More Civilians Than ISIS Fighters Are Believed Killed In Mosul Battle
At the main cemetery on the west side of Mosul, Iraq, kids play among the makeshift headstones sticking out of freshly dug mounds of red earth.
Some of the markers are broken slabs of concrete painted with the names of the neighborhoods where the bodies were found. "Boy and girl" reads one from the Zinjali district. In other places, a single headstone gives no indication of the multiple bodies buried underneath.
But the gravediggers remember everything.
"We dug these graves with a bulldozer. This is an entire family. One, two, three, four, five, six," says Hamid Mahmoud Hussein, counting the bodies in a single grave.
He and the others buried bodies while shooting was still going on around them.
Months of vicious fighting — the battle started in October 2016 and ended in July 2017 — left destruction so extensive that U.S. commanders compare it to the World War II battle for Stalingrad.
More than five months later, the civilian death toll is still being calculated. The Iraqi government won't talk about casualties. But figures obtained by NPR from the Mosul morgue put the
