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"Clawing through the dirt, Abdelhassan al-Mohani collected his brother bone by bone. 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. Mr. Mohani held the skull and gently brushed the dirt from the eye socket. Then he wept.
"Abdelhussein had disappeared on his way to work in Baghdad on Jan. 23, 1981. 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."
-- The New York Times, June 2, 2003
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"At the first grave site that the team is investigating - a bleak square-mile expanse of sand and silt near the town of Musayib, 40 miles south of Baghdad - local people have already dug up the skeletal remains of almost 650 victims. Blindfolded with their hands tied, they had been herded into trenches and shot - executed in March and April 1991 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."
-- The Sunday Telegraph (London), June 1, 2003
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"In two days, they've found 2,000 bodies--men, women, children, some handicapped. 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."
-- ABC World News Tonight, May 13, 2003
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"Hundreds of Iraqis whose loved ones vanished during the 1991 Shiite Muslim uprising watched Tuesday as workers dug into a mass grave, a backhoe pulling up eight or nine bodies at a time, and perhaps as many as 3,000 over the past four days. 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."
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003
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"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."
-- The Daily Telegraph (London), May 14, 2003
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"For people streaming past 32 coffins laid out in Basra's al-Jumhuriya Grand Mosque on Monday, grief competed with anger as they searched for relatives who disappeared after a Shiite Muslim uprising in 1999. 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. 'No, not him. 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."
-- Associated Press, May 12, 2003
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"Mr. 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 535. A cousin, Sagur, arrested at the same time, was 537. 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.
"But now that he is gone, the families of the disappeared are finding the numbers, matching them to the metal plates and finally collecting their dead. 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."
-- Report on Al Qarah Cemetery in The New York Times, April 25, 2003
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"There is nothing in this tunnel, save for rats and sodden fruit crates. But across town, at another portal to the subterranean maze, a morsel of information has floated to the surface. It's a piece of paper, part of a security file. It reads: 'Ali Shankat. Executed criminal. Accused of writing about Saddam Hussein.'"
-- Report on Iraqi Prisons in the Toronto Star, April 21, 2003
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"'My brother disappeared in 1992,' this woman told us. 'We never heard another thing from him.' He and hundreds of others buried here were Shi'ite Muslims, Saddam's religious enemy. 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. 'I suffered so many years,' he said. 'My hair turned white from the pain and guilt.' But now he is free to tell, and when we went to visit him there was a line out the door, all people looking to match a name with his secret numbers. It is an act of courage that may finally bring some peace to families with homecomings so long overdue."
-- CBS Evening News, April 24, 2003
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"As clumps of hair blew across the hard, dry land, Jabar Sattar sat rocking and sobbing on a hill of dirt created by the backhoe. 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. 'I looked for 12 years,' Sattar cried into the bag of remains. 'Every day I told myself, you're alive and will come back. Now what am I going to say to our father?'"
-- Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2003
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"Desperate relatives and friends were digging to find remains of their loved ones yesterday at what US soldiers said was the largest mass grave of Saddam Hussein's victims discovered in Iraq. ... 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."
-- The Australian, May 15, 2003
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"On an exhumed mound beside the most westerly row of corpses, Ali Abdul Hassan Mekki, 50, sat with a plastic bag between his feet. Thirteen years ago his brother, Jaffar, disappeared during Hussein's post-rebellion slaughter. It was, for him, the worst possible outcome -- misery without certainty. 'I think this is my brother,' he said. 'This is my pullover, which he always borrowed from me to wear, but it is not enough to identify him. The problem is that I don't recognise this wallet and the identity card does not have any writing on it.'"
-- The Australian, May 15, 2003
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"A map provided by a former driver for Iraqi military intelligence brought Abdulaziz al-Qubaisi Abu Musab to the abandoned Iraqi military camp here this morning in search of the answer to the question that most Kuwaitis have asked - and dreaded - since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war: where are the nearly 600 missing Kuwaitis?
"Mr. 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 1991, was among the drivers who took the Kuwaiti prisoners to their execution in Baghdad and subsequent burial here, 50 miles west of the capital.
"It was impossible to speak directly to this driver, who calls himself Samir and still fears for his life, or to say today how accurate his account of the execution is. But the map he gave Mr. Abu Musab proved very accurate."
-- The New York Times, May 17, 2003
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"The killing began one morning in October 1991 at 8:30. 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.
"A single intelligence man carrying a machine gun positioned himself inside the horseshoe. The prisoners wept and cried out the Muslim prayer before death: there is no god but God.
"The gunfire began. 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."
-- Agence France-Presse, May 17, 2003
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"An intensive search for Kuwaiti soldiers and civilians missing since the first Persian Gulf war may have ended at this remote site, where skulls, brown pants and bones sticking up eerily from the sand were unearthed in the first day of digging at the site.
"When Saddam Hussein fell, there were grim hopes that the missing might still be alive but starving in one of the regime's prisons. Coalition searches found the prisons empty. Instead, it now appears the Kuwaitis were already dead.
"Ten buses carrying the 'disappeared' had been driven northwest of Baghdad past the relatively prosperous city of Fallujah, according to the driver of one of the buses. The prisoners were unloaded, shot, then buried in deep pits."
