WHEN he first heard that United States troops had toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraqi engineer, Hazem Mohammed, thought he would finally be able to find his brother, who had been shot dead and dumped in a mass grave after a failed uprising against Saddam's rule in 1991.
It wasn't just Mohammed's hopes that were raised after the US-led invasion in March 2003.
Relatives of tens of thousands of people who were killed or disappeared under the dictator believed they would soon find out the fate of lost loved ones.
Twenty years later, Mohammed and countless other Iraqis are still waiting for answers. Dozens of mass graves were found, testimony to atrocities committed under Saddam's Baath Party.
But, work to identify victims of killings has been slow and partial in the chaos and conflict engulfing Iraq in the past two decades.
As exhumations dragged on, more atrocities were committed in sectarian conflict and amid the rise and fall of armed groups, such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants, as well as Shi'ite militias.
It was another 10 years before Mohammed led a team of experts to the site where he, his brother and others were rounded up as Saddam's troops crushed a mainly Shi'ite uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
They were forced to their knees next to trenches summarily dug in the outskirts of the southern city of Najaf, and shot. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed by Saddam's forces during his rule.
The remains of 46 people were exhumed from the site, now surrounded by farms, but Mohammed's brother was never found.
According to the Martyrs Foundation — a governmental body involved in identifying victims and compensating their relatives —- over 260 mass graves have been unearthed so far, with dozens still closed.
In a section of the ministry of health in Baghdad, a team of about 100 people processes remains from mass graves, one site at a time.
The department head, Yasmine Siddiq, said they had identified and matched DNA samples of around 2,000 individuals, out of about 4,500 exhumed bodies.
Lining the shelves of her storage room are remains of victims from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war — skulls, cutlery, a watch, and other items that might help identify victims.
The forensic efforts are complemented by archivists studying stacks of documents from Saddam's Baath Party, disbanded after his overthrow, for the names of missing persons yet to be identified.
Mehdi Ibrahim, an official at the foundation, said that each week his team identifies about 200 new victims. The names are published on social media.
So far the foundation has processed about half of the one million documents in its possession, just a fraction of Iraq's scattered archive.
Some atrocities are more quickly examined than others.
According to Siddiq, massacres committed by Islamic State (IS) militants, who seized much of northern Iraq in 2014 and held it for three violent years, have been prioritised.
The highest identification rate for victims was achieved for an incident known as the Camp Speicher massacre by IS, a mass shooting of army recruits.
The killings resulted in about 2,000 martyrs, including 1,200 killed and 757 who remain missing.
Other disappearances remain unexplored. In Saqlawiya, a rural area near the Sunni town of Falluja, families are losing hope of discovering the fate of more than 600 men captured when the area was retaken from IS by security forces.
Shia militiamen seeking vengeance against IS rounded up Sunnis from the town. Ikhlas Talal wept as she scrolled through pictures of her husband and 13 other male relatives who disappeared in early June, 2016.
Talal and other women from the neighbourhood have searched for their husbands, fathers and sons for years, travelling across Iraq and contacting prisons and hospitals — all in vain.
"We are not a priority," she said, surrounded by half a dozen children who she barely manages to feed with the help of local aid groups and small scale farming.
Questions remain even over the better-reported incidents.
Majid Mohammed last spoke to his son, a combat medic, in June 2014 before the Camp Speicher massacre. His wife Nadia Jasim said successive governments had failed to address the enforced disappearances.
"With all the time that passed since 2003, we should have found a solution. Why are people still disappearing?"
The writer is from the Reuters news agency