Four years after 40 Indian labourers were abducted by ISIS in Iraq, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told Parliament on March 20 that 39 of them had been killed. Her statement was a reiteration of what Harjit Masih, the lone survivor of the ISIS massacre had revealed when he returned from Iraq in 2015. Sushma had, however, until two weeks back, insisted that the other labourers had been alive.
On Monday, 2nd March, 38 out of the 39 bodies were flown back from Iraq in an Indian Airforce C-17 aircraft. While 31 bodies (belonging from Punjab and Himachal Pradesh) were received by the distraught families at the Guru Ram Das Jee International Airport in Amritsar, the rest of the bodies were flown to Patna and Kolkata to be handed over to their families.
The last labourer's body will be brought back as soon as DNA testing is completed, Minister of State (MoS) for External Affairs General (retired) VK Singh, who oversaw the entire procedure, said.
The minister and the central government have come under severe criticism for giving false hopes to the families of the labourers. Sushma, however, defended her stance saying there was no way to corroborate Masih’s revelations about the rest of his compatriots having been killed.
Here’s what happened and how the ministry of external affairs handled the situation.
Forty labourers from India who were working at a construction site in war-torn Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul were abducted by the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in June 2014. Family members approached External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for help to rescue them.
Sushma met them 12 times in next three years, each time assuring them that their loved ones were safe. Even after Harjit Masih returned to India in 2015 and told the media that the other 39 labourers had been killed by ISIS, Sushma denied it, reiterating to the families and the nation that the kidnapped men were alive and safe. Meanwhile, she sent her deputy VK Singh to Iraq last year to investigate the matter.
Only after the Iraqi government forces were able to free Mosul from ISIS occupation this year that the truth about the abducted labourers came out. Iraqi authorities unearthed a mass grave outside Badush village in the nation's north, in which the mortal remains of the missing 39 labourers were discovered.
The identities of 38 of them were matched by DNA analysis. Subsequently, Swaraj informed Parliament that all the missing men were dead and that their bodies would be brought back to India in about 10 days.
Who are these victims?
Daily labourers
The 39 deceased men were labourers at a construction site in Mosul, Iraq. They, like the thousands who head to countries in the Persian Gulf every year to find work, were from poor families and went to war-torn Iraq to support their families in India. As many as 27 of them were from Punjab, while six were from Bihar, four from Himachal Pradesh and two from West Bengal.
One of them, named Govinder Singh, had worked in a Punjab factory before heading to Iraq in 2014. Khokhon Sikdar from Bengal's Nadia district, who is now survived by wife Namita, a five-year-old son and a teenage daughter, was his family's sole breadwinner. Gurpinder Kaur, the sister of another victim Manjinder Singh, has told the media that he was sent to Iraq by fraudulent travel agents.
When were they kidnapped?
2014
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had begun a major offensive against the Iraqi government in 2014 and captured major cities like Mosul and Tikrit. Soon after they captured Mosul, the terrorists took the Indian labourers hostage.
What did the Indian government do?
Repeatedly claimed labourers were safe
Here’s a timeline that explains the sequence of events:
2014:
June 11-16: Abducted labourers called their families in panic, asking them to approach the government to rescue them. Families sought the help of Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj.
June 20: Then MEA Secretary (East) Anil Wadhwa assured the families of the abducted men that they were safe.
June 25: Syed Akbaruddin, then MEA spokesperson, told the media, “I have again told you today that we have further confirmation as of today that they remain in captivity. However, they have not been harmed.” On June 28, he again reiterated about the Indians' safety.
July 23: Sushma assured the families that their abducted kin would be released by the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
July 24: Sushma told Lok Sabha: “As far as the 40 captives are concerned, then I could say that we do not have direct contact with them, but I could say on the basis of some other sources that they are safe and alive and are also getting regular meals.”
August 19: Sushma informed the families that the men were kept hostage in a Mosul garment factory.
During the same year, when 46 Kerala nurses abducted by ISIS in Tikrit, Iraq, the arrived at a deal via intermediaries and rescued them. Sushma made 18 calls to her foreign counterparts and other key stakeholders in that region to ensure the release of the nurses.
2015:
May 15:
Harjit Masih, a Punjab native who was among the 40 labourers abducted by ISIS, reportedly returned to India in 2014 after narrowly escaping death when the ISIS men fired at the entire group. However, he came in front of media only one year after, as he attended a press conference organised by the Aam Aadmi Party in Chandigarh and said that the other workers who had been abducted along with him had been shot dead.
Masih later narrated the entire incident to ‘The Quint’.
He said on 11th June 2014, all the 40 labourers, including him, were abducted from a construction site in Mosul’s University Lake Towers. The residents already vacated the city a day before. As per Masih' account, two Bangladeshis brought the ISIS men on the site due to some payment issue. On the pretext of giving the labourers return visas, the terrorists first took them to the Al-Qudus building within the city and then took to a factory warehouse in the Al-Mansoor Industrial area on the following day. Then the workers were divided in two groups as per their nationalities.
From the industrial area, the Indians were then taken to a sand dune in Badosh desert in a cramped van. After that, they were made to kneel down on the dune and were shot from behind. While the firing went on for two minutes, Masih got shot in his leg and fall on the ground. After few minutes, he regained consciousness and found everyone around him dead. He then escaped from the execution site and reached to the nearby highway, from where he took lift from two vehicles. After reaching the ISIS base again, he used a fake name 'Ali' and begged the terrorists to help him to reach at the construction site. The men dropped him at the University Lake Towers.
