WWF’s Secret War

WWF Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People

The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching. A BuzzFeed News investigation reveals the hidden human cost.

Tim Lane / Guy Shield for BuzzFeed News

Down the road from the crocodile ponds inside Nepal’s renowned Chitwan National Park, in a small clearing shaded by sala trees, sits a jail. Hira Chaudhary went there one summer night with boiled green maize and chicken for her husband, Shikharam, a farmer who had been locked up for two days.

Shikharam was in too much pain to swallow. He crawled toward Hira, his thin body covered in bruises, and told her through sobs that forest rangers were torturing him. “They beat him mercilessly and put saltwater in his nose and mouth,” Hira later told police.

The rangers believed that Shikharam helped his son bury a rhinoceros horn in his backyard. They couldn’t find the horn, but they threw Shikharam in their jail anyway, court documents filed by the prosecution show.

Nine days later, he was dead.

Hira Chaudhary
Tsering Dolker Gurung for BuzzFeed News

An autopsy showed seven broken ribs and “blue marks and bruises” all over his body. Seven eyewitnesses corroborated his wife’s account of nonstop beatings. Three park officials, including the chief warden, were arrested and charged with murder.

This was a sensitive moment for one of the globe’s most prominent charities. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) had long helped fund and equip Chitwan’s forest rangers, who patrol the area in jeeps, boats, and on elephant backs alongside soldiers from the park’s in-house army battalion. Now WWF’s partners in the war against poaching stood accused of torturing a man to death.

WWF’s staff on the ground in Nepal leaped into action — not to demand justice, but to lobby for the charges to disappear. When the Nepalese government dropped the case months later, the charity declared it a victory in the fight against poaching. Then WWF Nepal continued to work closely with the rangers and fund the park as if nothing had happened.

As for the rangers who were charged in connection with Shikharam’s death, WWF Nepal later hired one of them to work for the charity. It handed a second a special anti-poaching award. By then he had written a tell-all memoir that described one of his favorite interrogation techniques: waterboarding.

Shikharam’s alleged murder in 2006 was no isolated incident: It was part of a pattern that persists to this day. In national parks across Asia and Africa, the beloved nonprofit with the cuddly panda logo funds, equips, and works directly with paramilitary forces that have been accused of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering scores of people. As recently as 2017, forest rangers at a WWF-funded park in Cameroon tortured an 11-year-old boy in front of his parents, the family told BuzzFeed News. Their village submitted a complaint to WWF, but months later, the family said they still hadn’t heard back.

People living near Nepal’s Chitwan National Park
Tsering Dolker Gurung for BuzzFeed News

WWF said that it does not tolerate any brutality by its partners. “Human rights abuses are totally unacceptable and can never be justified in the name of conservation,” the charity said in a statement.

But WWF has provided high-tech enforcement equipment, cash, and weapons to forces implicated in atrocities against indigenous communities. In the coming days, BuzzFeed News will reveal how the charity has continued funding and equipping rangers, even after higher-ups became aware of evidence of serious human rights abuses.

A yearlong BuzzFeed News investigation across six countries — based on more than 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, including confidential memos, internal budgets, and emails discussing weapons purchases — can reveal:

World Wildlife Fund activists demonstrate on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change conference
Jorge Silva / Reuters

WWF has launched an “independent review” led by human rights specialists into the evidence uncovered by BuzzFeed News. “We see it as our urgent responsibility to get to the bottom of the allegations BuzzFeed has made, and we recognize the importance of such scrutiny,” the charity said in a statement. “With this in mind, and while many of BuzzFeed’s assertions do not match our understanding of events, we have commissioned an independent review into the matters raised.” The charity declined to answer detailed questions sent by BuzzFeed News.

It continued: “We hope that an accurate picture of our conservation work on the ground, the challenges faced by all, in some of the most dangerous and hostile places on Earth, and the efforts being made to secure a future for people and planet can be reflected in the story.”

WWF was established by a small group of mostly British naturalists in Zurich in 1961. Since then it has expanded globally, establishing field offices in over 40 countries, which are coordinated and led by executives at its international headquarters in Gland, Switzerland. It aims to “protect the future of nature,” a vital mission that has galvanized millions of supporters, including famous patrons, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Prince Charles to Sir David Attenborough. The charity’s advertising campaigns, many of which promote rangers as “one of the planet’s first and last lines of defense” against wildlife crime, inspire small donors to give in droves. In 2017 alone, WWF raked in more than 767 million euros, more than half of which came from members of the public.

“Some types of torture are done to obtain confessions, as the killing of a rhino is a very serious case.”

The charity funnels large sums of cash to its field offices in the developing world where staff work alongside national governments — including brutal dictatorships — to help maintain and police vast national parks that shelter endangered species. It says it is active in more than 100 countries on five continents, and showcases its collaborations with communities, whether in protecting reefs in the Pacific islands or facing off against illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest.

But many parks are magnets for poachers, and WWF expends much of its energy — and money — in a global battle against the organized criminal gangs that prey on the endangered species the charity was founded to protect.

It’s a crusade that WWF refers to in the hardened terms of war. Public statements speak of “boots on the ground,” partnerships with “elite military forces,” the creation of a “Jungle Brigade,” and the deployment of “conservation drones.” The charity sells forest ranger children’s dolls for $75, branded as “Frontline Heroes.”

WWF is not alone in its embrace of militarization: Other conservation charities have enlisted in the war on poaching in growing numbers over the past decade, recruiting veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to teach forest rangers counterinsurgency techniques and posting promotional materials showing armed guards standing at attention in fatigues and berets. Ex–special forces operatives promote their services at wildlife conferences. But WWF stands out as the biggest global player in this increasingly crowded space.

The enemy is real, and dangerous. Poaching is a billion-dollar industry that terrorizes animals and threatens some species’ very existence. Poachers take advantage of regions ravaged by poverty and violence. And the work of forest rangers is indeed perilous: By one 2018 estimate, poachers killed nearly 50 rangers around the world in the previous year. But like any conflict, WWF’s war on poaching has civilian casualties.

Nepali army personnel burn wildlife parts seized from poachers at Chitwan National Park
AFP / Getty Images

Indigenous people living near one park in southeast Cameroon described a litany of horrors in interviews and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News: dead-of-night break-ins by men wielding machetes, rifle butt bludgeonings, burn torture involving chilis ground into paste, and homes and camps torched to the ground.

Their tormentors in these accounts were not poachers, but the park officials who police them. Although governments employ the rangers, they often rely on WWF to bankroll their work. Rangers are scattered thousands of miles apart across many countries, but WWF’s international network of offices effectively stitches them together into one global force fighting under the same set of principles.

Staffers in the charity’s in-country field offices are supposed to report any allegations of brutality back to its headquarters in Switzerland. But documents reveal WWF’s own staffers on the ground are often deeply entwined with the rangers’ work — coordinating their operations, jointly directing their raids and patrols alongside government officials, and turning a blind eye to their misdeeds.

Since 1872, when Native American tribes were forced to leave their ancestral lands to make way for Yellowstone National Park, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have lost access to their land to ensure animals roam in people-free spaces. These communities, from the Tharu in Nepal to the Baka in Central Africa, remain on the outside looking in at land where their ancestors gathered food, built shelter, and made medicine out of natural resources for generations.

With deep knowledge of the land and its animals, these communities should be ideal partners in WWF’s war against poaching, anthropologists and activists said. Alienating locals only encourages them to assist professional out-of-town poachers, making that battle harder. “The Baka are the eyes and ears of the forest and could really help conservation,” said Charles Jones Nsonkali, a Cameroonian indigenous rights activist. “But they are treated as the enemy instead.”

