Baghdad:
For an hour every Saturday, with a short break for the evening call to prayer, a modestly dressed woman appears on television here and takes phone calls from Iraqis whose relatives have vanished.
It is a show that is uniquely Iraqi, a weekly attempt to locate a few of the thousands who have disappeared, either as victims of sectarian kidnappings and or as prisoners lost in Iraq's impenetrable, sometimes brutal, justice system. The callers recount different paths to the same dead end, describing how searches of prisons and police stations, hospitals and morgues have left them with no clues.
"We don't know anything," a caller named Salwa said in describing her brother's disappearance from a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad last year. "What's happened?"
The show, called "Patron of the Oppressed," is part of Iraq's raucous, partisan media culture. It appears on Baghdad TV, a channel owned by the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Islamic Party. Although it is not overtly political, each episode offers an implicit critique of the Shiite-led government.
"No one is taking care of the prisoners," said the host, Suhair Azawi, whose last job was on a reality television program that delivered aid to needy families.
Some voices are clotted with emotion. Other callers tell their stories with the weary familiarity of people who have presented their case to countless lawyers, jailers and court officers, without success. Sometimes, children shout in the background as a missing father or son is described.
On the air, Ms. Azawi solicits full names, birth dates, physical descriptions and last-known whereabouts. Was he -- and invariably, the missing are men -- sent to a particular prison? Where did he live?
She interviews experts on detention policy and broadcasts short segments on life inside Iraq's prisons. She displays photos of the missing, and tells callers she will search her lists of detainees and reach out to the Ministry of Justice for information. She wishes each caller luck, then greets the next person on the line: "Salaam aleikum."
"It is rare to find anyone," Ms. Azawi said, looking drained after a live broadcast one recent evening. "Almost all of them are in secret jails or have been killed."
It is all but impossible to create a tally of Iraq's missing, what happened to them or where they may be. Some are in government prisons, and others killed long ago by Shiite death squads, Sunni militants or criminal gangs.
Amnesty International estimates that 30,000 people are being held without trial, and the government and Iraqi nonprofit groups say that as many as 15,000 people were reported missing in 2005 and 2006, two of the worst years of the sectarian war.
Still people call in -- dozens in a single hour -- and overload the studio's two phone lines, dialing in from the mountainous terrain of Kurdistan as well as the shrine cities in Iraq's Shiite south. Stitched together, their calls create an oral history of the last eight years of war.
Aziz Hasoon, whose brother was arrested more than three years ago, said he knew the odds were negligible that anyone would respond to his call for information. But Mr. Hasoon said his brother, an army soldier, was reported to be in jail in southern Iraq, and Mr. Hasoon said he believed he was still alive.
There was a call from Faras of Mosul, in Baghdad's volatile north, whose cousin disappeared into the labyrinth of jails run by different arms of the government after being arrested in 2005. And one from Salman, in Hitt, whose brother was kidnapped three years ago.
"I can understand their suffering," said Riyadh al-Barzanji, the show's producer and creator.
Mr. Barzanji started the show a year ago as a memorial of sorts to his older brother, who was kidnapped in 2005 from Baghdad's Dora neighborhood, one of the capital's worst battlegrounds. Mr. Barzanji said his brother was taken to safe houses operated by militias loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and disappeared.
Mr. Barzanji said his brother, who worked as a driver for Baghdad TV, was probably buried in an unmarked grave. So now, every Saturday, he sits in a cramped control room and forwards callers to Ms. Azawi.
"People keep asking and begging for information about their families," Ms. Azawi said. "It's a heavy weight."
It has been four years since Subhiyah Fadel Khalaf, 62, kissed her son Abbas goodbye as he set off for Samarra, north of Baghdad. She and her other sons have been looking for him ever since. They have visited prisons across the country and paid thousands of dollars to shadowy figures who promised to free her son, only to abscond with the money.
She thought she glimpsed his face in a television report on detainees, lifting her hopes. Every week for the past four months, Ms. Khalaf has called in to the show to talk about Abbas, hoping that someone will recognize his name or offer a signal that he is all right.
"I keep dreaming of him coming back home," Ms. Khalaf said in an interview. "That's why I call. This is maybe the only hope left for me now, to keep waiting every week."
Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting.
It is a show that is uniquely Iraqi, a weekly attempt to locate a few of the thousands who have disappeared, either as victims of sectarian kidnappings and or as prisoners lost in Iraq's impenetrable, sometimes brutal, justice system. The callers recount different paths to the same dead end, describing how searches of prisons and police stations, hospitals and morgues have left them with no clues.
"We don't know anything," a caller named Salwa said in describing her brother's disappearance from a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad last year. "What's happened?"
The show, called "Patron of the Oppressed," is part of Iraq's raucous, partisan media culture. It appears on Baghdad TV, a channel owned by the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Islamic Party. Although it is not overtly political, each episode offers an implicit critique of the Shiite-led government.
"No one is taking care of the prisoners," said the host, Suhair Azawi, whose last job was on a reality television program that delivered aid to needy families.
Some voices are clotted with emotion. Other callers tell their stories with the weary familiarity of people who have presented their case to countless lawyers, jailers and court officers, without success. Sometimes, children shout in the background as a missing father or son is described.
On the air, Ms. Azawi solicits full names, birth dates, physical descriptions and last-known whereabouts. Was he -- and invariably, the missing are men -- sent to a particular prison? Where did he live?
She interviews experts on detention policy and broadcasts short segments on life inside Iraq's prisons. She displays photos of the missing, and tells callers she will search her lists of detainees and reach out to the Ministry of Justice for information. She wishes each caller luck, then greets the next person on the line: "Salaam aleikum."
"It is rare to find anyone," Ms. Azawi said, looking drained after a live broadcast one recent evening. "Almost all of them are in secret jails or have been killed."
It is all but impossible to create a tally of Iraq's missing, what happened to them or where they may be. Some are in government prisons, and others killed long ago by Shiite death squads, Sunni militants or criminal gangs.
Amnesty International estimates that 30,000 people are being held without trial, and the government and Iraqi nonprofit groups say that as many as 15,000 people were reported missing in 2005 and 2006, two of the worst years of the sectarian war.
Still people call in -- dozens in a single hour -- and overload the studio's two phone lines, dialing in from the mountainous terrain of Kurdistan as well as the shrine cities in Iraq's Shiite south. Stitched together, their calls create an oral history of the last eight years of war.
Aziz Hasoon, whose brother was arrested more than three years ago, said he knew the odds were negligible that anyone would respond to his call for information. But Mr. Hasoon said his brother, an army soldier, was reported to be in jail in southern Iraq, and Mr. Hasoon said he believed he was still alive.
There was a call from Faras of Mosul, in Baghdad's volatile north, whose cousin disappeared into the labyrinth of jails run by different arms of the government after being arrested in 2005. And one from Salman, in Hitt, whose brother was kidnapped three years ago.
"I can understand their suffering," said Riyadh al-Barzanji, the show's producer and creator.
Mr. Barzanji started the show a year ago as a memorial of sorts to his older brother, who was kidnapped in 2005 from Baghdad's Dora neighborhood, one of the capital's worst battlegrounds. Mr. Barzanji said his brother was taken to safe houses operated by militias loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and disappeared.
Mr. Barzanji said his brother, who worked as a driver for Baghdad TV, was probably buried in an unmarked grave. So now, every Saturday, he sits in a cramped control room and forwards callers to Ms. Azawi.
"People keep asking and begging for information about their families," Ms. Azawi said. "It's a heavy weight."
It has been four years since Subhiyah Fadel Khalaf, 62, kissed her son Abbas goodbye as he set off for Samarra, north of Baghdad. She and her other sons have been looking for him ever since. They have visited prisons across the country and paid thousands of dollars to shadowy figures who promised to free her son, only to abscond with the money.
She thought she glimpsed his face in a television report on detainees, lifting her hopes. Every week for the past four months, Ms. Khalaf has called in to the show to talk about Abbas, hoping that someone will recognize his name or offer a signal that he is all right.
"I keep dreaming of him coming back home," Ms. Khalaf said in an interview. "That's why I call. This is maybe the only hope left for me now, to keep waiting every week."
Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting.
Track Latest News Live on NDTV.com and get news updates from India and around the world
