It’s a strange relief to see something still lying in the place where it fell, appearing unmolested by nature or man. A fully clothed skeleton lies prone on the hillside, frozen in what looks like an attempted escape from the wadi. Hasan saunters along the road to show me more of what the liberation of Albu Saif left in its wake. Those that still do, and the people who’ve taken shelter inside them, hang on like corporeal tissue unwilling to decompose. Concrete rubbish recalls where buildings once stood. Some 340,000 people have been displaced in the past six months, fleeing the most intense urban warfare waged since World War II another 100,000 will join them by mid-summer. Lofted train tracks traverse Albu Saif before terminating on Mosul’s western side, where Islamic State militants are making their last stand. The northward view of Mosul, bisected by the Tigris, is dark, halting, and handsome. Iraqi forces swept through en route to reclaiming their country’s second-largest city from the Islamic State. That moment came in February, when it was much colder in Albu Saif, this village on a bend in the Tigris River a few miles south of Mosul. They are a fraction of what the ravine holds: A short distance away, near the hood of a destroyed Humvee, is another body, stripped of flesh but still braided with the scraps of a brown shirt worn at the moment of death. He wears blue and gray fatigues and black combat boots, one of which he used to kick the stone that now rests near the scattered remains of a dead man. Hasan, who gives me only his first name, has stubble on his chin. The air is thick with the smell of burnt rubber, bloated rigor, and oil fires. Hasan, a 24-year-old enlisted in the Iraqi Federal Police, stands on the sandy road that snakes along the wadi’s eastern edge. Each bone is a dirty, decalcified umber, like a masticated chew toy. Next to it, strewn in the dirt and grass of a sun-swathed wadi-one of thousands of small desert valleys scattered across northern Iraq-are a coccyx, femur, humerus, and elbow joint. A stone skitters down the hillside, clips a tangle of cloth, and stops short of a human’s lower vertebrae.
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