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Old 10-03-2003, 11:15 PM   #23 (permalink)
Food Eater Lad
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June 3, 2003

Tales of Saddam's Brutality
The Iraqi people talk about mass graves and Saddam’s crimes against humanity






U.S. Marine Corps photo by
Lance Cpl. Christopher Graham
Remains found at mass gravesites, located near a farm on the outskirts of Al Mahawil, Iraq, May 7, 2003.

The cruelty of Saddam's regime is evident in its brutality toward Iraqi citizens. Mass grave sites across Iraq provide further evidence of Saddam's atrocities. Below, the Iraqi people share their stories of brutality, torture, fear, and death.

For more personal stories of life after Saddam, visit Liberation Update.

For more information on Coalition assistance to protect mass graves, click here.




Unspeakable Acts: Mass Murder

Unspeakable Acts: Torture

Unspeakable Acts: Mutilation

Pervasive Fear

The Disappeared: Living with the Terror

The Children: No Iraqi Too Small

The Athletes: A High Price for Defeat

Unimaginable Places



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Unspeakable Acts: Mass Murder



Photo by Thomas Hartwell
Aweda Abed Al-Amer, 48, grieves over two members of her family found in a mass grave in Musayib, 75 KM SW of Baghdad. She lost 5 members of her family including her husband, son and 3 nephews after an uprising against the Iraqi government in 1991.The bodies wrapped in linen shrouds are being held in a makeshift morgue in a youth center for possible identification.

"Now, 12 years later, Mr. Shaati cannot remember if the women and children beside him screamed as the bullets hit, or whether the men in the hole moaned as they died. He only recalls a moment of hollow silence when the soldiers stopped shooting. Then came the throaty rumble of a backhoe and the thud of wet earth dropping on bodies. He survived but saw hundreds of other innocents buried in another of Saddam Hussein's anonymous mass graves."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 2003

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"The soldiers took them out in groups of 100 to 150 people. When his time came, Mr. Shaati was ordered to remove his T-shirt and rip it into strips that were tied over his eyes and around his hands. The prisoners were herded onto a bus, everyone holding on with their teeth to the shirt of the person in front of them. When they arrived at a field - Mr. Shaati is still not sure where - their grave had already been prepared. 'They led us down an incline into a wide long hole,' he said. 'It was quiet. No one fell or even cried. I was positioned very close to the corner, maybe second or third from the wall. Then they started shooting. Somehow I wasn't hit. By then, I guess, they didn't go to the trouble of shooting all of us.' After the grave was covered, Mr. Shaati, alive but choking on dirt, wormed his way out of the ditch. He punched through the earthen blanket with his head, and worked himself free of the cloth straps. Gulping the cold night air, he knew that all his soldierly ideas about honor and country counted for nothing."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 2003

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"The executions took place two or three times on most days, Arjawi said. Each time, between 100 and 150 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."
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003

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Photo by Thomas Hartwell
Iraqis search for their relatives and friends among victims found in a mass grave in Musayib, 75 KM SW of Baghdad. The victims are thought to be from among some 2,000 persons reported missing after the 1991 uprising against the Iraqi government. The bodies wrapped in linen shrouds are being held in a makeshift morgue in a youth center.

"[J]ust to see the landscape of bones mixed with clothing, skulls strewn in the splay of human detritus and other remains is chilling. 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.

"Then the traces of human anatomy appear. 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.

"'It's a kind of hell out there,' said Mr. Nasir, who no longer plants onions where so many bodies have been desecrated. 'We have always known that there were people here, but we couldn't take them,' he said. 'We knew our Muslim brothers were not buried properly, but we couldn't say a word.'"
-- The New York Times, May 14, 2003

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Sally Hodgson - Department of State
A sign of mourning posted recently outside a house in a neighborhood a few kilometers from a mass grave southeast of Basrah. The sign in Arabic reads: "Matar Jaber Ali was killed by Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party in 1991." Matar's brothers put up the sign outside their house after they dug up a robe at the mass grave, which they believe their brother was wearing when he disappeared in 1991. Similar signs can be seen posted throughout southern Iraq, often with printed photos of people missing or killed by Saddam's brutal regime.