From there, he, along with few other Bangladeshis, left for the city of Erbil in a car. They cleared another ISIS checkpoint, before being detained by the Iraqi forces. Masih reached to the Indian officials after escaping from the Iraqi custody.
After his return to India, he was first asked to wait for a couple of days, before going back to Punjab. Eventually, he ended up in government custody for almost a year.
Sushma accused the man of lying, saying that two foreign intelligence agencies had informed Indian authorities that the labourers were unharmed.
July 22: Junior EAM Minister V K Singh informed Lok Sabha that the government was taking the necessary steps to secure the release of the Indians in Iraq.
September 19: Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal met the families of the labourers in Jalandhar and informed the media that the men were alive and safe.
2016:
March 30: Masih was arrested for allegedly colluding with a Dubai-based individual to send the 39 Indians to Iraq during 2014.
June 19: Sushma denied Harjit Masih’s account of the massacre of the 39 others who had been abducted with him; she said the government had not found any evidence to support his claim.
August 19: The opposition Congress party raised the issue in Parliament. Rajya Sabha MP Pratap Singh Bajwa moved a Privilege Motion against Sushma Swaraj for misleading the country and families of the abducted labourers.
2017:
June 8: The external affairs minister informed the labourers’ families that she had received information about a few Indians being found in a Mosul church. Following this, V K Singh left for Iraq to investigate.
July 16: The labourer’s families were informed that the men were lodged in a Badush jail.
July 24: Iraqi Foreign Minister Dr Ibrahim Al-Eshaiker Al-Jafari informed the media that he did not have any information about the abducted workers.
July 26: Swaraj told the Parliament that search operations would continue.
September 12: Even as the search operation was on, Christian priest Father Tom Uzhunnalil from Kerala, who was kidnapped by IS militants in Yemen, was freed after 17 months with Oman's intervention.
December: Sushma Swaraj informed the Lok Sabha that the Indian government has sent DNA samples of the families of the labourers to the Iraqi authorities, presumably in the event that the labourers are found dead and DNA matching needs to be done to verify their identities.
How did the truth about the labourers’ death come out?
A gravesite was discovered:
After freeing the country from the ISIS forces last year, Iraqi authorities started digging the dirt mounds on a dry hill outside Badush village, where the terror group was presumed to have buried some of their enemies four years ago.
March 20: The Iraqi authorities informed the media about finding human remains in Badush. Deep penetration radars determined the presence of the remains. The bodies discovered had long black hair and silver bracelets or karas typically worn by Sikhs.
A DNA analysis was conducted on the bodies, following which identities of 38 out of the missing 39 were established.
Iraq's forensic director Zaid Ali Abbas said that the bodies were decomposed and many of them were found with bullet wounds on their heads.
On the same day, Sushma Swaraj first broke the news in Parliament that the labourers abducted four years ago were dead. She held a press conference and revealed details to the media.
How did the victims' families react?
They were miffed about kept in the dark
The family members reacted with shock and disbelief, as they had been misled over the years by Sushma Swaraj and the ministry of external affairs with repeated assurances that their kin in Iraq were safe. They were also upset that the government had not officially informed them about the death of their loved ones; they came to know of it from news reports about Sushma’s statement in Parliament.
Some of the victims' families even demanded that a DNA test be conducted in India again and the reports be shared with them.
Accusing the MEA of keeping them in the dark, some relatives also called for monetary compensation from the government.
Masih's stand vindicated:
Harjit Masih reiterated what he had said in 2015, moments after the External Affairs Minister's Parliament address.
At the press conference called after announcing the death of the 39 labourers, Sushma responded to questions about why Harjit Masih had been disbelieved, said, "Masih is just an individual; he could claim 39 others are dead. But we are the Government, we cannot say this so easily. We have to be responsible."
She also rubbished Masih's account of being harassed by the government (when he was kept in a protective custody in 2015 and the got arrested at the following year, after recalling his escape from the fate that the other 39 labourers suffered). Sushma claimed that Masih had been kept in protective custody.
In an interview with NDTV on March 22, Masih further added that after his return to India in 2014, he was kept in a protective custody, as told by Sushma Swaraj in parliament at November that year.
He also added that the Indian officials, while luring him with a job, told him to say that the other 39 labourers were not dead.
“They told me to say I don't know (about the others) and that I escaped,” Masih said to the channel. He also said that he was treated well during the custody. He was kept in Delhi, Gurgaon, Bangalore and Greater Noida.
How did the Opposition react?
Criticised the government’s handling of the incident as insensitive
Rajya Sabha MP from Congress Ghulam Nabi Azad accused the MEA of misleading the nation by forcefully asserting in Parliament even as recently as in 2017 that the labourers were alive.
Shashi Tharoor also flayed the Centre for giving false hope to the victims' kin, and criticised the government for lack of transparency.
National Conference leader and former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah said in a tweet, "Nothing Govt of India says can make up for the sheer heartlessness displayed today. Using Parliament as an excuse for the families of 39 dead Indians having to learn of their heartbreaking loss from TV channels is unpardonable (sic)."
On March 23, the Congress said that it would move a privilege motion against the External Affairs Minister in the Rajya Sabha for misleading the House on the issue.