Silent Graves

Hossain Soki Walladi used to say he was born twice. The first time in Chad, a country whose regime killed his father and brother, and threw him in jail. The second time in Sweden, where he tried to build a new life. Soki was fifteen when military forces invaded his village and took him to the police station. They demanded he reveal to them the whereabouts of members of his immediate family, who were supporters of the local resistance movement. “Since I couldn’t answer their questions, they brutalised me. They beat me, put out cigarettes on my body and cut me with jagged cans and bottles,” Soki testified. After eight months of torture, he was released, only to learn that his elder brother and father had been liquidated. His mother soon passed away, and once he had provided for her funeral he fled to Libya, from where he set out for Europe by boat in 2001. When Soki arrived in Boden in northern Sweden and applied for asylum, he was seventeen. But the Swedish migration system treated him as an adult.

“This practice used to be common in our country. The Swedish authorities simply ignored what it said on Soki’s birth certificate, the only document he possessed. Also, they could not find anyone who knew the language of his tribe, so they presented him a document stating that he spoke Swahili and Arabic. Since he was illiterate and terrified, he signed it without question. That mistake meant he was labelled unreliable, and it dogged him to the very end,” says Soki’s longtime friend Anna in an interview with the Novosti weekly. She met Soki at the Red Cross in Boden, where he and her mother both worked as volunteers.

Hossain Soki Walladi 1984 – 2020. (Photo: Privatna archive)

In the following years, he learned to write and speak Swedish with the help of a local teacher, adopted a cat, Nisa, and made a wide circle of friends, with whom he travelled the whole country. He volunteered for a time as a mobility assistant for special-needs people and with the Boden municipality. Since he was popular with the clients, his supervisor once accompanied him to the migration office to help him at least obtain a work permit. But all efforts were in vain because the competent court repeatedly rejected Soki’s asylum application. At the same time, his native Chad denied him permission to return to the country. And so things continued until January 2018, when he was detained and then deported to central Africa.

“After so many years in Sweden, that was an extremely traumatic experience for Soki and all of us who knew him,” says Anna, who stayed in touch with her longtime friend.

He called her once a month, and whenever she would ask him how he was doing in Chad, he answered tersely. They last heard from each other two years ago.

“As usual, he wanted me to tell him about my family and his other friends. We reminisced about amusing situations and ended the conversation laughing. He never once told me he was on the way back to Europe. Not once. Probably he didn’t want us to worry. That’s why I got a terrible shock a few months later, when the Swedish police called and asked if I knew anyone called Soki. A person with that name on a credit card was found dead in Croatia,” adds Anna, who went on to assist the Croatian Ministry of the Interior (MUP), through Interpol, in the process of identifying the victim.

Soki Walladi’s body was pulled from the River Korana in ​​Pavlovac, near the town of Slunj, on 28 June 2020. Although almost all the circumstances of his death remain unknown to this day, it can be assumed that he drowned after crossing into Croatia from Velika Kladuša (Bosnia-Herzegovina); presumably he aimed to return via Slovenia to the west of the European Union.

“In Boden, we still can’t believe that this happened. We often talk about him, and we miss him immensely. His small hands that made coffee and food for us, his big brown eyes, his smiles, and the affection he lavished on us,” Anna remembers her friend, whose body is buried in Skakavac, 3,000 kilometres away.

We soon found Soki’s grave at the cemetery of that village near Karlovac. Although located at the very edge of the cemetery, it can hardly be overlooked. It is covered by a mound of earth, with two tall, Islamic-style wooden grave markers protruding. The brown one has a small plaque nailed to it, with the designation 1-9-1C: here Ait and Rachid, two Moroccans whose bodies were found in the River Mrežnica in the summer of 2020, are buried beside Soki. The grave next to theirs, with the green marker and the designation 1-9-1A, is the final resting place of four more young men: Alifrom Bangladesh, Ratib from Syria, Yasser from Morocco and Eslam from Egypt. Their graves are the only ones in that part of the cemetery where there are neither flowers nor candles.