"'This is my brother,' declared Munther Taffuk after examining the freshly exhumed corpse, relieved to a point that he had found his missing sibling after a two-year search. Munther then moved in for a closer look. 'My God,' he screamed. 'They took out his eyes.' He then pulled two matted pieces of cotton wool from the eye sockets of his little brother's skull and wept.

"His sister, Manal, cried openly as she said her younger brother, Muthfer, simply vanished without trace two years ago. 'My God, look what they did. This is my brother, he did nothing wrong.'"
-- Times of Oman, April 22, 2003

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"The skeletal remains on display Monday showed signs of physical trauma. 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."
-- Associated Press, May 12, 2003

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Photo by Thomas Hartwell
Iraqi workers dig for the remains of Iraqis from a mass grave in Musayib, 75 KM SW of Baghdad. The victims are thought to be from among some 2,000 persons reported missing after the 1991 uprising against the Iraqi government.

"The grave was no more than a long trench, with dirt shoveled over the men executed for their role in the uprising here in 1999 after the killing of a prominent Shiite cleric, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, said relatives who viewed the remains today.

"On March 25, 1999, a shepherd in the desert about 45 miles north of Basra saw men being brought by Baath Party trucks to an open clearing, said Ali Hassan, 20. 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."
-- The New York Times, May 12, 2003

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"In May 1991, having served in the Persian Gulf War with the Marines, I volunteered for further duty in Provide Comfort -- a joint military operation designed to assist in the relocation of Kurdish refugees into northern Iraq. 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....

"As the Marines began digging defensive positions and putting up tents, a grisly discovery was made. Heavy equipment had unearthed myriad body parts; hands, arms, legs, etc., were uncovered in what was determined to have been a mass grave. Most telling among this evidence of inhumanity was an infant's sandal.

"The body parts were reburied immediately after their discovery, but for many days the stench of rotting flesh lingered in the air until all the remains were located and reburied. 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."
-- James Zumwalt, op-ed in The Washington Post, April 30, 2003

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"Near Kirkuk, U.S. military forces discovered about 1,500 unmarked graves last week near a military base and industrial park. 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."

"Beth Ann Toupin, an Iraq specialist with Amnesty International, said it is still early to know the magnitude of rights abuses under Saddam. 'There's probably much more to be found,' she said, noting that hidden prisons may be discovered. 'And what's new to us is that now people care.'"
-- The Washington Times, April 23, 2003

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"The Baath regime has gone and now we can talk freely with you. They [the corpses] are all political. Ten to 15 bodies would arrive at a time from the Abu Ghraib prison and we would bury them here. The last corpse interred was number 993."
-- Mohymeed Aswad, manager of Baghdad cemetery, Agence France-Presse, April 21, 2003

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"The civilians were hanged. Sometimes a soldier would come through and they were all shot. I could distinguish them by their uniforms. This grave belongs to a woman. She was hanged. There are another five cemeteries in Baghdad with secret gravesites so in this city alone there are about 6,000 (political) corpses."
-- Gravedigger at a Baghdad cemetery, Agence France-Presse, April 21, 2003

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"I have spoken to a prison officer who worked there. He had no idea how many people were killed in that prison but he said it must have been thousands. In one corner of that prison outside the walls of an inner secure area we found relatives grieving over an open grave where they had found a number of bodies. Bodies who have had their hands tied behind their backs - they had been shot in the head.

"It is our understanding that these people had been rounded up for the simple crime of having a satellite mobile telephone. As such they were suspected of being American spies. They were shot in the dying days of the regime even though those who shot them must have known that the end was up."
-- Tim Rogers, ITV News (UK), reporting from Baghdad on bodies found in a prison run by the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs, April 22, 2003

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"In 2000, Mr Abu Sakkar [a clandestine government agent] was caught "under-reporting" activities in the mosques and sent for two months to Tourist Island on the Tigris river, south of Baghdad, to receive a crude brand of re-education.

