For Many Iraqis, Hunt for Missing Is Never-Ending

BAGHDAD, March 18 — He comes to her in dreams, dressed in the blue police uniform he wore the day he disappeared.

“I’m alive,” he tells Intisar Rashid, his wife and the mother of their five children. “I’m alive.”

And so she restlessly keeps searching. Ever since the Thursday two months ago when her husband failed to come home, Ms. Rashid has tried to find the man she loves.

In the Green Zone last week, where she waited to scour a database of Iraqis detained by American troops, she said she had already visited the Baghdad morgue a dozen times, every hospital in the city and a handful of Iraqi government ministries.

“I feel like I’m going to collapse,” she said, carrying her husband’s police identification card in one hand and a crumpled tissue in the other. “It’s taken over my days, my nights.”

The past year of dizzying violence here has produced thousands of Iraqis like Ms. Rashid — sad-eyed seekers caught in an endless loop of inquiry and disappointment. Burdened by grief without end or answers, they face a set of horrors as varied and fractured as Iraq itself.

Has my son or husband or father been killed by a death squad, his body hidden? Or has he been arrested? Is he in a legitimate prison with his name unregistered, or trapped in a secret basement jail with masked torturers?

Most importantly: How can he be found?

Under Saddam Hussein, the disappeared were not discussed. Asking for information about people believed to be detained or killed by the regime only brought more danger to the family. But since the war, and particularly following the sharp rise in sectarian fighting over the past year, searching has become an obsession.

Nearly 3,000 Iraqis visited the American-run National Iraqi Assistance Center in the Green Zone last month to look for missing relatives, roughly triple the monthly traffic of last spring, and an increase of 50 percent since December, according to military figures.

Capt. Lance Carr, the director of the center, which also manages programs for medical aid, employment and other issues, said the swell in inquiries about missing men tracks with a rise in detentions under the new Baghdad security plan. Iraqis said that despite the legacy of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, their best-case scenario was still American detention because at least then their loved ones were registered and had a chance to be released if innocent.

But American-run prisons hold only a small portion of Iraq’s detainees. Because many victims of the violence here are never identified, and because the Iraqi detention system remains corrupt, sectarian and opaque, according to Iraqi and American officials, most Iraqis never find who they are looking for.

“There are so many different sides that are fighting now, without names or uniforms,” said Muhammad Haideri, a Shiite cleric and chairman of the human rights committee in the Iraqi Parliament. “There’s terrorism; there are kidnappings, armed militias and gangs. On top of that, when a bomb explodes, people end up deformed, and they are considered missing, too.”

Mr. Haideri said his committee had pressed the Ministries of Interior and Defense to compile lists of prisoners and improve how detainees were treated, but that progress has been slow. He said that both the army and the police had been infiltrated by sectarian gangs and that individual units and commanding officers feared giving people open access to detainee information because it would cut off a source of bribes and the security forces could be accused of torture, especially by Sunni Arabs.

“It does not serve the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Defense or the prime minister to publish numbers or names, because it will stir up more anger,” Mr. Haideri said. “Even if the Shiites are innocent, it will be chaos.”

The political calculation has only made life harder for those in search of the missing. On a recent day at the National Iraqi Assistance Center, known as NIAC (and pronounced “nye-ack”), 190 people streamed in; 110 of them had come to search for missing relatives.

One door away from the main media office of the United States military in Iraq — the source of upbeat news releases with headlines like “Iraqis leading the way to their future” — the rotating crowd of Iraqis sat quietly, glum, eyes looking toward the floor as if they had not laughed or smiled in months. Most were women, dressed in black and carrying folders with pictures of the missing, their identification cards, and handwritten notes with the worn corners and creases that come from repeated use.

The stories Iraqis told in interviews over several days sounded like different verses of the same dirge.

Anwar Mialla’s brother, a Sunni farm worker near from Falluja, disappeared June 24 during his hourlong commute to work. Neither he nor his car were found.

Hisin Najim, a Shiite, said her husband and 15-year-old son disappeared Aug. 1 near Taji, a Sunni area north of Baghdad, where they had taken a job moving furniture with their pickup truck.

Jemila Jassam’s son Falah, a Sunni Arab, left a friend’s house in the Sunni Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriya on Jan. 8 to get gas. He never returned.

Kadem Mnahi Badr, 61, a Shiite laborer from Sadr City, said his son 21-year-old son Talib disappeared Sept. 9 while driving a taxi. “His car was never found, there was no phone call, no trace at all,” he said.

For many of the Iraqis at NIAC, the lack of information seemed to hurt as much as the loss itself. They provided the basic facts of their stories in monotones, but describe their quests with raised voices and tear-filled eyes.

