Photos — Azmat Khan

Qaiyarah, Iraq (Azmat Khan)

Rawa, the lone survivor of an airstrike that killed her parents and siblings in Qaiyara, Iraq on March 19, 2016. Although the U.S.-led Coalition confirmed that it had carried out an airstrike "10 meters away against a known ISIS weapons cache,” a subsequent civilian casualty assessment found the allegation of civilian casualties to be “noncredible” on the basis that there was “insufficient information to determine if the structures in the immediate area of the strike were residential in nature, as stated in the allegation."

Taza Khurmatu, Iraq (Azmat Khan)

In March 2016, in a lush farming village south of Kirkuk’s oil fields, seven mortars crashed into a residential neighborhood in the Iraqi town of Taza. The shells had become something of a daily occurrence in Taza, which lays on a frontline, besieged by a neighboring ISIS stronghold for nearly two years. But on that day Zaineb Akbar Saleem could smell something different: the stench of rotting garlic. As she rushed from her home to the grass where her daughter Fatima had been playing, pungent black smoke filled her throat, stung her eyes, and burned her skin.

Taza doctors remember precisely how the two-and a half-year-old girl arrived at their clinic: eyelids sealed shut, hair slicked back, and skin glimmering, as though freshly coated with a patina of oil. They washed Fatima, knowing little about what had caused her injuries or those of dozens of other patients that had arrived at the ward. In the hours that followed, anyone who so much as touched the afflicted developed wounds of their own. As word spread that it was a chemical attack, local doctors conceded defeat and sent hundreds of Taza patients to more advanced hospitals in Kirkuk. In a day, Fatima’s skin turned black; in two, she drew her last breaths.

Fatima was one of three people killed by what is ISIS’s most advanced chemical attack to date. When I arrived in Taza just a few weeks after, I found a village still reeling from the effects. Residents were still coming to the local clinic to get treated, including this baby, whose rash continues to afflict him.