‘We’ll Start Digging Here’

DERNA, Libya—The men in white protective suits and face masks stood out as the evening sun turned the Mediterranean into a soft shade of blue. As they scanned the debris-covered coastline and lifted pieces of the collapsed road with the help of an excavator, their mission was simple yet brutal: They came to dig out the dead.

Storm Daniel hit Libya’s eastern coast a week ago, bringing in torrential rains and bringing down two poorly maintained dams upstream and uphill from this coastal city in eastern Libya. Derna has been partially wiped out; the parts portside by where the river ran have been erased. Out of the 90,000 people once living here, at least 11,300 have been confirmed dead; local officials warn the number could continue to climb to at least 20,000.

Workers stand on a pile of rubble by the sea next to an excavator as they search for the dead in Derna on Sept. 17.

In some parts of the city, the stench of death is suffocating and worsens by the hour, not even leavened by the salty sea breeze. It lingers on people’s skin and in the dust; it tickles the nose and turns the stomach. New bodies are dug out of the mud every day, while others are washing up on the shores of a sea that has already claimed the lives of more than 2,000 people this year alone as they tried to cross it in dinghies and rafts in hopes of a better life in Europe.

Selima al-Jazweh, 40, believes her husband is one of those who got dragged out into the sea. She lost her house to the floods and has since been living in a high school auditorium, sharing space with dozens of other women and children. For the past week, the mother of four has been visiting hospitals and morgues, scanning casualty lists and asking neighbors in vain. Like the men in white suits, she has been standing on the shores of the sea, scanning the rough waves for bodies. She’s no longer looking for hope. “Closure and clarity” is what she’s after, she said. It’s been a week, and the only thing they can uncover at this point is tragedy.

Just yards from the shore where Jazweh—and many other families—stood vigil is one of the collection points for newly found dead bodies. A team of women and men work here to disinfect the dead, wrap them in body bags, and, eventually, drive them off to one of the many mass graves, carved out of an open field about half an hour’s drive from the city and run by a local group of Salafists who have taken on the burial site’s management. Ground lime covers the fresh graves to smother the scent of decay. That, too, is almost to no avail.

Workers dig new mass graves at a site about a 30-minute drive outside Derna, on Sept. 17, using ground lime to keep the stench of death at bay.

Derna, a bit to the east of Benghazi and almost due south of Athens, was once dubbed the pearl of the Mediterranean. “It’s famed across Libya for its creative soul, its unmatched Ottoman and Andalusian heritage, its poetry and music,” said Anas El Gomati, the director of the Sadeq Institute, a Libyan think tank.

Little is left of it today, but many agree that Derna’s disaster could have been prevented, at least partially. The two upstream dams were constructed in the 1970s to protect the city, squeezed between the Mediterranean and a steep mountain slope, from flooding. Under Libya’s former ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi, the dams were maintained in 1986 after floods caused major damage. After the 2011 France-owned and NATO-led overthrow of the Libyan government and subsequent civil war, Libya turned into what political analysts refer to as a failed state. Corruption prevailed; safety maintenance for Derna’s dams did not.

A family stands on a hill overlooking the destroyed city of Derna on Sept. 17.

During the civil war, the city was politically isolated and eventually reverted to a hotbed of jihadis, offering both recruits and a safe haven for several extremist groups, including al Qaeda. Few cities in the Middle East or North Africa have offered as many fighters, on a pound-for-pound basis, against U.S. adventurism as has Derna. In 2014, the Islamic State briefly took hold of parts of the city but was defeated two years later by local military and Islamist groups.

Today, as part of eastern Libya, Derna is ruled by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army, a parallel administration that stands in opposition to the internationally recognized Government of National Unity in Tripoli—currently led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh. Derna certainly has had its share of disasters. Bombed-out buildings with shrapnel marks stand next to the ruins of houses just recently washed away by avalanches of water, mud, and debris. In some ways, one destruction mirrors the other: Rebar pokes out of collapsed concrete pillars, while children’s toys, clothes, and photographs lie jumbled in the dirt.

Muhanned El Hardi scanned through the many areas of the city that will eventually be cleared for residents to return to. While many houses have collapsed, some are still standing and could potentially be recovered—once all the dead are dug up. And that’s what 30-year-old Hardi, together with his dog Rock, is here for. He is part of a rescue and recovery team that traveled to Derna just a day after the floodwaters swept through.

Muhanned El Hardi and his dog Rock, seen on Sept. 17, have been at work on rescue and recovery for a week after traveling to Derna to help just after the initial disaster.

The task is daunting, exhausting, and terrifying, Hardi admitted, saying that he has already dug up dozens of bodies with his team, most recently a young family with a 2-year-old boy, his eyes missing. “They were barely recognizable,” he said. “I can’t allow myself to stop and think about the situation, the tragedy, and the grief. People here need us now,” he added. “I will deal with my own pain and grief later.”

He walked slowly as Rock sniffed the area, smelling debris, until the dog sat down quietly and lingered. “It’s his way of telling me that he’s found something,” Hardi said. “We’ll start digging here.”

The sun sinks on the horizon as a soldier’s search for bodies continues on Sept. 17.

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