A Baka woman fishes in the forest near Lobéké National Park
Tom Warren / BuzzFeed News

WWF said it does not see indigenous communities as its target: The goal is to catch organized criminals, not people struggling to feed their families. The charity vows to work hand in hand with these communities, and even has a written policy pledging that it will “not undermine” their human rights.

Yet, time and again, indigenous groups — both small-fry hunters and innocent bystanders — say they suffer at the hands of the rangers.

This is the untold story of collateral damage in WWF’s secret global war.

A sign near an entrance to Chitwan
Tsering Dolker Gurung for BuzzFeed News

On his knees outside Chitwan’s jail, Shikharam Chaudhary begged his wife, Hira, to get him out before it was too late. “He had told me crying that they might kill him if I cannot take him away,” Hira later told human rights investigators.

But all Hira could do was give her husband an ointment for his wounds. Shikharam insisted he was innocent, but he didn’t have a lawyer, and there was no judge to hear his case or grant him bail. No police officer or prosecutor had approved his imprisonment.

Nepal’s park officials were given this free rein decades ago, shortly after WWF first arrived in Chitwan in 1967 to launch a rhinoceros conservation project in a lush lowland forest at the foot of the Himalayas. Six years later, Nepal created Chitwan National Park, 360 square miles of protected land for the area’s one-horned rhinos, Royal Bengal tigers, and slender-snouted gharial crocodiles.

To clear the way, tens of thousands of indigenous people were evicted from their homes and moved to areas outside the park’s boundaries. These people had lived in the area for centuries, building their roofs out of leaves, making medical ointments out of tree bark, and feeding their families with fish from the river.

The park’s creation radically changed their way of life: Now they must scrape together money to buy tin for their roofs, pay hospital bills, and farm new crops. They also live in fear of the park’s wild animals, which, while rising in number thanks to anti-poaching efforts, have destroyed crops and mauled people to death.

Rhinoceros horns can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market. Professional poachers offer a tiny portion to locals who assist them, which can be hard for impoverished residents of villages to turn down.

Chitwan’s forest rangers work alongside over 1,000 soldiers from the park’s army battalion. Nepalese law gives them special power to investigate wildlife-related crimes, make arrests without a warrant, and retain immunity in cases where an officer has “no alternative” but to shoot the offender, even if the suspect dies. Chitwan’s chief warden serves as a quasi-judge who for years had the ability to dole out 15-year prison terms himself (a recent constitutional amendment transfers all criminal cases that require sentences longer than a year to district courts).

“This was how I learned to pour water into the nose while interrogating. To tell the truth, after that we used this method many times in Chitwan.”

Starting in the 1990s, WWF Nepal set up “anti-poaching units” at the country’s parks. The charity provided monthly salaries for staffers, rewards for informants, and a variety of field gear for rangers, including “khukuris,” curved knives commonly used by the Gurkhas, the famously fierce army brigade, according to internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. A former WWF Nepal employee said he was once told to buy North Face jackets for the army officials inside the park — who donned them only after he replaced the North Face logo with WWF’s emblem.

Indigenous groups living near Chitwan have long detailed a host of abuses by these forces. Villagers have reported beatings, torture, sexual assaults, and killings by the park’s guards. They’ve accused park officials of confiscating their firewood and vegetables, and forcing them into unpaid labor.

When forest rangers locked up Shikharam in June 2006, park authorities were scrambling to curb the poaching that spiked alongside social unrest during the country’s Maoist insurgency. They managed to save more rhinos the following year — but the success came at a cost.

Shikharam Chaudhary’s brother, who advocated for his case
Tsering Dolker Gurung for BuzzFeed News

Rangers had not just waterboarded Shikharam, according to eyewitness testimony in police records and a human rights report obtained by BuzzFeed News. Fellow detainees reported that they had seen the guards kicking him in the chest, beating him with bamboo poles, and stomping on him with their boots. Indigenous rights activists who visited Shikharam in jail said they warned Chief Warden Tikaram Adhikari that he was in a bad state.

“We asked the chief warden to stop torturing him and requested that Shikharam be taken to a hospital for treatment, but he just shrugged off our request,” activist Chabilal Neupane told BuzzFeed News. “He told us it was necessary to put pressure on detainees during the investigation process.”

When Shikharam finally fell unconscious, one detainee told police he had heard guards say “the oldie has stopped breathing.” He died at a hospital soon afterward.

After Shikharam’s death, the park released a statement saying he had simply fainted and fallen off a bench after an uneventful week.

Tharu activists demanded a postmortem, obtained by BuzzFeed News, which found “a clear indication of physical violence.” The cause of death was declared to be “excessive pressure applied on the back and left side of the chest,” which rendered Shikharam unable to breathe.

WWF responded to the Shikharam crisis with emphatic support for the park officials charged with murdering him, all of whom, including Adhikari, claimed Shikharam died of natural causes and told BuzzFeed News they weren’t involved in his death.

In a series of meetings hosted by the government’s forest department while the park officials awaited a verdict, staff from a joint initiative between WWF and the government of Nepal asked the Tharu activists to convince Shikharam’s family to drop the criminal complaint, multiple activists told BuzzFeed News.

The section manager of the WWF-backed initiative was then Purna Bahadur Kunwar.

“He would say, ‘Let’s not politicize the issue, it was an accident, who will be there to take care of animals?”’ claimed Birendra Mahato, the chairperson of the Tharu Cultural Museum and Research Center.

Purna Kunwar, now the field coordinator for another WWF project, said he “could not clearly recall the incident in question.” He asked BuzzFeed News to email him further questions, but did not respond in time for publication.

Court documents from the Chaudhary case
Obtained by BuzzFeed News

The family pushed ahead, but to no avail. The Nepalese government intervened and withdrew the case against the accused killers in March 2007.

WWF celebrated. “I have every confidence that this move will renew the motivation of park staff and other conservationists to save Nepal’s rhinos and root out illegal wildlife trade,” WWF Nepal president Anil Manandhar declared in a press release. “WWF will always be there to support this endeavor in any way we can.”

The government’s decision was later questioned in an investigation by a Nepalese human rights group, which reviewed medical records and re-interviewed witnesses. The group concluded Shikharam had died due to torture “at the hand of Park authorities” and called his treatment “inhuman, cruel and degrading.” Assuming that forestry officials could run their own system of justice was “as foolish as to suppose that a child can shoulder the load of a grown up person,” the report said.

The three men who had been accused of murder did not take part in the review, and continued to deny involvement in his death. But another Chitwan official spoke to the group’s investigators about general interrogation practices at the park. “Some types of torture are done to obtain confessions, as the killing of a rhino is a very serious case,” he said. The report was later featured in a book.

After Shikharam died, another indigenous man was found dead at the park’s jail. His family insisted that he had been tortured and accused guards of murdering him. Park officials said he had hanged himself.

A 2008 internal report by a WWF consultant, obtained by BuzzFeed News, came to its own conclusion about Shikharam’s death. The report referred to Shikharam as a “crime convicted individual” — even though he had never been formally charged — and lamented that the arrests of the three Chitwan officials had “widely demoralized park staff and paralyzed anti-poaching operations.”

WWF’s work with violent partners spans the globe. In Central Africa, internal documents show the charity’s close involvement in military-style operations with both a repressive dictatorship and a notoriously fierce army.

In Cameroon, under authoritarian president Paul Biya, rangers have long been accused of beating and torturing people who live near the WWF-supported parks they patrol. The government believes “there are no human rights violations anywhere” in Cameroon, said spokesperson Loh Guillaume Kimbi. He added that taking “concrete steps to prevent poaching cannot and should not be considered at any moment as a gross violations of human rights.”