Although the crime pages of the local media and the official statistics of institutions typically treat their deaths as coincidental accidents, all seven are victims of the ruthless European migration policy that made it impossible for them to safely travel to western Europe in search of a better life, friends or relatives. This policy has criminalised those like Soki Walladi, who for various reasons, most often connected to war, were never able to obtain the necessary documents, labelling them as illegal migrants. It has also placed physical obstacles in their way – razor wire, border fences metres high, armed police patrols – and thus de facto deprived them of the right of free movement and access to international protection. In other words, it channelled them towards inaccessible border crossings, into a deadly path criss-crossed by rivers, seas, mountains, cliffs, railway tracks and minefields.

The grave of an unidentified person in Popović Brdo (Photo: Selma Banich)

Since early 2017, when the EU abruptly changed its policy towards refugees from the Near and Middle East, at least sixty-two migrants have died on the territory of Croatia: thirty-seven drowned, nine froze to death, five died in traffic accidents, two were hit by trains, two died from pulmonary oedema or lung failure, and the same number from natural causes. One person each died from falling into a cave or from a height, from an electric shock and from a land mine. In one case – a man who died this year – an autopsy has yet to be performed, so the cause of death is still unknown. In the same five-year period, a total of 140 migrants were injured, fifty-seven of them seriously and eighty-three slightly, according to the response we received from the MUP, which noted that the statistics relate to “third-country nationals who entered the Republic of Croatia illegally via the EU’s external borders and are staying in the country without permit”.

The largest number of migrants died in the Karlovac and Primorje-Gorski Kotar counties, but deaths have also been recorded in the counties of Osijek-Baranja, Vukovar-Srijem, Sisak-Moslavina, Lika-Senj, Brod-Posavina and Istria. Since their bodies are most often buried in the local cemeteries closest to the place of death, the graves are dotted through the villages around Otok, Novska, Karlovac, Duga Resa, Ozlje, Ogulin, etc. Only a few have been exhumed and returned to their country of origin, be it because some of the deceased have no family left or its members are scattered all over the world due to armed conflicts, be it because of the complex and expensive process, which, depending on the distance and the local bureaucracy, comes with a price tag of up to several thousand euros.

In the greater Karlovac area alone, where the municipal service company Zelenilo Ltd takes care of burials, thirteen migrants have been buried since January 2018. Their graves were visited by researchers involved in the project European Irregularized Migration Regime at the Periphery of the EU (ERIM). Marijana Hameršak, senior associate at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research and project manager, invited artist and activist Selma Banich to join them.

“The usual practice in Karlovac County is for the names of the victims not to be indicated on the graves, even when their identities have been established. Almost all the graves are decontextualised – meaning they give no information about where the deceased came from, when they were born or how they died – and it was terrifying to realise that these people had been hounded in various ways until their death. They did not have the right to free movement, access to the asylum system and the freedom to choose the place and circumstances in which to live their lives,” Banich says and stresses that it takes their death to fundamentally change the attitude of the regime and its institutions.

“Hospitals, pathology departments, service companies, police and embassies then start dealing with their corpses, which are buried in the same ground they were chased from prior to their deaths. This is pure hypocrisy of this country, the European regime of migration control, capitalism and colonialism,” she adds.

Their first visit to the cemetery in Skakavac was quite a shock, Selma Banich says, because they were not at all certain if something was a grave or a ditch, nor how many people were buried in each. This was one of the reasons for initiating a public commemorative gesture, which resulted in the creation of “The Passage/Prijelaz”, a memorial canvas with thirty-six portraits of people who died on their migrant journey through the Balkans. Artists, social scientists, activists and other members of the Women to Women collective and the ERIM project took part in making it.

“We wanted this type of decolonial practice – a process of public mourning – to enable the local community to realise the brutality of the oppressive migration regime and oppose it,” Banich explains.