"'Three of my fellow Shias were shot in front of me,' he said. When he returned to his work with the police campaign to put down Shia opponents and rebels, he witnessed more savagery. 'One day I walked into the station and the room of the interrogation office was wide open. 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".'"
-- The Daily Telegraph (London), April 23, 2003

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"I saw thousands killed and buried in mass graves. Some were lined up and machine- gunned before being covered with sand. Others were just buried alive. Saddam had a programme of telling villagers (Kurds) they were being relocated south. We would take trucks that would normally hold 12 to 15 people and put in 200 with no water or ventilation. Many would die on the way. Survivors were driven to Al Anbar or Tharthar and buried alive in vast holes dug in the ground. I saw thousands of people – men, women and children – die this way."
-- Defecting colonel in Iraqi internal security service, Evening Standard (London), April 17, 2003

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"At least three massacres on Saddam City's streets have occurred in the last 10 years, including 700 people gunned down during a 1998 Shiite demonstration, said Muhammad Qadim Saadoun, a former air force helicopter pilot whose 40-day political imprisonment ended last week with the U.S. entry into Baghdad.

"He said he was imprisoned repeatedly for refusing to fire on his fellow Shiites, who form the majority of the population but had long been subservient to Mr. Hussein's Sunni-dominated secular government.

"'You cannot imagine the horrible things they did to us,' Mr. Saadoun said. He was tortured while hanging upside down by his feet and pistol-whipped so hard he has lost some of his memory."
-- The Dallas Morning News, April 17, 2003

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Photo by Thomas Hartwell
Iraqis search for their relatives and friends among victims found in a mass grave in Musayib, 75 KM SW of Baghdad. The victims are thought to be from among some 2,000 persons reported missing after the 1991 uprising against the Iraqi government. The bodies wrapped in linen shrouds are being held in a makeshift morgue in a youth center.

"Kubba's money insulated his family from mayhem, but it did not shield him from witnessing the almost casual slaughter of his people. Last week he recalled a 'scene that haunts me still.' Kubba was driving his Mercedes through Basra's Saad Square when he came upon some 600 men who had been detained while police checked their IDs. According to Kubba, 'Chemical Ali' Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's half brother and the tyrant of southern Iraq, stopped and inquired, 'No IDs? Just shoot them all.' Kubba watched as 'they shot over 600 people in front of me.'"
-- Newsweek, April 28, 2003

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"When they came closer, I could see in the bus men, women and children with blindfolds over their eyes. I was very afraid and hid in a hole. It was mostly men. There were about eight children and ten women. They (Ba'ath Party forces) took them off the bus and led them over to the hole in groups. They sat or knelt and then they began to shoot them from very close, many shots. Some were just pushed in and then covered up with earth. There was no escape, it was done very quickly.

"I could not tell this secret because I knew it was dangerous knowledge that I should not hold, dangerous knowledge. But if the British Army want me to show them I will dig up the bodies myself, because I know they are there. I can never forget."
-- Satar Al Khalid, a Bedouin, recalls an incident he saw near Ramallah, Iraq, in 1998, Daily Mail (London), April 14, 2003

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"'Prisoners were taken to watch executions; anyone who cried was executed, too. Our hands were tied like this. First the left hand and then the foot. Then a black hood on my head, then they applied electricity."

"They had a game: They made people drink gasoline, then put them out in open ground and fire guns at them."
-- Abdallah Ahmed, survivor of Abu GhraibPrison, on CBS Evening News, April 14, 2003

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"Two men yesterday gave eyewitness accounts of the execution last Saturday of a commander of the Iraqi 29th brigade after he recommended retreating from Sheykhan, a frontline town that fell to US and Kurdish forces at the weekend.