Secret budgeting documents from Lobéké National Park in Cameroon show how closely WWF’s staff have worked with government forces. The charity has helped train them, paid their salaries, and built them homes. It has bought them radios, satellite phones, TVs, 4x4s, and boats. And it has allocated a significant portion of the millions in donor money it spends at Lobéké to “enforcement” activities, including patrols and raids.

Obtained by BuzzFeed News

The park’s management plan says WWF will help organize raids, known as “coup de poings,” on local villages suspected of harboring poachers. A confidential internal report found that such missions, frequently conducted in the dead of night with the help of police units, were often violent.

WWF also worked with the Battalion d’Intervention Rapide (BIR), a Cameroonian special forces unit that has separately been accused of killing unarmed civilians. (Kimbi, the government spokesperson, denied that the BIR has been involved in human rights abuses.) The charity has long denied collaborating with the controversial unit, but emails obtained by BuzzFeed News show its staff in Cameroon responded enthusiastically when an official called on them to arrange a “well-armed” team to catch suspected poachers who they believed had just shot a ranger and suggested they seek the backing of “our colleagues from the BIR.” Three days later, a WWF staff member wrote that he had met with a BIR lieutenant to “solicit their participation” in “this important patrol.”

Internal budgeting documents
Obtained by BuzzFeed News

In neighboring Central African Republic (CAR), a failed state in civil war, WWF’s staff embroiled themselves in something potentially even riskier: an arms deal.

WWF’s local office plays a central role at the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve on the southwestern tip of the CAR: The charity formally comanages the park and its forest rangers in partnership with the country’s environmental ministry.

In 2009, WWF staff in CAR got involved with the purchase of assault rifles from the country’s army, a force notorious for committing human rights abuses, including decapitating civilians and parading their heads through the streets.

Though the anti-poaching forces it works with are often armed, WWF itself has strict rules against buying or selling weapons. And the park was already in trouble: It was losing donor money in a haze of severe mismanagement. In one internal memo, a local WWF employee warned colleagues of “critical” problems: rules broken, “bad contracts” that paid out “exaggerated amounts,” and other “certain abuses” found in the park’s budget.

One former WWF employee in CAR told BuzzFeed News he was recruited to help “camouflage the deal because none of our funders were permitted to buy weapons.”

But as he examined the invoices, he noticed that the numbers didn’t add up. In an email, he prodded Jean Bernard Yarissem, WWF’s top official in the country, for more detail. An AK assault rifle “should cost us” 266,666 Central African francs (around $615), the employee wrote, “so for 15” weapons “it reaches 4 million.” If so, he wrote, that would leave about 2 million francs unaccounted for: “Does that mean that two boxes of ammunition cost 1 million each?”

Soon it all unraveled. Yarissem explained what happened in a reply to an email sent to nine other officials under the subject line “scandale.” Members of the CAR army had “embezzled” funds meant for arms and ammunition. (The CAR government did not respond to a request for comment.)

Yarissem wrote he was upset the money from the deal had gone missing. Yet he betrayed no misgivings about purchasing the guns, which he referred to as “the weapons that we possess.”

Yarissem did not respond to requests for comment. One official copied on the email initially denied any involvement in the deal to BuzzFeed News, saying, “The idea of WWF buying weapons is unbelievable.” Reminded of details in the email, he backtracked, acknowledging there had been “some discussion” about such a deal, but he did not believe it had gone through.

WWF declined to answer questions about the botched arms deal when asked about it in detail last week.

After that deal went awry, the charity’s staff in CAR did not appear to shy away from involvement with weapons. The charity bought food and fuel for soldiers deployed on an anti-poaching mission during the peak of the country’s civil war, according to two former staffers who spoke to BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity. One former WWF staffer said he had personally taught rangers how to safely handle AK-47s and how to conduct defensive combat tactics.

In the years after Shikharam’s death, WWF continued to support Nepal’s forest rangers. In 2008, the charity wrote about the success of their intensive campaign called Operation Unicornis to increase the number of rhinos in Chitwan. The mission included “risky undercover investigations,” according to WWF’s internal newsletter.

The next year, Kamal Jung Kunwar, one of the three officials charged in Shikharam’s death, wrote a memoir about his time at the park. In Four Years for the Rhino, which was published by a Nepalese nonprofit, Kunwar claims to have arrested over 150 poachers, brokers, and smugglers over a three-year period. He insisted he was innocent, claimed he was out of the country when Shikharam was detained, and speculated that the damning autopsy results were fabricated.

But Kunwar freely admitted that the forces he oversaw as coordinator of the park’s anti-poaching operation unit regularly beat suspects. He wrote about giving a suspect a “hard slap,” buying packets of chilli powder for sprinkling into suspects’ eyes, and watching as a fellow ranger punched a boy in the nose until it “started bleeding profusely.” In another, he described a Tibetan boy who refused to speak during interrogation until soldiers poured water into his nose and eyes — the same waterboarding technique Shikharam had described to his wife.

“This was how I learned to pour water into the nose while interrogating,” Kunwar wrote. “To tell the truth, after that we used this method many times in Chitwan. This method was useful in obtaining information.”

Narendra Shrestha/ EPA-EFE

In an interview, Kunwar told BuzzFeed News he stood by his memoir: “Everything is in my book,” he said, “just read my book.” He defended his tactics. “It was not torture,” he said. “It was interrogation.”

“I could have hidden the truth and not talked about it in the book,” he added, “but I didn’t because I wanted to present the real scenario. I wanted to let people know about the situation at the time and say, ‘This is what had to be done to save rhinos.’”

In a follow-up email, Kunwar added that it was important to show “respect to others’ human rights,” even if they “are suspected of killing pregnant rhinos, child rapist, human murderer etc.”

WWF spent nearly $3 million on the area including Chitwan National Park in 2009–10, nearly double what it had spent only five years earlier. In 2010, the United Nations released a report documenting six recent extrajudicial killings by army personnel patrolling national parks around Nepal, including Chitwan. Park officials “played an active role in obstructing criminal accountability,” the report said, by falsifying and destroying evidence, falsely claiming the victims were poachers, and pressuring the families of the victims to withdraw criminal complaints.

In one case, soldiers shot and killed two indigenous women and a 12-year-old girl while they were gathering tree bark at Bardiya National Park in 2010. The victims weren’t criminals, another human rights report concluded, just “very poor people who had hardly any source of income.”

Neither report mentioned WWF or made any findings about its relationship with the parks or their officials. The charity has funded anti-poaching enforcement at each of the national parks where the killings took place. One of its major celebrity board members, Leonardo DiCaprio, funds tiger conservation efforts at both Bardiya and Chitwan national parks. (DiCaprio did not respond to a request for comment.)

Two years after the report was released, a Tharu woman was cutting grass near the banks of the Rapti River when a soldier patrolling Chitwan National Park attacked her, she told BuzzFeed News. He stepped on her hands, threw away her sickle, and pushed her into the bushes, where he ripped off her clothes and attempted to rape her. When she resisted, he beat her with a bamboo stick until she lost consciousness.

The soldier was arrested, and a park-affiliated committee tasked with improving local relations stepped in. The woman and her family told BuzzFeed News she was pressured not to press charges against the soldier. “I didn’t get justice,” she said. Her knee is still so damaged that she’s unable to work.

“I am still suffering,” she said.

The sexual assault made national headlines. Despite WWF’s deep involvement with Chitwan National Park and its commitment to protecting indigenous people from abuse, no one from the charity ever met with the woman to discuss the attempted rape, she said. A few months later, WWF gave the soldier’s army battalion an award for combating rhino poaching.