Most of the migrants died in the rivers – Dobra (Photo: Tamara Opačić)

At the same time, the MUP emphasises that the Croatian police “undertakes all in its power to save migrants in dangerous situations. […] The activities of the police to intensify the surveillance of the Croatian borders and prevent the operations of organised criminal groups do not extend exclusively to preventing illegal migration and maintaining favourable security conditions at the state border, but to protecting the lives and safety of all persons, including those who attempt to enter Croatian territory illegally,” it said in reply Novosti. The MUP also boasted of there being “too many cases to count, where the Croatian police rescued migrants whose lives were endangered by deep snow and hypothermia, by travelling in impassable mountains without proper equipment, or by injuries sustained by falling from rocks, or who had to be pulled from a river because the rugged nature of the terrain prevented them from getting out themselves – cases that have been covered by the media”.

However, Selma Banich recalls that many deaths of people on the move are a direct result of pushbacks, i.e. forceful deportations, as was the case with Madina Hussiny, a girl who was hit and killed by a train in late 2017 just after the Croatian police had forced her and her family back towards Serbia. Testimonies gathered by activists of the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) show that a large number of forcible and illegal expulsions, an estimated fifty percent of them, are carried out by the Croatian police who force refugees to enter rivers and then walk or swim back to the border of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. According to the BVMN report for 2021, such practices are most common around the village of Šturlić near Cazin, where the River Korana forms the Croatian-Bosnian border. In testimony heard in spring of 2021, five underage Afghans confirmed that the Croatian police had expelled them at that location. After apprehending the youths on Croatian territory and taking them by van to the riverbank, they ordered them to lie on their stomachs and started beating them on the legs with sticks. They then forced them to cross the border through the river, which was too deep in that part, so they had to swim. “Some people have already drowned in that spot, and there were weak swimmers among us, but we had to jump into the water so they’d stop beating us. It was terrible,” one victim of the pushback described.

“I can say from experience that the Croatian institutions are absolutely in the service of the migration regime of the European Union and its member states, which bears all the hallmarks of modern fascism. Croatia, which is currently assigned the role of guarding the area between Schengen and the EU’s external border, carries out only part of the tasks of this complex system. The problems for people on the move neither begin nor end here. The root problem is a political one: the exploitation of entire communities and resources in their countries of origin, which is why they are literally forced to flee from poverty and wars – wars ironically financed, in part, by the budget of the EU,” Banich says.

“Even if they succeed in reaching western Europe, where many of these people have family members and friends, they are made to live in a tangle of permits: residence permits, work visas and other restrictions. Most often, they are exploited as cheap labour – modern slaves who pick fruit and vegetables for our supermarket shelves,” the artist adds.

Portrait of Ahmad Kahlil Ibrahim created as part of the artistic-activist project “The Passage”

Statistics of the Missing Migrants Project, an initiative backed by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), confirm that the murderous policies of the migration regime, compounded by the media and public’s lack of concern for the deaths of people who left their homes in search of safety, are not a characteristic of Croatia alone. Since 2014, 48,231 refugee deaths have been recorded worldwide, or at least sixteen every day. And this is a very low estimate because many bodies are never found, especially of those who drown in the Mediterranean, the mass grave of our age, in which at least 2,048 people died in 2021. European rivers, from the Marica to the Drina, Korana and Kupa, are becoming more and more deadly in recent years since the formal closure of the so-called Balkan refugee route. The IOM points out that the indifference of governments, and the resulting insufficient allocation of funds for finding and identifying bodies, is one of the key problems.

The MUP explains that this is a complex process in which several different institutions are involved, in the case of Croatia. “When a dead person is found, the police conduct an investigation, after which the body is transported to the Clinical Institute of Pathology and Forensic Medicine. A forensic examination is then conducted to determine the cause of death and the particular injuries, and the competent public prosecutor’s office is informed of the incident,” the police replied to us. The identity is determined by finding personal documents, by the people who reported the disappearance recognising the body, and by conducting dactyloscopic and DNA analyses. “In cases where data on the dead person’s citizenship is available, the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs informs the foreign diplomatic and consular mission in Croatia, which participates in the further procedure, both in terms of notifying the family and arranging for the body to be returned. If the identity cannot be determined by the procedures mentioned, the body is kept at the forensic facility until identification is achieved,” the MUP stated. It added that, according to the data available to the border police, the identity of fourteen people who died on Croatian territory has yet to be established.

