Her tormenters would hang her from a hook in the ceiling by her arms, which were bound behind her back. Sometimes they added electric shocks. Sometimes they beat her on the soles of her feet until they were engorged with blood and her toenails fell off. She was There was no water, no bathroom. The only food was two big pots they brought in, one with dirty rice and one of soup.
You had to fight for it. If you were strong and healthy, you'd get food. If you were weak, you'd wait. He knelt in a hole at the edge of a cemetery near the village of Muhammad Sakran, just outside Baghdad.
The faded writing on a plastic armband in the grave told him this was his brother, Abdelhussein. Mohani held the skull and gently brushed the dirt from the eye socket.
Then he wept. His family never heard a word from the government, but eventually they drew the obvious conclusion: as a Shiite, he must have been arrested in the Islamic Dawa Party roundup. Blindfolded with their hands tied, they had been herded into trenches and shot - executed in March and April during the failed uprising that followed the first Gulf war.
Some were buried alive when the holes were filled in over them by bulldozer. In a race against time, it is now up to the scientists from Inforce the International Forensic Centre , a British charity set up 18 months ago to investigate mass killings and genocide, to persuade their relatives not to uncover any more bodies so that vital forensic evidence is kept intact.
They all stumbled into the ready-made grave. Husseini said. Then someone came down in the hole and dragged me up by my collar and yelled, "Shoot this kid! And they started shooting at me again, but still I didn't get hit. Then the shovel came. I could breath but I didn't move. A man came to check and was standing over the hole where everyone was buried and he called to the shovel driver, "Come and cover this kid.
After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. The maid says she saw a guard rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The body of the woman was carried out in a military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder and the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday's mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom.
A guard told her, "Don't say anything about what you see, or you and your family will be finished. According to his chief bodyguard, when Uday learned that one of his close comrades, who knew of his many misdeeds, was planning to leave Iraq, he invited him to his 37th-birthday party and had him arrested. An eyewitness at the prison where the man was held says members of the Fedayeen grabbed his tongue with pliers and sliced it off with a scalpel so he could not talk.
A maid who cleaned one of Uday's houses says she once saw him lop off the ear of one of his guards and then use a welder's torch on his face. A top official in radio and TV says he received so many beatings for trivial mistakes like being late for meetings or making grammatical errors on his broadcasts that Uday ordered him to carry a falaqa in his car. Uday also had an iron maiden that he used to torture Iraqi athletes whose performance disappointed him.
Abu Musab, a member of the Iraqi National Congress, the political movement headed by Ahmad Chalabi, said he had been given the map by a man who, in October , was among the drivers who took the Kuwaiti prisoners to their execution in Baghdad and subsequent burial here, 50 miles west of the capital.
But the map he gave Mr. Abu Musab proved very accurate. He was the team captain, as well as the tournament's most valuable player, and he was punished for the team's failure.
He was held captive in Hussein's Republican Palace for seven days, he recalled, blindfolded the entire time. Today, he played unafraid. The frightened Kuwaitis - blindfolded, with hands bound by lime-green plastic ties - were ordered into horseshoe formations at the training school for the intelligence service in Baghdad.
The prisoners had been brought there that morning in vans and buses. The prisoners wept and cried out the Muslim prayer before death: there is no god but God. The shooter pivoted, according to the account provided to Mr. Abu Musab, using the horseshoe formation to make the executions quicker.
Formation after formation was brought forward until all were dead. All were men, save one. Coalition searches found the prisons empty. Instead, it now appears the Kuwaitis were already dead. The prisoners were unloaded, shot, then buried in deep pits. Seven days into the dig, the scene resembles a battlefield of the dead: the loose sandy soil carved into trenches, ditches and foxholes by a bulldozer.
All around lie piles of remains: pelvic bones, ribs, femurs and skulls -- one still wearing its weave-pattern prayer cap, another the blindfold affixed by his killers shortly before death. From many protrude the identity cards, amber necklaces, front-door keys and watches used by relatives to identify their brothers, cousins and sons. A plastic artificial leg sticks out of one pile, two crutches from another. Thirteen years ago his brother, Jaffar, disappeared during Hussein's post-rebellion slaughter.