Chitwan park officials continued to lock people up. As of November 2013, there were 80 people detained in Chitwan custody, some whom had been there more than 15 years, according to the Kathmandu Post.

Chitwan National Park did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

During this time, Chitwan’s former chief warden, Tikaram Adhikari, continued working for Nepal’s forest department — and closely with WWF. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Adhikari denied any involvement with Shikharam’s death and said he was only arrested because of political pressure from Maoists. Shikharam’s autopsy results were fabricated, he said.

After the case was dropped, Adhikari’s influence expanded.

Chitwan’s Rapti River

Frank Bienewald / Getty Images

In 2014, M.K. Yadava, then director of Kaziranga National Park in India — where WWF has backed rangers with supplies and arranged combat and ambush training — produced a document laying out an extraordinarily hardline anti-poaching strategy in which due process would take a backseat.

“Never allow any unauthorized entry (Kill the unwanted)” was a key principle. “If a question arises as to which rights shall get higher priority,” Yadava wrote, “it shall not be the human rights.”

He called on the government to grant him the same sweeping powers to arrest and detain suspects as his Nepalese neighbors. “This is also what we need to do in India,” he wrote.

Yadava personally thanked Adhikari in his proposal. He had invited Adhikari to an international conference where, with a senior WWF representative looking on, Adhikari “shared his positive experiences of controlling poaching in Chitwan by conferring magisterial powers to the Chief Warden,” Yadava wrote.

Yadava’s strategy may have helped curb poaching, but in 2017 the BBC reported rangers at the park had killed dozens of people under his watch, including innocent villagers. “The instruction is whenever you see the poachers or hunters, we should start our guns and hunt them,” one guard told the BBC. “First we warn them — who are you,” another guard said. “But if they resort to firing we have to kill them.” The story led to international outcry, but there was little mention of WWF’s role at the park. “We do not support any procedure that advocates an alleged ‘shoot on sight policy,’” WWF said in a statement, denying that such a policy existed.

But BuzzFeed News can now reveal that WWF India was not only aware of Yadava’s proposal, but supported it. Documents reveal that five WWF employees — including the chief executive of its India office — were listed on his proposal as members of an “expert panel and peer-review group.” One WWF India staffer responded to the paper by offering to help park officials motivate and train its “frontline staff.”

“I could have hidden the truth and not talked about it in the book, but I didn’t because I wanted to present the real scenario. I wanted to let people know about the situation at the time and say, ‘This is what had to be done to save rhinos.’”

Indigenous people have also reported abuse by rangers near other WWF-backed protected areas across India. Just last year, a man who was out collecting wood near Pench Tiger Reserve was found beaten to death. Eight forest rangers were arrested, and police said one of them had confessed that they had burned his body in the forest to destroy evidence.

BuzzFeed News sent a detailed letter seeking comment to numerous Indian Forest Service officials, as well as Yadava. None responded.

Financial documents show that, over the years, WWF has supplied Indian rangers with hundreds of batons and anti-riot helmets, and night vision binoculars for patrols. It also donated uniforms, evidence kits, and a range of vehicles, from jeeps to four-wheelers to trucks and boats.

“In India, if anyone is in uniform they have powers and can abuse anyone at any point,” a former employee of WWF India told BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity.

WWF’s war on poaching extends beyond its support for boots-on-the-ground patrols. Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal the charity has assumed the role of a global spymaster in its efforts to protect wildlife.

Forest rangers often pay people in villages to act as “informants,” documents show. That tactic is risky even when it’s used by trained law enforcement and intelligence agencies, since an informant can be tortured or killed if their cover is blown. Charities shouldn’t get involved with such a “dangerous” enterprise, conservation expert Rosaleen Duffy told BuzzFeed News, because they can lack training in how to collect and transmit sensitive information to keep sources safe.

WWF officials have repeatedly claimed that the charity steers clear of direct involvement in the recruitment and running of informants. “We aren’t law enforcement agencies,” said Drew McVey, a regional officer overseeing operations in Africa, during a recent conference at the London Zoo.

But WWF has been deeply involved in the controversial practice for some time. The charity has helped establish informant networks in authoritarian states, documents show, and it has handed over intelligence to rangers and soldiers accused of human rights abuses.

Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show WWF has offered staffers detailed instructions for finding and cultivating informants, who “help to solve crimes.”

“If a question arises as to which rights shall get higher priority, it shall not be the human rights.”

A global training manual drafted in 2015 declared that people who disclose sensitive information do so with a range of motivations: “Fear; Revenge; Money; Repentance; Altruism.” When they find a potential source, the manual instructs WWF staffers to deploy a three-step approach. Step one: “establish rapport.” Step two: “orientation and guidance.” Step three: “explain safety policies.”

It makes clear that those safety policies only go so far, saying WWF has “a limited means to extract” an informant from a dangerous situation.

In India, Nepal, Cameroon, and CAR, emails and other internal documents show WWF’s active on-the-ground involvement with informant networks. The charity has purchased information and arranged bounties — $170 for a seized assault rifle, for example. For regular informers, it has paid salaries and transportation costs.

One WWF staffer emailed his managers in CAR in 2010 to warn that morale of the secret informants would run low if the charity wasn’t paying them swiftly enough. The staffer proposed a “slush fund” to pay them faster.

The road to Lobéké National Park in Cameroon
Tom Warren / BuzzFeed News

This past rainy season, the muddy red road from the Cameroonian capital of Yaoundé to Lobéké National Park was studded with crater-sized potholes and carcasses of unlucky trucks as it wound through logging towns and jungle villages plastered with reelection posters for President Biya. The three-day drive ends with a welcome sign bearing the name of the Cameroonian Ministry of Forestry and Fauna. WWF’s famed panda logo is stamped alongside it.

WWF executives at its headquarters thousands of miles away in Switzerland claim to keep the Cameroonian government at arm’s length. But this local bureau of “Programme WWF” shares its office with forest rangers employed by the government — meaning WWF administrators work just a few doors down from an ad hoc jail cell where guards have locked up suspected poachers before carting them away to prison.

WWF promises that if it learns of possible abuses by forest rangers, it will “leave no stone unturned” to find out what happened, but its complaint process is not straightforward. In 2016 it established a “complaints resolution process,” overseen by officials in Switzerland, in which WWF pledges to respond to allegations within 10 days. The charity told BuzzFeed News that it informs people of the process through churches and other community organizations.

Yet Baka people throughout Lobéké told BuzzFeed News they were unaware there was anyone they could complain to. Others only learned they could complain because a British NGO called Survival International, which campaigns for indigenous rights, has recently helped dozens of people submit complaints through a separate reporting system for WWF whistleblowers, which is advertised outside the Lobéké bureau on a tattered piece of paper. One complaint submitted online, signed by five people from a village near the park, alleged that forest rangers had tortured an 11-year-old boy.

A sign outside the program office near Lobéké National Park
Tom Warren / BuzzFeed News

“If the guards find you, even with just one antelope, they beat you and make you take your clothes off,” they wrote.

BuzzFeed News traveled to the village and confirmed the account with both the boy and his parents, Moungue and Janine.

The family of three was out harvesting cocoa near the park one day in 2017 when a team of forest rangers and soldiers approached demanding information about weapons used for poaching.

“I said, ‘I don’t have weapons, I’m just working the fields, I don’t know which weapons you’re talking about,’” Moungue told BuzzFeed News. “At that point they said, ‘If that is so, get on your knees, sit down, sleep here.’ That’s when they started to hit me.” They beat the mother, father, and son with machetes, using the blunt ends to hit the soles of their feet.