This figure would be even higher if part of the work, which should normally be done by state institutions, were not taken on by volunteers and activists who help refugees and their relatives. Information and photographs, which are crucial for finding missing persons and identifying the deceased, are most often shared through social media. In the Balkan context, the largest community is the Facebook group “Dead and Missing in the Balkans”. In one of the most recent posts, a girl from Serbia asks for news about Seif, a thirty-year-old man from Tunisia. “He disappeared somewhere between Serbia and Bosnia. He last called his family on 14 May 2019. He has a tattoo on his arm. If you have any information, please contact me via my inbox,” it says under a photo of the young man.

One such initiative allowed the identity of Ahmad Kahlil Ibrahim to be ascertained and his grave to be found. The whole life of that Palestinian was marked by war, exile and suffering. He was born in Syria, where his family had fled during the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ahmad worked as an electrician in his new home, Damascus, and started a family. But another war began, and their house was razed to the ground in 2013, so thirty-three-year-old Ahmad and his wife Rabah fled to Beirut with their three children. Due to the extreme poverty in which they lived in one of the Lebanese refugee camps, Ahmad left in the summer of 2017 for Germany, where two of his cousins live. It took him a year to reach the Bosnian-Croatian border, where he was expelled by the Croatian police. Ahmad’s next crack at the game (an attempt to cross the border) proved fatal. At the end of 2018, his body was found in the River Dobra, in the municipality of Generalski Stol. Since he had no documents with him, he was buried in the local cemetery in Lipa under the designation “Unknown male”.

Silvia Maraone (Photo: Privatna archive)

It probably would have remained that way, had not Silvia Maraone from the Italian non-governmental humanitarian organisation IPSIA (Institute for Peace, Development and Innovation) joined in the story. IPSIA has been present in the countries of former Yugoslavia since the late 1990s. Since the outbreak of the refugee crisis, Maraone has been active along the Balkan route, and in addition to providing direct psychosocial assistance she has helped refugees by publishing useful information on her blog. At the end of 2018, she shared information on people dead and missing in the Balkans. That is why, several months later, she was contacted by Ahmad’s relatives, who asked her to help.

“Since I had no information about the man, I didn’t know what to do. But at the same time, I wanted to help – I guess I thought everything would go smoothly,” Silvia Maraone recalls, who immersed herself in the case in January 2019.

She soon found an item on a local news website about a missing migrant who had fallen into the river near the Skubin Waterfall, and then she contacted several institutions on behalf of Ahmad’s family: the mountain rescue service, the Karlovac police and the Syrian consulate in Zagreb. After the body of a yet unidentified man was found in the River Dobra, she mediated in conducting a DNA analysis, and at the same time she comforted the family of the deceased, who were receiving contradictory information.

“The Red Cross joined in and supported Ahmad’s cousin from Germany in coming to Croatia and giving a blood sample. The victim’s identity was soon confirmed, but another important question still had to be answered: where was Ahmad’s body? A year later, we found out he was buried in Lipa,” Silvia tells us.

The grave of Ahmad Kahlil Ibrahim in Lipa (Photo: Tamara Opačić)

Shortly before the corona pandemic began and the borders were sealed, the Italian aid worker went to that village near Duga Resa, but since Ahmad’s grave was unmarked she was unable to find it. Since it was a Sunday, she went to a nearby church, waited until the end of mass and spoke to the priest.

“A woman, Valentina, soon joined us. She was the most diligent person I could find in that strange place and in this whole chaotic story. As a nurse who had once worked as a volunteer in Syria, she was extremely empathetic. She took me to the grave, which had a cross on it, so I asked her if there was any chance we could arrange it in accordance with Islamic tradition and add Ahmad’s name to it. Although his identity had been established months earlier, no one informed the local community, which went on to performed a wonderful gesture,” Silvia adds.

After Silvia’s visit, residents of Lipa and the surrounding villages set about rearranging Ahmad’s final resting place. They covered the bare earth with decorative pebbles, carved his name and surname, as well as the year and place of his birth and death, in a wooden board, and decorated it with flowers. Thus Ahmad Kahlil Ibrahim was given back at least a part of his dignity, which he was so cruelly divested of two years earlier at the ramparts of Fortress Europe.

