The clouds have unzipped their burden onto the earth, but now the rain has stopped and the roads are soggy. The irrigation channels in the pastures overflow with muck. Bayonets of bright green grass peep through the bloated soil. In the distance, the tailpipe of a tractor puffs a scarf of smoke around the edge of the field. Under a patch of trees nearby, a small campfire crackles inside the remains of a clothes dryer.

“Who needs biscuits?” a young man with steely eyes says to a group of roughly a dozen men gathered around the fire. Some are crouching, others kneeling. Some stand and stretch. Eggs boil in a small kettle. Tiny cups of tea pass between big men.

It is about 10 in the morning and the sun peeks through the haze. The fire smolders, and one man walks deeper into the grove. The sound of wood snapping comes from where the man disappeared. He returns and feeds twigs to the fire.

“Hopefully we will finish early today,” mutters Hasan Mohammad. Like most of the men, he is dressed in sturdy navy work clothes and, like most of the men, his speech is muffled by a baby-blue surgical face mask. At his feet several white body bags lie in a row on the dirt path abutting the green grass. The field beyond them is a chaos of choppy heaps of earth that indicate makeshift graves.

Starting in January 2014, Raqqa was the de facto capital of the Islamic State. A Kurdish city in northeastern Syria, Raqqa hugs the banks of Euphrates River, and it was the site of brutal torture filmed by ISIS for propaganda. The area is where journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff are rumored to have been beheaded. For years the city’s residents lived under forced Islamic rule.

Then, in October 2017, the US-led coalition liberated the city from the militants after months of urban warfare throughout the city’s narrow and circuitous streets. By December 2018 more than 165,000 displaced residents had returned to the shell-pocked city. According to US Central Command, air strikes here killed some 1,200 civilians and countless more ISIS fighters. Many of the dead were hastily buried.

Some graves hold a single body; one held close to 1,500. They stipple Raqqa and the surrounding countryside, and as former residents return to their damaged and destroyed homes, the city government is working to exhume and identify the bodies.

The men around this fire have been hired as body pullers, and they have been doing this work for more than a year. Today they’ll work from 8 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon—the winter sun sets early.

Sometimes the remains are released to relatives who might be able to identify their family member based on a tooth or a sneaker. If they are unidentified, then ideally they should be placed in long-term storage—the mortuary beneath a hospital, for example. But the electrical power in Raqqa is limited: not enough for fridges and freezers.