It was October 2018, three months after the villagers submitted their complaint. No one from WWF had met with them, they said. The original complaint never received a response, according to records obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Last week, WWF issued a press release announcing a “historic” new agreement between the Cameroonian government and the Baka people. It grants them “greater access rights” to the forest, and promises to “tap into” their “traditional knowledge” of the region.

Hira Chaudhary
Tsering Dolker Gurung for BuzzFeed News

Hira Chaudhary said she received a few thousand dollars from Chitwan after her husband’s death. She never heard from the park or from WWF again.

“I am all alone,” Hira told BuzzFeed News.

Near the on-site detention center where Shikharam sobbed into the night, a gold-plated sign from 2016 celebrates the anti-poaching efforts of the “joint conservation operation cell” where park officials and soldiers from Chitwan’s army battalion work together.

Recent changes to Nepalese law mean park officials must now seek approval from a judge to detain someone for longer than 24 hours. But they can still launch cases without involving the police and dictate prison sentences with a maximum of one year. It’s still not an offense for a ranger to shoot a poaching suspect to death in self-defense.

WWF cites Nepal as a shining example of what can happen when the government and people in villages work together. But on the ground, villagers tell a different story.

In December, indigenous people from a village bordering Chitwan gathered behind a mustard seed field and discussed their recent run-ins with park officials. One man told BuzzFeed News that Chitwan soldiers had beaten him so badly the year before that they had broken his eardrum. Others said their fishing permits were abruptly denied for no apparent reason. Even those who have permits said they couldn’t walk near the Rapti River, long the lifeblood of the community, without being hassled by park officials. The president of the nearby community forest — one of the initiatives championed by WWF — said even he wasn’t allowed to enter the forest without permission from the warden.

The villagers said they would be eager to speak with WWF about these issues, and to learn more about how they might look after the land better. “We’d be lucky if they would come to us and talk to us,” said community leader Jaya Mangal Kumal. “They have to consult us, educate us, teach us.”

Yet WWF had never once come to speak with them, the villagers said. They live less than a mile away from the park.

People gather by a mustard seed field to talk to BuzzFeed News
Tsering Dolker Gurung for BuzzFeed News

The three rangers originally charged with causing Shikharam’s death continue to thrive. One, Ritesh Basnet, got a job at WWF Nepal after the charges were dropped. He told BuzzFeed News he “was innocent” and that he “had done nothing wrong.”

Kamal Jung Kunwar’s memoir, in which he admitted to waterboarding suspects, has been adapted for the big screen. A February trailer for the upcoming movie, on which he has a writing credit, portrays rangers slapping poaching suspects before Kunwar is “jailed by the corrupted system” as part of a “conspiracy.”

In 2014, WWF gave a Leaders for a Living Planet award to Chitwan National Park. The charity handed the award to Kunwar, who by then had become the chief warden.

A photograph shows him smiling with the charity’s top officials, including then-president Yolanda Kakabadse and then–director general Jim Leape.

Kakabadse did not respond to a request for comment. Leape told BuzzFeed News in a statement he “was not aware of concerns” about Kunwar. “As I expect they have told you, given the seriousness of the allegations WWF has decided to launch an independent review to determine exactly what happened,” Leape said.

In an interview for WWF’s website, Kunwar had warm words for the charity. The support WWF provides “is really helping us to do our job well,” he said. “I thank them for this.”

BuzzFeed News reported from Nepal in partnership with the Kathmandu Post, which has today published its own investigation into WWF’s work in the country. Read the Post’s story here.

Tsering Dolker Gurung, François Essomba, Cecile Dehesdin, Alice Kantor, Morgane Mounier, and Emma Loop contributed reporting to this story.

This is Part 1 of a BuzzFeed News investigation.

To read the other articles in this series, click here.

‘I’ve seen death in this city, but nothing as sad as this’: how a ferry disaster exposed the corruption devastating Iraq

As protests against a rotten system continue, the families of 128 drowned civilians await justice.

Early in the morning on 21 March, in Mosul’s flat and dusty al-Baker neighbourhood, a school principal named Ustad Ahmad went to see his mother. It was the start of the new year holiday of Nowruz, and she asked if they could go to the cemetery to visit his father’s grave. Ahmad had other ideas. He was planning to take his wife and children to an amusement park, as a reward for the boys’ full marks in their recent exams. Besides, he told his mother, he didn’t want to be reminded of death on such a beautiful spring day.

Back home, after breakfast with the boys, Ahmad sat on a wooden chair in the bathroom for his weekly shave. Then, preparing to go out, he put on his new summer blazer, a pair of jeans and the wraparound sunglasses his wife had recently bought for him. Tall and burly, Ahmad was a very proud man – proud of his status among his colleagues, the comfort and neatness of his house, his smart and witty boys, his beautiful baby daughter and above all, his clever, outgoing wife, who loved to travel. At around 1pm, the family caught a taxi to the amusement park, and Ahmad gave the boys enough money to go on every ride. He even joined them for a round on the bumper cars.

Things hadn’t always been as comfortable for Ahmad as they were now. When Islamic State took over Mosul in 2014, he had been deemed “unreliable” and expelled from his teaching job. For three years he was unemployed and unable to provide for his family. He sold his wife’s gold and some of their furniture, borrowed money from his mother and brother, and became dependent on whatever his wife’s family could spare them. Friends and neighbours nagged him to go out and find work as a day labourer, or get himself a pushcart and work in the vegetable market. But how could he? A school principal can’t work in the market, he felt. He rarely left the house and sank into depression, arguing with his wife and children, who stopped going to school. Now, two years after the liberation of Mosul, he was proud to be a respectable principal once more, even if the city was still in ruins and his school barely functioning.

Mosul is a city broken by war and corruption. Today, the early euphoria of liberation from Islamic State is dissolving as the failure of reconstruction efforts becomes increasingly apparent. Pledges to rebuild the city remain unfulfilled, while the five bridges spanning the river Tigris have either collapsed or are strung together by military pontoons. Hundreds of thousands of people who were driven out of their homes during the fighting are still living in camps. The security situation is deteriorating and Islamic State cells are re-emerging. Across Iraq, anger against political elites is rising. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets of Baghdad to demand a complete overhaul of the political system. After two months of demonstrations, in which 400 were killed and thousands injured, the prime minister resigned, but the crowds are still camping out in main squares across the country, waiting for the rest of their demands to be met.

At the same time, what endures is the tenacity and resilience of the people of Mosul, their love of life and entrepreneurial spirit. During the later stages of the war, as the city was being retaken block-by-block by the Iraqi army, liberated neighbourhoods would spring back to life quickly. Families returned to their homes and teams of young volunteers cleared rubble from their streets. Even as the fighting raged just a few blocks away, someone would start selling cigarettes, a grocer would reopen with a box of half-rotten tomatoes and canned beans, and refurbished shops and restaurants would spring up, albeit without water or electricity. Those who could raise a bit of money began rebuilding their homes, while still waiting for the compensation their government had promised them. People allowed themselves the small reward of a meal out with their families.

It was close to 2pm when Ahmad’s family settled down to have their lunch, but there were no shaded areas in the park. The boys suggested that they go to Umm Rabaen, a pleasure island on the Tigris River. It was cooler by the water and there was a picnic area, and another amusement park. Ahmad called another taxi and they headed to the island.