‘Why? Why? Why?’ Ukraine’s Mariupol descends into despair

MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling.

There’s 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body. There’s 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. There’s the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns, among the first of Mariupol’s children to die from a Russian shell. 

They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.

“The only thing (I want) is for this to be finished,” raged worker Volodymyr Bykovskyi, pulling crinkling black body bags from a truck. “Damn them all, those people who started this!”

The children of medical workers warm themselves in a blanket as they wait for their relatives in a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

An apartment building explodes after a Russian army tank fires in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A body lies covered by a tarp in the street in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

More bodies will come, from streets where they are everywhere and from the hospital basement where adults and children are laid out awaiting someone to pick them up. The youngest still has an umbilical stump attached.

Each airstrike and shell that relentlessly pounds Mariupol — about one a minute at times — drives home the curse of a geography that has put the city squarely in the path of Russia’s domination of Ukraine. This southern seaport of 430,000 has become a symbol of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s drive to crush democratic Ukraine — but also of a fierce resistance on the ground.

In the nearly three weeks since Russia’s war began, two Associated Press journalists have been the only international media present in Mariupol, chronicling its fall into chaos and despair. The city is now encircled by Russian soldiers, who are slowly squeezing the life out of it, one blast at a time.

Several appeals for humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians went unheeded, until Ukrainian officials said Wednesday that about 30,000 people had fled in convoys of cars. Airstrikes and shells have hit the maternity hospital, the fire department, homes, a church, a field outside a school. For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, there is quite simply nowhere to go.

The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is sparse, with residents melting snow to drink. Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.

People burn scraps of furniture in makeshift grills to warm their hands in the freezing cold and cook what little food there still is. The grills themselves are built with the one thing in plentiful supply: bricks and shards of metal scattered in the streets from destroyed buildings.

Death is everywhere. Local officials have tallied more than 2,500 deaths in the siege, but many bodies can’t be counted because of the endless shelling. They have told families to leave their dead outside in the streets because it’s too dangerous to hold funerals.

Many of the deaths documented by the AP were of children and mothers, despite Russia’s claims that civilians haven’t been attacked.

“They have a clear order to hold Mariupol hostage, to mock it, to constantly bomb and shell it,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on March 10.

Just weeks ago, Mariupol’s future seemed much brighter.

If geography drives a city’s destiny, Mariupol was on the path to success, with its thriving iron and steel plants, a deep-water port and high global demand for both. Even the dark weeks of 2014, when the city nearly fell to Russia-backed separatists in vicious street battles, were fading into memory.

And so the first few days of the invasion had a perverse familiarity for many residents. About 100,000 people left at that time while they still could, according to Serhiy Orlov, the deputy mayor. But most stayed put, figuring they could wait out whatever came next or eventually make their way west like so many others.

“I felt more fear in 2014, I don’t feel the same panic now,” Anna Efimova said as she shopped for supplies at a market on Feb. 24. “There is no panic. There’s nowhere to run, where can we run?”

That same day, a Ukrainian military radar and airfield were among the first targets of Russian artillery. Shelling and airstrikes could and did come at any moment, and people spent most of their time in shelters. Life was hardly normal, but it was livable.

By Feb. 27, that started to change, as an ambulance raced into a city hospital carrying a small motionless girl, not yet 6. Her brown hair was pulled back off her pale face with a rubber band, and her pajama pants were bloodied by Russian shelling.

Her wounded father came with her, his head bandaged. Her mother stood outside the ambulance, weeping.

As the doctors and nurses huddled around her, one gave her an injection. Another shocked her with a defibrillator. A doctor in blue scrubs, pumping oxygen into her, looked straight into the camera of an AP journalist allowed inside and cursed.

“Show this to Putin,” he stormed with expletive-laced fury. “The eyes of this child and crying doctors.”

They couldn’t save her. Doctors covered the tiny body with her pink striped jacket and gently closed her eyes. She now rests in the mass grave.