It was, for him, the worst possible outcome -- misery without certainty. The problem is that I don't recognise this wallet and the identity card does not have any writing on it. Each time, between and blindfolded people, their hands and sometimes feet bound, were led into pits about 10 feet deep. Gunmen then fired into the pit, often for several minutes, Arjawi said.
A bulldozer then pushed dirt onto the bodies, sometimes burying or crushing people who had survived the volley and were trying to climb out. At first, it just seems like hundreds of bundles of clothes have been laid out on the dikes and roads that cut through the marshes here.
A femur from a leg, a humerus from an arm, a shard of pelvis, and skull peeking out from a gray blanket that someone assembling remains laid down. The bundles reveal themselves as the former repositories of living human flesh, before the gunfire sent them on their journey into the marsh. Nasir, who no longer plants onions where so many bodies have been desecrated. Villagers clutched the remains to their chests, trying to keep them intact as they fell from the machine's big shovel.
They laid the bodies in the dirt nearby, next to hundreds of others waiting to be claimed. Then they searched for personal papers, the remnants of a wristwatch or other items that might reveal the identities of the dead. All around lie piles of remains: pelvic bones, ribs, femurs and skulls--one still wearing its weave-pattern prayer cap, another the blindfold affixed by his killers shortly before death. He cradled a clear plastic bag containing the remains of his younger brother Faris.
Faris was a soldier, he said, and had just returned from Kuwait when private security men arrested him in his front yard, just two miles from the grave site.
Now what am I going to say to our father? Many skeletons were still blindfolded. The Iraqis and the US military believe there are several thousand more.
This is an archaeological site. And it's no accident the bodies were buried here. Under Saddam Hussein, it was illegal for Iraqis to dig here, or even walk on the site. Search teams look for identification inside crumbling wallets, adding each name to a ledger. If there's no ID, they hope a relative might recognize something -- a watch, a scarf. Some still had faded bandages tied around the eye sockets and black cloth binding the feet. Several skulls had large holes on one side or were crushed in the back.
In each open wooden coffin, the bones were carefully wrapped in white cloth, surrounded by scraps of hair, bits of teeth and bones. The visible evidence of their demise drove scores of black-clad women to wailing and men to weep.
Peering into a simple plywood coffin, Karima Musa Mohammed carefully looked over the remains inside--a ragged blindfold tied around the skull, feet bound by black cloth, faded gray pants, light gray shirt. Not my son,' she pronounced, then burst into tears. The mass grave was one of many being unearthed around the country as Iraqis come to grips with the reality of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime.
The shepherd said he saw a backhoe dig a long trench and the men, blindfolded, were lined up in front of the ditch. Then they were shot. When the delegation returned home without him, its members were imprisoned and tortured. The punishment - which included wrestlers, coaches, journalists and referees - was a message to others who might have been considering defections. Even the chairman and the secretary of the wrestling federation were imprisoned, though they weren't in Syria during the tournament.
We felt their pain alongside them,' former wrestling federation head Loai Sateh said in a recent interview. He was released only after they showed up. It is a 2-meter 6-foot body suit of metal bars that was used to restrain offending athletes under the scorching sun for hours. One athlete who spoke on condition of anonymity said he was placed in the suit for long hours under blistering sun. A hose dripped water into his mouth to prevent him from dying of dehydration. I spent three years in jail and suffered a lot,' he said, showing scars on his wrists from prison chains and gaps where he said three teeth had been pulled out with pliers.
Saadi was just one of many writers and thinkers at the weekly market who celebrated being able to buy and sell books that were illegal under the old regime.
Then they punctured his right eardrum with a skewer. And then they tried to break his right leg with a bat. But when the X-rays that Uday Hussein demanded as proof of their efficiency showed in fact they had not broken Tariq Abdul Whab's leg, his captors took him back to prison where someone smashed his right leg with such ferocity that his toe hit his kneecap.