He didn’t want to be reminded of death on such a beautiful spring day

Umm Rabaen embodies the mixture of ruin and resurgence that defines Mosul. It was first turned into a pleasure island during the late 80s, when riverside cafes, restaurants, chalets and the pyramid-shaped Oberoi hotel were built as part of a grand development plan. The hotel is now a ruined shell, and most of the trees have been chopped down for firewood. But cafes and restaurants have been restored and reopened, and on weekends, the people of Mosul flock to the island to sit at white plastic tables, drinking tea or eating grilled kebabs. The familiar sight of the Tigris flowing beside them, fast and muddy, is a reminder of the endurance of their city, just as the view of the ruined buildings on the opposite bank brings back memories of the vicious war that they only just survived.

Like many businesses in Mosul, since the liberation of the city from Isis, the island was part-owned by a member of the economic wing of a powerful militia. Earlier this year, a parliamentary commission reported that armed groups, working through their economic wings, have secured public contracts for businesses, in return for large kickbacks. They control the multimillion-dollar scrap metal trade and oil smuggling operations, as well as imposing illegal tolls on commercial traffic. The businesses they own are unaccountable, their funding is untraceable and, through a combination of fear and corruption, there is almost no oversight. The result, for the people enjoying their new year holiday in Mosul, was disaster.

That same morning, in a different part of Mosul, a woman named Shahla woke up feeling cheerful and decided to take her mother to a new restaurant for brunch. Tomorrow would be her mother’s 72nd birthday and Shahla and her two sisters had bought gifts, ordered cakes and sweets, and stuffed aubergines, zucchini and vine leaves with meat and rice, arranging them in a large dolma pot for the family feast. Today, though, Shahla had her mother to herself.

The two women shared a particularly close bond after living as virtual prisoners under the rule of Islamic State. Their prison had been their two-storey house, which sat in a quiet neighbourhood, nestled among olive, tangerine and eucalyptus trees, not far from the eastern banks of the Tigris. Shortly after June 2014, when Isis officially declared its caliphate, the 13 Christian families that lived in the neighbourhood were expelled, their doors marked with the letter N (for Nazrites) and their houses redistributed to the organisation’s senior foreign fighters. A Chechen commander lived across the street, while a Russian woman moved in next door and shouted at Shahla and her mother to cover their eyes even in their own garden. She would also send over her Egyptian husband to demand some of Shahla’s mother’s food.

When the battle to liberate Mosul began in September 2016, the houses of the foreign fighters in the neighbourhood became a target. Three were levelled in airstrikes that shook Shahla’s home and shattered their windows. Russian snipers set up a base in a house across the street. Other fighters fired their rocket-propelled grenades at the approaching Iraqi armoured vehicles from barricades at the end of the road.

A street near Mosul University after fighting between the Iraqi counter-terrorism service and Islamic State, January 2017.

Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

Towards the end of the battle, as the fighting intensified and Iraqi troops got closer, Islamic State fighters came knocking at their door in the middle of the night. They ordered them to leave their house and go with them: they would be human shields for the retreating fighters. The women gathered their belongings in small bags, piled food into an old wheelchair and set out. Distant explosions shook the ground under their feet. At the end of the street they came across other neighbours who had slipped away from the Isis fighters, and together they hid in the basement of an abandoned house. Twenty-five women and children hid in that dark basement for three nights, while above, battle raged. When finally they heard on the radio that their neighbourhood was liberated, they remained trapped in their hiding place. They could hear fighters in the house, searching for civilian hostages to ensure their safe retreat. In the basement, the families crouched in darkness, holding their breath. Not until they heard the roars of army trucks and armoured vehicles had they dared to move.

After their brunch, Shahla was in the kitchen preparing a pot of sweet Turkish coffee, while her mother sat reading in the garden, when Umm Yussuf, a friend of her mother, called to invite them for tea at the pleasure island that afternoon. Shahla didn’t want to go out. She thought that on a sunny public holiday the island would be too crowded. But her mother wanted to go – the weather was beautiful, and she hadn’t seen Umm Yussuf for weeks, so Shahla eventually agreed. She prepared a basket of food and a flask of coffee and they set off.

It took Shahla and her mother 20 minutes to walk from their house to the river. Her mother was glad to be out, and her cheeks were flushed from the warm afternoon sun. When she saw the large crowd that had gathered at the river bank, Shahla thought the whole of Mosul must be here. She didn’t like crowds, and she was trying to ask her mother if they could leave, when Umm Yussuf found them. The two old women hugged and the three of them slowly headed towards the ferry to the island.

Umm Rabaen island is connected to the east bank of the Tigris, less than 100 metres across the water, by two cable-pulled flatbed ferries, which were owned and maintained as part of the amusement park and island. The ferry allegedly had no safety provisions, security staff were reportedly unskilled and inept, and the service was rarely, if ever, subject to inspection.

As the crowd waiting for the ferry swelled, a short man with alert, beady eyes watched with growing unease. Omar was sitting nearby in an old motorboat whose white fibreglass coating had turned yellowish-brown with age. He noticed that in the past couple of hours the water had risen quickly. The lower decks of the riverside cafes, where he had moored his boat, had been submerged, and plastic tables and chairs taken to higher decks.

The day before, the river police had told the ferry management that it would need to suspend operations because of the unusual quantity of water being released from the Mosul dam higher up the river, after heavy rainfall. Everyone who lived or worked along the river had been informed – boatmen, cafe owners, even the farmers who raised water buffalos on the southern edge of the city. But the ferry was running as normal.

The ferry allegedly had no safety provisions, security staff were reportedly unskilled and inept, and the service was rarely, if ever, subject to inspection

At 3pm, it docked at the jetty on the eastern bank, and a single line of people descended, squeezing their way through the families waiting to board. The two crowds intermingled in a sea of coloured headscarves, pushing, and moving slowly. Everyone was in their holiday clothes, young men and boys wore suits and bow ties, girls wore dresses with frills.

Shahla went down the steps on to the ferry carrying her bag, the food basket and her mother’s handbag. She noticed that the water level was very high. Her mother and Umm Yussuf walked behind her slowly, holding hands. Ahmad and his family climbed down the steps backwards with the pram, one step at a time. The back of the ferry was full, but more people pushed to enter. By the time it started moving, nearly 300 people were crammed onboard.

The ferry was a contraption made from two sections of an old pontoon bridge welded together and decorated with arches that rose high on either side. Steel wires stretched between the arches above a row of benches. Motors mounted on opposite sides of the river pulled cables connected to the front and back of the ferry. A third, guiding cable resisted the push of the currents and maintained the ferry on a straight course.

Guardian graphic.

Image: Google Earth, 2004

The ferry shook and shuddered as it moved. The strength of the current pushed it downstream before the cable pulling it corrected its path and it shifted slightly upstream. The operator, standing in the back, noticed the ferry was tilting and started walking to the front, telling people to move away from the listing right side. The back of the ferry was being dragged by the current, pulling the ferry off its line. As the ferry jerked and swayed, a few kids climbed over the right-side railing, trying to see what was going on.

A small wave gushed over the deck, covering Shahla’s feet. Growing scared, her mother said that the three of them should go back and sit in a cafe on the shore, as if they could still walk away. Shahla tried to reassure her, but she could see that people were frightened. Elsewhere on the ferry, where Ahmad was standing, women were crying. He stuck by the railing, assuring his wife and children that the ferry would right itself, while clutching the pram handles tightly.

A second, bigger wave surged in. The ferry began listing to the right. The boys hanging on the right side railings threw themselves into the frothing water. Just over a minute into the crossing, the ferry had tilted so far that one third of the deck was underwater, and most of the people were clambering on the other side, but the ferry couldn’t right itself. Ahmad, standing in water up to his neck, held on to the pram, trying to keep the baby above water. Then he heard a loud grinding noise and saw that the ferry was turning over and people were sliding down towards him. He gripped the handles of the pram tightly but it sank, pulling him underwater, his baby daughter disappearing into the darkness of the river.