"'He was made to stand in a ditch for half an hour or so and then he was shot,' said Salah Mehdi Taleb. 'The man who shot him was Mahmoud Taher, who also gave us political education.'"
-- The Financial Times (London), April 10, 2003

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Pervasive Fear

"'I am one of millions who have been tortured,' said 33-year-old Ali Khadem Al Essery, whose knuckles were smashed with a club while he was being interrogated in 1994. Everyone here knows someone who was tortured, and many victims see a bleak future without a measure of justice exacted on the torturers."
-- Newsday, April 21, 2003

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"A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. 'The bodyguards closed all the doors, didn't let anybody out,' the chef remembers. 'Women were yelling and crying, "What happened to her?"' The groom knew. 'He took a pistol and shot himself,' says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin.

"Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting, into a guardhouse on one of Uday's properties, according to a maid who worked there. 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."
-- Time, May 25, 2003

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"At Baghdad's teeming Al-Mutanabi book market, Ali al-Saadi held up a gilded Islamist book and recalled the one he said led to his torture in one of Saddam Hussein's military prisons. 'When I was a literature student in 1982, intelligence officers found a book by Mohammed Sadeq Sadr in my house,' said Saadi of the Shiite ayatollah whose 1999 murder was widely attributed to Saddam's Sunni-majority regime. 'They accused me of organizing a political group. 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."
-- Agence France-Presse, May 9, 2003

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"The Iraqi Intelligence Service established a unit to assassinate Saddam Hussein's enemies at home and abroad that claimed 66 successful 'operations' between 1998 and 2000, according to documents obtained by The Times.

"Found on the floor of a looted Intelligence Service villa on the east bank of the Tigris River here, the six-page file described the program and contained suggestions for improving its effectiveness - including obtaining poisonous gas disguised as perfume or explosives that would detonate when the car of the target passed by."
-- Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2003

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"'The writers who praised Saddam would get treated well. 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.'"
-- Agence France-Presse, April 28, 2003

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"Uday's favourite punishment was the medieval falaqa, a rod with clamps that go around the ankles so that the offender, feet in the air, can be hit on the bare soles with a stick. 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.
-- Time, May 25, 2003

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"Uday's physical ailments seemed to heighten his sadistic tendencies. 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."
-- Time, May 25, 2003

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"Saboowalla said he was imprisoned because he spoke his mind to fellow travelers fleeing Baghdad after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. He said he'd remarked that if talks with the United Nations did not work, force would be used against Saddam. '...someone overheard me. The police came the same day and asked why I spoke against Saddam,' said Saboowalla. 'I told them it was just normal conversation and I didn't mean it.'

"An Iraqi court sentenced him to 20 years for 'insulting' Saddam, who was then Iraq's president. He said the police testified that he had advocated 'shooting and killing Saddam.' The years in jail have made him watch his words. He refused to talk about how he was treated in jail. But his younger brother... said Saboowalla had spoken of being placed in solitary confinement for weeks and 'not seeing the sun' for 27 months."
-– Report on the return to India of Annis Mohammed Saboowalla, who had been imprisoned in Iraq since 1991, Associated Press, April 25, 2003

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"Poet Imad Kadhum...said he had been terrified that Baath members would inform on him and that several friends were arrested for offending Saddam, who was himself credited with penning several self-aggrandizing novels.

"'All the writers here refused Saddam Hussein and many were in trouble if we did not praise Saddam in our poetry or stories,' he said. 'We never accepted that we were criminals. If our work was disliked by Saddam or (eldest son) Uday, then we would be placed in jail.'

"'A lot of (writers) may have been killed, and to this day we don't know what has happened to them,' Kadhum said."
-- Agence France-Presse, April 28, 2003

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"A slightly broader picture of what happened has emerged from the chief gravedigger, just 21 years old. He is Muhammad Muslim Muhammad and he said he began digging graves here when he was 14 to fulfill his military service.

"He said he received the bodies every Wednesday at about 11 a.m., after the weekly hangings at around 5 a.m. There were never fewer than nine bodies to bury. During one especially bad time in 2001, he said, the numbers rose. One day he buried 18 people. He said he had never told anyone the details of his job. 'I didn't open my mouth, or I would have ended up with these poor people here,' he said."
-- Report on Al Qarah Cemetery, The New York Times, April 25, 2003

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