. The stories we tell are probably not what people expect from a prison podcast.

Like cooking meals in a prison cell, keeping little pets, prison nicknames, and trying to be a parent from inside.

Stories about life on the inside, shared by those who live it.

Find ear hustle wherever you get your podcasts. From PRX.