There is not stopping of tears as a pall of gloom descended on the family members of 31 men from Punjab whose death was confirmed on Tuesday after the Union external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj informed Parliament that all 39 Indians who went missing in the war-torn Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014 are dead.

Desperate of a job abroad for a good income to help their families back home, most of these Punjab 31 men have left behind ailing old parents, young wives, sisters  and brother who can’t stop shedding tears as their long hope of seeing them again has finally come to an end.

“The (Union) government kept giving us false hopes that my only son ( 38-year-old Kawaljit Singh) is alive along with the others in Iraq.  He had just a one-and-half-year daughter when he left for Iraq. But once the news regarding his missing came, even his wife left us along with the child. Now we have nothing left in our lives as the even the false hope is not there,” Kawaljit’s mother, Mahinder Kaur told The Statesman over phone from her village Roopawali in Batala area of Gurdaspur.

“We have been praying day and night for his return and hoping against hope for his life, but all of it has come to nothing, ” she said adding that the last time her son spoke to her was in June 2014.

The sister of another victim Ranjit Singh, resident of village Manawala in Ajnala (Amritsar) said said the family got the news regarding the confirmation of his death from TV news.  “We had all the hopes of  Ranjit coming back as the government has repeatedly been claiming about their survival. But now it’s all gone. But if all of them were dead in 2014, the government should not have kept us in the dark like this for so long,” said a sobbing Jasbir Kaur.

She said Ranjit, who was unmarried and would have been 30 if alive,  was not the only brother of two sisters. “Both of us sisters are married. Our  father died 11 years back. Now Ranjit’s death has left the mother alone,” she added.

Another victim, Jatinder Singh was 21 when he left home at Sailka in Amritsar for a job in Iraq. “After passing Class XII, he tried to join the defense forces. But after he didn’t succeed, Jatinder went for this job in Iraq.  Ever since we had got the news about his missing, we have been hoping that they will come back. But now all this hope is over. But did the government kept hiding this information from us all these years,” said a cousin sister who didn’t want to be named.

The sister of another victim Manjinder Singh, resident of Bhoewal in Amritsar, said her brother was promised a job in Dubai but was taken to Iraq instead.  “We want Sushma Swaraj to tell us the whole truth. They kept us in the dark all these years and now even didn’t inform us about the death. We came to know if from TV,” Gurinder Kaur, 31, said.

Making a suo motu statement in Rajya Sabha, Union minister. Swaraj said a team of Indian and Iraqi officials found the bodies from a mass grave in Badush and DNA tests confirmed they belonged to the missing Indians.

Forty Indians — from Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal — went missing in June 2014 after Mosul fell to the Islamic State. In 2015, one of them, Harjit Masih, managed to flee from the clutches of Islamic State and said all other Indians were killed. But the external affairs minister refused to buy his claims then. In July last year, she said she would declare the missing persons dead until she had a concrete evidence.