Oleksandr Konovalov, an ambulance paramedic, performs CPR on a girl injured by shelling in a residential area as her dad sits, left, after arriving at the city hospital of Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022. The girl did not survive. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

The lifeless body of a girl killed during shelling at a residential area lies on a medical cart at the city hospital of Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

The same geography that for so long worked in Mariupol’s favor had turned against it. The city stands squarely between regions controlled by the Russia-backed separatists — about 10 kilometers (six miles) to the east at the closest point — and the Crimean Peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. The capture of Mariupol would give the Russians a clear land corridor all the way through, controlling the Sea of Azov.

As February ended, the siege began. Ignoring the danger, or restless, or perhaps just feeling invincible as teenagers do, a group of boys met up a few days later, on March 2, to play soccer on a pitch outside a school.

A bomb exploded. The blast tore through Iliya’s legs.

The odds were against him, and increasingly against the city. The electricity went out yet again, as did most mobile networks. Without communications, medics had to guess which hospitals could still handle the wounded and which roads could still be navigated to reach them.

Iliya couldn’t be saved. His father, Serhii, dropped down, hugged his dead boy’s head and wailed out his grief.

Serhii, father of teenager Iliya, cries on his son’s lifeless body lying on a stretcher at a maternity hospital converted into a medical ward in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Marina Yatsko, left, runs behind her boyfriend Fedor carrying her 18 month-old son Kirill who was fatally wounded in shelling, as they arrive at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Medical workers unsuccessfully try to save the life of Marina Yatsko’s 18 month-old son Kirill, who was fatally wounded by shelling, at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Marina Yatsko and her boyfriend Fedor comfort each other after her 18-month-old son Kirill was killed in shelling in a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

On March 4, it was yet another child in the emergency room — Kirill, the toddler struck in the head by shrapnel. His mother and stepfather bundled him in a blanket. They hoped for the best, and then endured the worst.

“Why? Why? Why?” his sobbing mother, Marina Yatsko, asked in the hospital hallway, as medical workers looked on helplessly. She tenderly unwrapped the blanket around her lifeless child to kiss him and inhale his scent one last time, her dark hair falling over him.

That was the day the darkness settled in for good — a blackout in both power and knowledge. Ukrainian television and radio were cut, and car stereos became the only link to the outside world. They played Russian news, describing a world that couldn’t be further from the reality in Mariupol.

As it sunk in that there was truly no escape, the mood of the city changed. It didn’t take long for grocery store shelves to empty. Mariupol’s residents cowered by night in underground shelters and emerged by day to grab what they could before scurrying underground again.

Serhiy Kralya, 41, looks at the camera after surgery at a hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine on March 11, 2022. Kralya was injured during shelling by Russian forces. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Medical workers treat a man wounded by shelling in a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

On March 6, in the way of desperate people everywhere, they turned on each other. On one street lined with darkened stores, people smashed windows, pried open metal shutters, grabbed what they could.

A man who had broken into a store found himself face to face with the furious shopkeeper, caught red-handed with a child’s rubber ball.

“You bastard, you stole that ball now. Put the ball back. Why did you even come here?” she demanded. Shame written on his face, he tossed the ball into a corner and fled.

Nearby, a soldier emerged from another looted store, on the verge of tears.

“People, please be united. … This is your home. Why are you smashing windows, why are you stealing from your shops?” he pleaded, his voice breaking.

Yet another attempt to negotiate an evacuation failed. A crowd formed at one of the roads leading away from the city, but a police officer blocked their path.

“Everything is mined, the ways out of town are being shelled,” he told them. “Trust me, I have family at home, and I am also worried about them. Unfortunately, the maximum security for all of us is to be inside the city, underground and in the shelters.”

People lie on the floor of a hospital during shelling by Russian forces in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A Ukrainian serviceman guards his position in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 12, 2022.(AP Photo/Mstyslav Chernov)

And that’s where Goma Janna could be found that night, weeping beside an oil lamp that threw light but not enough heat to take the chill off the basement room. She wore a scarf and a cheery turquoise snowflake sweater as she roughly rubbed the tears from her face, one side at a time. Behind her, beyond the small halo of light, a small group of women and children crouched in the darkness, trembling at the explosions above.