At this point, the cable pulling the ferry snapped. The left side of the hull, standing almost vertical now, hit the cable pulling the second ferry back from the island, and started to turn over. People fell on top of each other. Shahla was pushed into the water. She was still holding her mother’s hand. She managed to get her head above the water, but a body fell on her, she sank again, and lost her mother’s hand. When she got back to the surface, a woman in a black robe grabbed her, desperate to stay afloat, and tried to climb on top of her, pushing Shahla down again. Shahla took a breath and sank underwater, allowing herself to be dragged downstream.

The hull stood vertical; people were trapped between the jaws of the arches and the rods connecting them. As it turned over, the arches closed like giant fangs on the people below. The ferry flipped, a green floating whale drifting downstream, chasing after dozens of bobbing heads.

Deep under the water, Ahmad lost the pram. He saw a boat nearby and swam to it, trying to grab on to the engine at the back. He shouted for help but no one heard him, or they were too absorbed in pulling people from the water. The owner of the boat came down to the stern, where Ahmad was still clinging desperately to the engine, and, ignoring the man hanging on to the propellor, pulled a cord to start the engine. It roared into life and the blades cut into Ahmad’s sides. He screamed as the propellor cut his flesh.

He let go. He knew he had lost his family. Better to die, he thought, as he sank into the water. But his body would not let him die, and involuntarily he kicked his way to the surface. He wept and mumbled thanks be to God, thanks be to God, his tears sinking into the water that carried him downstream, past riverside cafes where people stood, watching and filming.

He reached another boat, and clutching on to the reeds, stretched out his hand and asked for help. Two men grabbed him by his arms, and a third pulled him by his belt and swung him over the edge. The body of a woman lay in the bottom of the boat, next to two dead children. The men hauled in another woman and a child, and started the engine, setting off towards the island.

A ferry taking people to the Umm Rabaen island amusement park in Mosul, June 2018.

Photograph: Claire Thomas

By now, a handful of fishing boats had driven into the middle of the river to try to pull survivors out of the water. Omar, the boatman who had been anxiously watching the crowds waiting for the ferry earlier, steered towards the drowning crowd. Among the people hauled on to his boat was Aya, a young woman a few days short of her 20th birthday, who had gone to the island with her mother and sister, along with some of her aunts and cousins. Sitting in the boat, with the shock of air flowing back into her lungs, Aya recovered enough to scream. A large man, with his son hanging on his back, grabbed the side of the boat and it started teetering dangerously. Aya begged him to let go, in case he flipped the boat and drowned them all, but the man held on with all his might. A young man bent over and pulled the child hanging on the man’s back into the boat. They all tried to pull the man, but he was too heavy. Too tired to hang on, he was dragged away by the current.

In the water, Shahla was bumped and rammed by objects and bodies. She looked for her mother among the people screaming and struggling around her, but the water was pushing her fast. She saw white gulls, so loved by the people of Mosul, circling overhead. Oh lord, she thought, is it possible that they are feeding on the bodies of the dead? She had been in the water for half an hour by now. The water was cold, her winter clothes were getting heavy, her headscarf was choking her, but she hung on tightly to her mother’s green bag. She didn’t want her mother to lose her ID card and go through the hassle and the humiliation of long queues.

Her chest was contracting, and she couldn’t breathe, she knew that if she didn’t keep swimming, she would die. She managed to catch on to a boat. She hauled herself over the side and collapsed into the bottom of the boat.

From the safety of the boat, Shahla was able to see the extent of the disaster. Bodies floated all around them, many of them children. There was a tiny boy, three or four, dressed in a onesie and floating on his back: it reminded her of the game she played as a child, with her sisters, floating their dolls in the bathtub. To her relief, she saw that the gulls were not feasting on the dead bodies, but the food people had brought for their picnics.

The boat dropped Ahmad on the island, where he wandered along with other survivors, and watched families still enjoying their picnics. Someone gave him water, another offered him a chair. A neighbour and his wife spotted him; they took him to the island’s administration office, but it had been abandoned. When the ferry sank, most of the staff had run away, fearing they would be arrested and anticipating the anger of the victims’ families. The neighbours took off Ahmad’s jacket and shirt and cleaned the three long cuts in his side with a piece of cloth soaked in antiseptic. At that point, he started to cry.

An officer from the Mosul Swat police unit arrived on the island in a large civilian motorboat they had commandeered and arrested everyone who was still working there – including vendors selling coffee and burgers – but the owners and directors of the island were nowhere to be seen. The officer took pity on Ahmad and gave him a lift back to the eastern riverbank.

Meanwhile, Omar brought Aya to the jetty and went back with his motorboat to see if he could rescue more people. She stood there shivering, her hair soaked in mud and her dress dripping with water. She was surrounded by a crowd of spectators and policemen who had gathered to watch the disaster unfold, their phones pointed at her. When Aya spotted a young policeman standing nearby, she began screaming at him. “My family, where is my family?” The bewildered policeman looked at her as if she were mad.

“My family, where is my family?”

In front of Aya, the ineptitude and failure of the Iraqi state seemed to be laid bare. In oil-rich Iraq, the Mosul River police department had just one boat, which had sat broken for many months; they had no ropes, and no lifejackets to throw to the people drifting and drowning in front of them. While the chief of the river police had jumped in one of the civilian boats and went to help with the rescue, some of his men just stood there staring. They didn’t know what to do; most of them had never trained for such a crisis and some didn’t even know how to swim. In the highly corrupt Iraqi security services, many of those policemen had paid a bribe to be appointed to a comfortable job by the river, rather than one of the more dangerous posts outside the city.

Once Shahla had been deposited back on land, a policeman stopped a passing car and told the driver to take her to the hospital. When she arrived, she searched out her mother and Umm Yussuf – first among the survivors, and then, with trepidation, among the bodies in bags. She didn’t find them. She was wet, shivering and exhausted, but she didn’t want to be in the hospital, which was packed with crying women and children. She collapsed on the pavement outside. “There was chaos, and no one was in control,” she recalled. “The bodies were dumped in the back of ambulances and pick-up trucks like they were sacks of garbage, while the policemen and the crowds filmed with their mobile phones.”

Later in the day, Shahla spoke to her brother on the phone. He was weeping. Before he said anything, she knew that her mother was dead.

The most organised institution in Mosul is the morgue. Two years after the war, it continues to receive the black and festering remains of corpses buried under mounds of debris and destroyed houses. The staff, who are efficient and thorough, compare DNA samples with their records and try to identify the victims among the thousands still missing.

The short, stocky young director, Hassan Watheq, who has a pencil moustache and wears rimless glasses, was having his lunch when he received a phone call from a friend to tell him about the ferry. He could hear the sounds of screaming families on the phone. He hurried to the morgue, knowing that the bodies would quickly begin to disintegrate, making identification very difficult. He knew all too well the chaos that would ensue, with families pushing and shoving, trying to reclaim their dead relatives. He called for a police guard to be stationed around the morgue.

Soon the bodies started arriving. Within an hour, there were 65 bodies in the refrigerators and hundreds of families gathering outside, women wailing, men pleading with the policemen to be allowed in. The director went outside, flanked by policemen, and climbed on top of a police truck. In his calm voice, he pleaded with the people to give him time.

The most organised institution in Mosul is the morgue

The majority of the bodies that arrived from the ferry were women and children. Even the staff of the Mosul morgue, accustomed to the sight of death, were weeping. “I saw a woman clutching a five month-old child,” recalled the director. “Both were dead, and I thought of my own two girls and started crying, even though death had become normal for us.”