Whab received all this treatment simply because Uday thought the sports television reporter was being disloyal to him by talking to soccer players he didn't like. Assigned to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, I was flown to the city of Zakho, where the unit was establishing its headquarters in and around an abandoned Iraqi divisional headquarters building Heavy equipment had unearthed myriad body parts; hands, arms, legs, etc.
Most telling among this evidence of inhumanity was an infant's sandal. It was later learned from the Kurds that about 70 of their tribesmen had been taken into this Iraqi divisional HQ and that none had come out alive. The victims were brutally tortured and executed, their remains then thrown into a common grave.
Turkish officials were told how Turkomans and Kurds were tortured together by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi police at the notorious security headquarters of Kirkuk. The man, who asked not to be named, said, 'Even this shows how we and the Kurds suffered the same fate in this city. Battery acid was spilled on his feet, which are now deformed. With his hands bound behind his back, he was hanged by his wrists from the ceiling until his shoulders dislocated; he still cannot lift his hands above his head.
The interrogators' goal: 'They just wanted me to say I was plotting against the Baath Party, so they could take me and execute me. Below ground are interrogation cells where unspeakable horrors were committed. A former inmate, Mohsen Mutar Ulga, 34, Ulga said he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for belonging to an armed religious group called 'the revenge movement for Sadr,' referring to a martyred Shiite cleric.
He had been arrested with 19 others; the lucky ones were executed right away. The rest were tortured with electric cattle prods and forced to watch the prison guards gang-rape their wives and sisters. Some were fed into a machine that looked like a giant meat cutter. Last week he recalled a 'scene that haunts me still. Just shoot them all. We take you now inside one of Saddam's most notorious prisons, 18 miles west of Baghdad, and it's hard to imagine a grimmer place. US soldiers are searching what remains of one of the biggest and most elaborate prisons in the world.
Saddam Hussein never cut corners when it came to punishment. Abu Ghraib once held tens of thousands of human souls -- criminals, political enemies, and those who just happened to get in the way. A year-old Iranian boy visiting his grandmother near Basra in was swept up in an Iraqi invasion. He was still here 15 years later. And they brought us polluted water to drink, so we all had diarrhea. The members of the Baath party were always watching the others.
There were always security members at my plays and sometimes they the plays were not allowed,' said [Aziz Abdul] Sahib. Sahib said he had been selling his writings at a public market once a week 'just so I could eat. Yehiye Ahmed, 17, grew up nearby. The prison guards were his neighbors; the inmates' screams were the soundtrack of his young life. I could hear everything from my house or when we played soccer behind the prison,' says Yehiye, a quiet boy, with large, haunted brown eyes and a body that suggests malnourishment.
When they got tired, the guards would switch with other guards,' he recalls. Last week, he wandered through the looted prison and stood behind the red bars of his former cell for the first time in over 10 years. I never believed a person could be subjected to such treatment by another human being,' Mekhedi says.
If our work was disliked by Saddam or eldest son Uday, then we would be placed in jail. Anwar Abdul Razak, remembers when a surgeon kissed him on each cheek, said he was sorry and cut his ears off. Razak, then 21 years old, had been swept up during one of Saddam Hussein's periodic crackdowns on deserters from the Army. Razak says he was innocently on leave at the time, but no matter; he had been seized by some Baath Party members who earned bounties for catching Army deserters.
At Basra Hospital, Razak's ears were sliced off without painkillers. He said he was thrown into jail with men, all with bloody stumps where their ears had been. One doctor who refused was shot. Today, Dr. Jinan al-Sabagh, an administrator at Basra Teaching Hospital, insists that the victims numbered only '70 or 80,' but he'd prefer not to talk about it. He says the ear-chopping stopped before his own surgery rotation came up.