“I want my home, I want my job. I’m so sad about people and about the city, the children,” she sobbed.

This agony fits in with Putin’s goals. The siege is a military tactic popularized in medieval times and designed to crush a population through starvation and violence, allowing an attacking force to spare its own soldiers the cost of entering a hostile city. Instead, civilians are the ones left to die, slowly and painfully.

Putin has refined the tactic during his years in power, first in the Chechen city of Grozny in 2000 and then in the Syrian city of Aleppo in 2016. He reduced both to ruins.

“It epitomizes Russian warfare, what we see now in terms of the siege,” said  Mathieu Boulegue, a researcher for Chatham House’s Russia program.

People settle in a bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A woman holds a baby in a bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka

People queue to receive hot food in a improvised bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine, Monday, March 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A man plays with a baby in a bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka

By March 9, the sound of Russian fighter jets in Mariupol was enough to send people screaming for cover — anything to avoid the airstrikes they knew would follow, even if they didn’t know where.

The jets rumbled across the sky, this time decimating the maternity hospital. They left a crater two stories deep in the courtyard.

Rescuers rushed a pregnant woman through the rubble and light snow as she stroked her bloodied belly, face blanched and head lolling listlessly to the side. Her baby was dying inside her, and she knew it, medics said.

“Kill me now!” she screamed, as they struggled to save her life at another hospital even closer to the front line.

The baby was born dead. A half-hour later, the mother died too. The doctors had no time to learn either of their names.

Ukrainian emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. The baby was born dead. Half an hour later, the mother died too. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Mariana Vishegirskaya walks down stairs in a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka

Mariana Vishegirskaya lies in a hospital bed after giving birth to her daughter Veronika, in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Another pregnant woman, Mariana Vishegirskaya, was waiting to give birth at the maternity hospital when the strike hit. Her brow and cheek bloodied, she clutched her belongings in a plastic bag and navigated the debris-strewn stairs in polka-dot pajamas. Outside the ruined hospital, she stared motionless with wide blue eyes at the crackling flames.

Vishegirskaya delivered her child the next day to the sound of shellfire. Baby Veronika drew her first breath on March 10.

The two women — one dead and one a mother — have since become the symbol of their blackened, burning hometown. Facing worldwide condemnation, Russian officials claimed that the maternity hospital had been taken over by far-right Ukrainian forces to use as a base and emptied of patients and nurses.

In two tweets, the Russian Embassy in London posted side-by-side images of AP photos with the word “FAKE” over them in red text. They claimed that the maternity hospital had long been out of operation, and that Vishegirskaya was an actress playing a role. Twitter has since removed the tweets, saying they violated its rules.

The AP reporters in Mariupol who documented the attack in video and photos saw nothing to indicate the hospital was used as anything other than a hospital. There is also nothing to suggest Vishegirskaya, a Ukrainian beauty blogger from Mariupol, was anything but a patient. Veronika’s birth attests to the pregnancy that her mother carefully documented on Instagram, including one post in which she is wearing the polka-dot pajamas.

Two days after Veronika was born, four Russian tanks emblazoned with the letter Z took up position near the hospital where she and her mother were recovering. An AP journalist was among a group of medical workers who came under sniper fire, with one hit in the hip.

The windows rattled, and the hallways were lined with people with nowhere else to go. Anastasia Erashova wept and trembled as she held a sleeping child. Shelling had just killed her other child as well as her brother’s child, and Erashova’s scalp was encrusted with blood.

“I don’t know where to run to,” she cried out, her anguish growing with every sob. “Who will bring back our children? Who?”

By early this week, Russian forces had seized control of the building entirely, trapping medics and patients inside and using it as a base, according to a doctor there and local officials.

Orlov, the deputy mayor, predicted worse is soon to come. Most of the city remains trapped.

“Our defenders will defend to the last bullet,” he said. “But people are dying without water and food, and I think in the next several days we will count hundreds and thousands of deaths.”

Anastasia Erashova cries as she hugs her child in a corridor of a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)