Ms. Rashid, 45, said she began her search the day after her husband failed to come home. He had called from his cellphone the night before from a checkpoint to say that he was running late at work in Baghdad and was taking a minibus to their home in Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of the capital. She kept calling him, but his phone had been turned off, and when he did not arrive, she feared the worst.

“I didn’t sleep at all,” she said.

The next morning, she called her husband’s commanders, who said they knew nothing about it. She drove to Baghdad. At checkpoints along the way, she asked if there had been any car accidents or bombings that might have cost him his life.

At the morgue later that day, and for the next nine days in a row, she said she looked through dozens of ghastly images of the dead — people with their heads cut off, their chests drilled, their faces peeled. Her mustached husband of 19 years, Ali Mahmoud al-Ajelee, the loving father who always kissed his youngest daughter before leaving for work, was not among them.

Hospitals were next. Then the Ministry of the Interior; the Ministry of Defense; the Ministry of Human Rights.

She said she also visited two American military bases in Mahmudiya, and at one point, walked the route from her home to Baghdad, asking everyone she met if they had seen her husband on the day he disappeared.

“I’ve spent two months like this,” she said. “Still, I find nothing.”

It was her second time at NIAC, and she waited patiently while others stepped into the white trailer with the wooden sign that said “detainee section.” A child in a wheelchair looking for medical assistance sat nearby.

Captain Carr, 44, a Navy reservist who works as a risk management consultant in Washougal, Wash., moved through the group softly, like a doctor near sleeping patients.

Though he has grown so dedicated to the center that he is trying to extend his tour past April, he said that most Iraqis who visit leave disappointed.

“For 75 or 80 percent, we can’t give them any news,” he said. “It’s tough. We still get requests for things that happened last April.”

In some cases, mistakes add to the pain. Mr. Badr, the laborer from Sadr City, said he was told a few months ago that his son Talib was in Camp Bucca, an American detention center in southern Iraq. He and his wife drove there a few days later, anxious yet relieved. They would finally get to see their son.

But when they arrived, they discovered there had been a mistake. They young man who greeted them had the same name and date of birth, but it was not their Talib.

“When his mother saw it was not her son, she fainted,” Mr. Badr said.

He said he was just as heartsick. He ran up to the young man and shook him.

“I kept asking that boy — even though I knew it was not my son — I kept asking him his name,” he said. “I had some feeling, some hope that maybe his face had changed while he was imprisoned. I just couldn’t believe it.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Badr was back to continue his search. He said his wife had fallen ill after the visit to Camp Bucca. “She hasn’t left her bed,” he said.The Iraqi workers in the detainee section trailer, one of several that make up NIAC, said that seeing so much hopelessness sometimes made them cry. An employee with a business degree, who called himself Abu Jassim, said he was particularly galled by the stories that involved lawyers and informants who charged families for false information.

It had become a common problem, he said. And in fact, several of the Iraqis who entered the trailer each day said they had paid someone for information.At one point, a woman wearing a blue scarf appeared with a registration number that she said she received from a lawyer. She had paid him 200,000 Iraqi dinar, about $137, for help, and she entered the trailer smiling, confident that things would be different for her. She said she could not wait to visit her husband.

She gave Abu Jassim his name (Wafah Altifat), his year of birth (1974), the date he disappeared (April 25, 2006) and the registration number.

Abu Jassim typed the information into his computer. He looked her in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The number has another name attached to it, with a different date of birth and a different date of arrest. Your lawyer is a liar.”

The woman burst into tears.

“They told me that a detainee who was released saw him,” she said. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “They told me he was there.”

Mr. Jassim said the database took time to update. Maybe it was just a misspelling and he really was with the Americans: “If you want to come here every 10 days,” he said, “we don’t mind.”

After she left, Mr. Jassim said that they did not have the heart to tell people that it was rare for a name to appear in the database more than a few weeks after the person was supposedly arrested.

Even those who knew better seemed to have a hard time giving up.

Ms. Rashid received the same message from a NIAC employee who goes only by the name Google. He told her that her husband could not be found in the system. He said that the database was updated every week or so if she wanted to come back.

“Do you think three months could pass and he wouldn’t be in the database?” she asked him.

He did not respond.

“I’ve heard of cases where someone was arrested in Mahmudiya and they didn’t show up in the database for seven months,” Ms. Rashid said, leaning forward, composed, the tissue in her hand. “Could that be what happened?”

Another pause, no answer.

“But it has happened right? It has happened.”

The employee mixed a shrug with a nod. Ms. Rashid stood up. She said she would return before the end of the month.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.