“I often hear my son’s voice,” she tells me. As she speaks I can’t help noticing that the sunlight streaming through the bright blue tarpaulin of the tent, has cast a strange and melancholy light across Khiarya’s lined face.
Her eyes are glazed with moisture, it’s the stifling heat maybe, or tears perhaps, I can’t tell for sure. I give an enquiring look across at Doctor Hasan sitting opposite, concerned that my chat with Khiarya is proving too painful for her and it’s time to stop. He nods discreetly in agreement and gently we change the subject before taking our leave.
Outside in the dust we walk though the ranks of tents crammed with the tens of thousands of civilians who fled here to Hajj Ali camp from the battles that turned swathes of Iraq’s second largest city Mosul and others into canyons of ruins.
In Mosul, Tal Afar, Hawija and other communities, the physical damage from years of barbaric rule by the Islamic State (IS) group and subsequent campaign by the Iraqi Army and Kurdish fighters to rout them is nothing short of staggering.
In Mosul’s old city and western neighbourhoods chasms of bomb-blasted buildings, severed electricity cables and phone lines lie mangled in stark testimony to the destruction of life at a physical and material level.
But what of those less visible wounds and scars, no less gaping in terms of the holes they puncture in people’s lives and way they disconnect their mental anchoring?
As I walk with Dr Hasan, one of numerous psychiatrists assigned by humanitarian agencies to Hajj Ali camp, he talks me once again through the traumatic and tragic experiences that led to Khiarya’s mental meltdown.
He tells how she was a survivor of an abusive marriage before war came to her doorstep. How her son who had gone over to the ranks of IS and shamed their tribe, family and neighbourhood and was then himself murdered by relatives for doing so.
No sooner had the horrors of the jihadists’ rule taken her son than those who came to liberate Khiarya’s town of Hawija in the shape of Iraqi Shi’ite militiamen, abducted her 17-year-old daughter, who has never been seen or heard of since.
Most of us could be forgiven for thinking that the end of a battle is a joyous thing, a time of celebration. But I doubt this is ever so. For many caught in the cauldron of conflict it’s often a time of even more personal trial. A moment to reflect and of terrible quiet. A time to wrestle with demons and prevent them from consuming what remains of lives that until now have survived near unimaginable horrors.
These past days, I’ve listened to some of those for whom the guns, bombs and cries have never completely fallen silent even if the fighting is all but over.
Others too for whom the images of dead or maimed loved ones remain indelibly etched in their mind’s eye. In the darkness of bedrooms, the slam of a door or in a baby’s cry this is how their new war haunts and lingers.
Through no fault of their own, the war gone by and the monsters it unleashed has scythed the happiness, hope and things held dearest out of their lives leaving behind a visceral sense of despair, loneliness, confusion and uncertainty.
The very idea of closure remains elusive for many, perhaps for the rest of their lives. For Zaman, a petite 28-year-old woman I met in Mosul now under psychiatric supervision, the wrenching from her family of all four brothers has left her with major depression and anxiety attacks.
Having gunned down one brother in the street as he worked as a taxi driver, IS later came to her home at midnight and seized two others. The body of one was returned a month later, the other she has since heard was most likely dumped with hundreds of other victims in a mass grave.
Her last brother too is now out of reach, inconsolable and unable to communicate after a breakdown that has left him in hospital for seven months.
For those like Zaman and her remaining brother, rarely can they travel through a day without crossing the emotional and traumatic intersection of past and present.
For these survivors, death has two faces. One is non-being; the other is the material being that is the corpse. Each takes its toll on the survivors in different ways.
Just before I left Hajj Ali camp the other day, Dr Hasan introduced me to another of his patients, a woman called Mardya.
Mardya keeps a photograph of her husband, Yusef, in a little plastic bag that never leaves her person night or day. In the now-fading thumbnail-size passport photo is the face of a handsome, clean-shaven man in dark blue suit, white shirt and striped tie.
The picture was taken just before she witnessed his car being blown to pieces by an IS bomb outside their home on the outskirts of Mosul. What Mardya saw that day has played on her mental health since. If that moment was the worst in her life then the day she married Yusef, she says, was the happiest.
“He was an honest man and very kind, a man who liked nothing more than staying at home with his family,” she told me.
Today for those like Mardya, Zaman and Khiarya what began as grief has morphed into something else.
Anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) depression, guilt, thoughts of suicide and periods of intense loneliness are all taking their toll on the survivors of Mosul’s cataclysm. Earlier this week as the tremor of the earthquake that struck Iraq and Iran shook the ground at Hajj Ali camp, Mardya was alone in her tent.
“At that moment, I felt I was about to join Yusef,” she later told me, smiling for the first time since we spoke.
The world’s headlines might have moved on, but for many the struggle to survive the psychological aftermath of the battle for Mosul is almost as desperate as those months during the physical battle itself.
“War is an anaesthetic. When the guns are firing, we feel nothing; we are numb. It is with peace that we feel pain,” an elderly Bosnian woman who survived the siege of Sarajevo once told me. This week in Iraq I realised once again the true resonance of those words.
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