I vowed I would never do it. I said I am a surgeon, not a butcher He is Muhammad Muslim Muhammad and he said he began digging graves here when he was 14 to fulfill his military service. There were never fewer than nine bodies to bury. During one especially bad time in , he said, the numbers rose. One day he buried 18 people. He said he had never told anyone the details of his job. He said he'd remarked that if talks with the United Nations did not work, force would be used against Saddam.
The police came the same day and asked why I spoke against Saddam,' said Saboowalla. He said the police testified that he had advocated 'shooting and killing Saddam. He refused to talk about how he was treated in jail. But his younger brother Hani came to a cemetery here today, like dozens of other Iraqis, not with the name of his dead brother but with a number. Satter's number was A cousin, Sagur, arrested at the same time, was These numbers were what was left of people convicted as enemies of Saddam Hussein and then made to disappear.
Their graves were not dignified with names but with numbers painted on metal plates. The plates spread like rusty weeds, covering more and more feet of desert every year Mr. Hussein held power. These were people executed - most by hanging in the fearsome Abu Ghraib prison a mile away - merely because the government considered them a threat.
Many were Shiite Muslims more active in their religion than the Sunni-dominated government felt it could tolerate. Missing eyes, ears, toenails and tongues mark those who fell into the hands of Mr. Hussein's powerful security services. They had been beaten with a metal cable. Then the guards threw salt water at them, so the scars would stay for life. Witnesses say they were dumped in the middle of the night, without the dignity of a coffin, often mixed with the bones of another.
Until this week, their whereabouts were unknown. But now, armed with shovels and mysterious scraps of paper, families are finally coming to reclaim their own. These people may have been just nameless, faceless victims to the regime, but if so, the question arises why would the regime have taken so much time to bury each one individually, and then mark each grave with a number?
The answer: The regime didn't keep track. The cemetery's caretaker did. There must be thousands of people in this book. Thousands of names.
Under penalty of death, this man stole Saddam Hussein's execution list and kept note of the bodies that came his way. It is an act of courage that may finally bring some peace to families with homecomings so long overdue. Hussein's rule. His speech is slurred because he is missing part of his tongue. Black-hooded paramilitary troops, the Fedayeen Saddam, run by Mr.
Hussein's eldest son, Uday, pulled it out of his mouth with pliers last month, he said, and sliced it off with a box cutter. They made his family and dozens of his neighbors watch. Salman was blindfolded and bundled into a van. Residents of his neighborhood say the van arrived in the afternoon with an escort of seven trucks carrying more than a hundred black-uniformed fedayeen wearing black masks that only showed their eyes.
They rounded up neighbors for what was billed as a rally; Mr. Salman's mother was ordered to bring a picture of Mr. Two men held Mr. Salman's arms and head steady, and pointed a gun to his temple. Another man with a video camera recorded the scene.
It was too quick to be painful but there was a lot of blood. When he awoke, the right side of his head was wrapped in bandages. It was Sept. Ghanem said. I felt oppressed. I hated Saddam with all of my heart, but I didn't know what to do. Many, like Mr. Ghanem, had inflamed wounds. Others were less fortunate. Ghanem described a medieval scene in which delirious and dying inmates lay on the prison's dirt floor screaming from pain. Two of his friends died from infections.
Ghanem's weeping mother. Hussein, said his trouble began when the eldest of his seven sons became old enough to join the Baath Party, but did not. We think you are in an opposition party. He is quick to pop out his glass eye for a visitor - and to tell of how he lost the real one to torture. I was afraid of what Uday would do to me and my family.
I would sit and cry when I was by myself. I want to play soccer for myself, and for the Iraqi people, not for Uday. A common thread runs through all their narratives. After losing a competition, players and their retinue were taken to the Olympic Committee building, where they were harangued before being transferred to a prison, usually Radwaniya.
They often had their heads shaved as a mark of shame and spent the first days in prison without food. Many said they were whipped on their backs, legs and arms by thick metal cables that hung from a wall in the prison and were named after snakes.
And if they were offered jobs playing abroad, Uday Hussein demanded a cut of the contract if they wanted exit visas to leave Iraq. One reporter, who said he preferred not to give his name because he was still afraid of 'Uday's men,' told AFP that such violence was widespread in the dark years of Saddam's year rule.