He began posting headshots of the victims on the morgue’s gate. Where ID had been found with the body, he was able to post the names of the dead. His other priority was preventing bodies from being stolen. “Iraqi law doesn’t recognise the missing as dead until five years have passed,” he explained to me, “and all this time they can’t get pensions or any rights. So a lot of people tried to register their missing as dead in the ferry disaster.”

Of the 128 confirmed dead, 57 were women, and 44 children. Another 69 are still missing. The latest body to be found was brought in on 11 September, almost six months after the ferry sank.

Even in a nation accustomed to fanatical militias, occupying armies and mad dictators, the ferry disaster was shocking. “I have seen death in this city,” the morgue director said, “but nothing as sad as this. People dressed for holidays lined up in body bags.” When the public discovered that the River Authority had issued a warning about the dangers of operating the ferry that day, grief turned to anger. People were enraged by the failure of the state and the apparent recklessness of the pleasure island’s owners.

The prime minister arrived in Mosul on the evening of the disaster and announced three days of mourning. He also formed an investigation committee and declared all the victims as martyrs, to be added to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi martyrs killed in the war. The president came the following day, and was booed by a crowd protesting against political corruption. He was bundled into a police pick-up while crowds pressed around, banging on the car.

Iraqi civil defence workers recover the ferry that sank in the Tigris, 23 March 2019.

Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Within days, the media was reporting that there was a connection between the owner of the island, Ubaid al-Hadidi, and a notorious militia commander. Before the ferry disaster, people in Mosul had felt too scared to speak openly about the activities of the militias’ economic arms. Now there were protests and sit-ins. On 24 March, the governor of Mosul, Nufal Hammadi, already under investigation for embezzlement of public funds and international aid, was sacked. He was accused of involvement with the militias’ business enterprises, of raiding public funds and annexing public land. The governor told a press conference: “I deny that I received a single cent or dinar from any party.”

A member of Mosul city council, who was on the investigation committee, told me the ferry had been overcrowded and sailing in very fast waters. “The official regulations specified that the ferry was allowed to work in [river speeds] that do not exceed 700 metres per minute, preferably between 400-300 metres, with a maximum capacity of 80 people on board. On the day it sank, it was carrying 287 people, and the current speed was 1,400 metres per minute,” he said.

The councillor, who asked to remain nameless, said the owners and management of the island bore direct responsibility for the incident, having apparently ignored the safety warnings. “[The owner] was informed by the river police the night before, and he signed the memo. But he saw a vast crowd, and he wanted to load as many people as possible. The state institution that was supposed to monitor the work of the ferry failed in their responsibility.”

The fact that the island’s owners were backed by a leader of the economic wing of one of Iraq’s fiercest militias, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, would have made it less likely that the rules would be enforced against them. Shirwan Dubadani, MP for the city of Mosul, Shirwan Dubadani, who also sat on the parliamentary fact-finding mission last year, told me that during a meeting he attended between the former governor of Mosul, the president of Iraq and the speaker of parliament, the governor confirmed that one of the militia’s most powerful men, Hayder al-Sa’edy, was a partner in the island, and his men provided security. Since the liberation of Mosul, al-Sa’edy had been in charge of the lucrative scrap metal business, running companies as fronts for the militia and its political party that were awarded public contracts by the governor.

“I imagine all that happened as a dream; I talk about it as if it was a story that happened to someone else.”

The owner of the island, Ubaid al-Hadidi, was a mid-level contractor before the fall of Mosul. Under the Isis occupation, he made a fortune buying and selling residential and agricultural lands confiscated from Christian residents expelled from the city. In 2015, he bought the concession for the island and ran it for a year and a half before he was forced to close it because of the lack of electricity and the approaching war. After the liberation of Mosul, a warrant was issued for his arrest on terrorism charges. But after al-Sa’edy allegedly intervened, the charges against al-Hadidi were dropped. In return, according to MPs and intelligence officers who spoke to me about the disaster, al-Hadidi paid a “contribution” of 5bn Iraqi dinars and gave al-Sa’edy a 30% share in the island.

The day after the ferry sank, al-Hadidi claimed in a phone interview with an Iraqi TV station that he and his son had not been in Mosul when the disaster occurred. The reason, he said, was that an Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq security representative had threatened them and demanded a large payment. “We would always shut the island if the water level climbed, but we haven’t been in Mosul because of the threats we received,” he said. Three days later, al-Hadidi and his son were arrested in Erbil and taken to a prison in Mosul. In an interview with an Iraqi TV network, a representative of Asai’ib Ahl al-Haq’s political wing said: “Even if we accept that someone connected to the movement is a partner in the island, that does not mean that Asa’ib are responsible for what happened.”

When they brought the body of Ustad Ahmad’s wife to his house on the night of the accident, he refused to see her. He did not attend her funeral. The body of his eldest boy was found the day after the ferry sank, trapped under the capsized hull. His other son and baby girl will never be found.

After the disaster, Ahmad could not stand to see his boys’ toys and school bags. “I asked my mother to remove all their belongings and give them away,” he said. “I don’t want to remember them. I want to forget their memories.” As he spoke, his voice was breaking. “I imagine all that happened as a dream; I talk about it as if it was a story that happened to someone else.” He was sitting in his mother’s house, the confident pride of the school principal was gone. He looked old and tired, his back bent and face sagging.

Ustad Ahmad’s wife, sons and baby daughter.

Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

“You know, we had lost another baby girl two years ago, she was the same age, a mirror image of this one, same laughter, the same face,” he said. Two years earlier, when their house was struck by an Isis mortar, Ahmad had run into the street carrying the other daughter, his wife and boys following him. His brother and neighbours rushed to help them. His brother pulled the baby from his arms, while Ahmad and his wife went back to the house to collect their valuables. When the couple were back in the house, another mortar exploded. Ahmad ran outside to find his brother and 10 of the neighbours dead. His baby daughter was dead. “Maybe it was in our fate to die on that day, but we missed death, and it caught up with us on the ferry,” he told me.

Ahmad does not blame incompetence or corruption for the ferry disaster. “Yes,” he said, “there was negligence, but what can I do about the owner, how can I get my justice from him? Is he much worse than the people who stood watching while people were floating in front of them? No one came to save us; no one volunteered to come down into the water; people just stood watching. No one helped. When they took me back to the island, I saw people sitting eating their picnics. This unfeeling attitude – is it because of all the death the city had seen?”

In the autumn, I visited Aya at her aunt’s house. “What caused the ferry to sink was corruption and negligence; treating the people as if they are nothing,” she told me. She spoke forcefully, her grief mixed with the bitterness of being abandoned by the state. “My mother said after this war, the destruction, the savagery of the killings, nothing worse would happen to us. We were liberated in March 2017, and in March 2019 she died.”

“No one cares this happened here,” she said. “The ferry will be forgotten just like all these other deaths were forgotten.” In October, Aya started receiving phone calls from prominent tribal elders, pressuring her to accept an offer of blood money from the owner of the island. Al-Hadidi was offering bereaved families 10m Iraqi dinars and a plot of land on the outskirts of the city, if they would drop any charges against him and his son. The elders told her that all the other families had accepted and she was one of the last holding out. “I was refusing to sign, but all the families had signed, they tell me that they won’t get anything from the state and they need the money. I don’t know what to do,” said Aya.

I called the MP Shirwan Dobadani to ask him about the compensation offer. He told me that it was true – two prominent tribal sheikhs had intervened as intermediaries. “If the families wait for the judicial system to give them justice, they won’t get anything,” Dobadani said. “There are thousands of cases of murder and assassination that haven’t been solved. The worst disaster in Iraq is forgotten after 72 hours.”