They blindfolded me and then tortured me with electricity. Officials believe they are the remains of victims of Saddam's repression of ethnic minorities, including Iraqi Kurds. Tens of thousands of Kurdish men disappeared under Saddam and were killed, according to human rights groups.
When he returned to his work with the police campaign to put down Shia opponents and rebels, he witnessed more savagery.
I saw Captain Abbass, one of our men, beating a man on the floor. I recognised him as a Shia religious student. He beat the man in the head and I noticed and pointed out to the captain that the student was already dead. He just said that he wanted to punish him more and that his hand was the "hand of god".
Some people would be left here for days upside down and would just die of fatigue and thirst. The Iraqi footballers had flunked a crucial penalty, and they dreaded what Uday Saddam Hussein had in store for them after the final whistle. The psychological pressure on the players was enormous, especially when it came to penalties. His burial in Highgate Cemetery, close to the grave of Karl Marx, was profoundly affecting.
His desk in the office became a shrine, his picture surrounded by flowers and messages. Readers sent hundreds of sympathetic letters, some including poems or money. The Observer , working through the Foreign Office, tried hard to arrange for Farzad's body to be returned to his parents in England. Eventually, with no warning, the coffin arrived late at night at Heathrow airport, accompanied by a chilling message from an Iraqi official: "Mrs Thatcher wanted him.
We've sent him in a box. Even now, two decades on, it is hard to contain one's anger — not just at the insane barbarity of Saddam, but at some Tory MPs and the parts of the British press that tried to pin the blame for his murder on poor Farzad himself, on the Observer and especially on me.
Sifting through the massive coverage, it is clear that some journalists come out well from the affair, notably Paul Foot, Hugo Young, John Pilger and Keith Waterhouse. Others appeared to be guilty, to use Foot's phrase, of "vicious humbug and hypocrisy".
In that category fall Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who accused me in the Sunday Telegraph of "sending him to the slaughterhouse", even though I didn't send Farzad to Iraq — he was a freelance responding to an official invitation — and didn't know he was in Iraq until he was arrested; Sir John Junor in the Mail on Sunday "Is Mr Trelford himself a holy innocent? When news broke a surprise to us that Farzad had spent 12 months in jail as a young man for attempted robbery, it was splashed on the tabloid front pages and presented as if it was a more important fact than his execution, even providing some justification for it.
The Mail on Sunday linked Farzad with Iraq's so-called "doom gun" project, using documents that were later shown to be forged. The conduct of two Tory MPs was unforgivable. Even while Farzad's fate hung in the balance, Terry Dicks said that he "deserves to be hanged". Dicks, a hanger and flogger, was described by another MP as "living proof that a pig's bladder on a stick can get elected to parliament".
Rupert Allason, alias Nigel West, the thriller writer, told the world that Farzad was a spy, a claim that led several front pages. He had no evidence and indeed no such evidence exists.
His claim was based soley on the fact that the name of an Israeli businessman had been listed inFarzad's address book, a contact that had in fact been given to him by me. Farzad's conduct in Baghdad, announcing his trip in advance to the Iraqi authorities and sharing the results with his fellow journalists, was hardly the stuff of espionage.
Ironically, Farzad Bazoft achieved his ambition of reaching the world's front pages. Sadly, his name was in the headline, not the byline. But his highly publicised death highlighted the evil of Saddam's regime in a way denied to the thousands of victims who died in silence.
This doesn't soften our rage at the injustice meted out to a friend. But it does give added dignity and meaning to his death to know that it served as a terrible warning to the world. The Observer Iraq.
Donald Trelford was editor of the Observer when his reporter was arrested in Iraq, falsely accused of spying and hanged on 15 March This article explores these topics in detail, including the seizure and restitution of the records, the political and sectarian misuse of the files, and the recent positive trends that hold the possibility of using the files in the spirit of human rights and the rule of law in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region.
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