-- The Washington Times, May 17, 2003
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"Jamal al-Attar was 26 years old when the Iraqi Mukhabarat snatched him off the street for questioning. He was accused of being a resistance fighter opposed to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Then he was loaded onto a truck with scores of other Kuwaitis. That was the last anyone here [Kuwait] saw of him. Today, Mr. Attar would be 38 years old and would have spent one-third of his life in an Iraqi prison. "I must say that I hope that he is still alive. I hope that all of them are still alive,' says Abdul Hamid al-Attar, Jamal's father. 'But I have to be frank with myself. I am not that much optimistic.'"
"Most difficult, say family members, is not knowing whether their loved ones are alive. ... If Hussein did this to his own people, the Kuwaitis received worse, family members say.
'We wish that all of them are alive and all of them will be returned soon to Kuwait – but if not, [their families] should know the truth,' says Ali Murad of the National Committee for the Missing and POWs.
"Attar agrees: 'Five or six years ago, we used to insist they are alive and that the Iraqis must bring them back to Kuwait alive. Now we have changed. We say we must know if they are dead or alive – but we can't accept that they are missing.'"
-- The Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 2003
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"'We found one of our friends and we are trying to find the others. People told us that they were killed here,' said Ali Khaled Shefeq, 40, a chemical engineer, digging at the grave with a spade. He said relatives suspect the men were killed around April 2 – less than a week before Baghdad fell....
'We all feel very sad,' Shefeq said. 'They are brothers. What can we say? God bless them. Until now, we didn't believe Saddam Hussein is gone, that it's over. We pray he will never come back again.'
"Others searching for bodies said they were looking for the remains of eight men who were seized at a mosque a month ago by a paramilitary group loyal to Hussein. A cry went up from the crowd as one of the decomposed bodies was unearthed. 'It's Abdul Rahman, it's Abdul Rahman,' people in the crowd shouted.
-- Newsday, April 23, 2003
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"For days now, scores of desperate Iraqis have turned up outside the state security complex here, searching for their missing loved ones, begging the American troops who guard its gates to help them find the relatives whom they believe to be trapped in a prison beneath the sprawling grounds.
"With the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, 30 years of buried history is slowly being resurrected. The Iraqis who appear each morning calling out names and dates of arrest are hoping that their missing brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles will be resurrected along with the past.
"They hold up one finger, two fingers, four fingers, trying to explain to the Americans how many relatives are supposedly in the jail. They throng the gates from dawn to dusk, holding up photos of their vanished loved ones and holding desperately onto hope."
-- The New York Times, April 17, 2003
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"Rousted from their beds, pulled off the street, yanked from their classrooms and their jobs, essentially abducted by the president's security goons and on the most feeble of pretexts, never again seen by their families and friends. Mourned furtively down through the years by parents and siblings, spouses and children.
"They are the missing, probably long dead and thus mercifully released from their misery. But hope lives on, however atrophied and threadbare. It is this hopeful longing for miracles that brings Iraqis, in their pleading numbers, to every portal, hatchway and unsealed vent hole, in search of loved ones. 'My brother,' says one. 'My son,' implores another."
-- Toronto Star, April 21, 2003
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"Anwar Abdul Qadir was there, too, looking. He has been missing his brother since 1991 as well, when the 17-year-old was taken from their home at 4 a.m. His uncle is also missing, and his cousin was executed in 1996. Altogether, he has six relatives who were arrested and whose whereabouts are unknown. 'I'm very lucky they just took five or six relatives,' he said, nodding in the direction of Abdul Wahab. 'Some people had five or six brothers taken.'"
-- The Washington Post, April 19, 2003
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"One of the disappeared is the son of an old man named Kadem Agari Albadri. He lives in a walled-compound on Maarifa Street – the street of knowledge – landscaped with fuchsia trees and palms. His name appears in the book as a local teacher. His son Adnan is there, also: No. 32, arrested March 3, 1991. Suspect. Whereabouts unknown.
"... Much of his family and friends gathered today to hear him speak. They all brought faded pictures or names scribbled on scrap paper of sons and brothers who have disappeared. They need look no further than the book.
"'Before anything, I want to tell the people of America and Britain something,' Mr. Albadri said. 'There is nothing, nothing more terrible for a father and mother than to have their child taken from them. Not to know. Never to see his body. You cannot imagine. This is how we lived.'"
-- The New York Times, April 17, 2003
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"The relatives push forward, waving their faded pictures, in much the same way that desperate kinfolk had wandered around the ruins of the World Trade Center towers after 9/11, seeking information about their missing. Haid Ahmed holds up a photograph of his brother, Moayed, an agriculture student who disappeared in June, 1981. 'We haven't been able to search for him until now. We were too scared even to try.' Too scared, in the Saddam days, to even inquire about Moayed's fate.
"'My brother could be anywhere. This is just a possibility. But any place I hear there is a prison, I go there. I have been to four prisons already. I am going to keep looking because my father and mother have asked me to. We have talked about him every day since he was taken. His life inside prison is now longer than his life outside. In my heart, I think he is alive, but only God knows.'"
-- Toronto Star, April 21, 2003
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The Children: No Iraqi Too Small
"His mother tried to keep him close, but her hands were tied and she could not hold the children. They all stumbled into the ready-made grave. 'They were shooting at us, but I didn't get hit,' Mr. Husseini said. 'I was lying on top of my mother. Then someone came down in the hole and dragged me up by my collar and yelled, "Shoot this kid!" I was pretending to be dead. And they started shooting at me again, but still I didn't get hit. Then the shovel came.' He felt himself being lifted with the dirt and dropped once again into the hole. 'I rolled myself to the edge and then to a place where there were reeds and water and the reeds were all sticking in my face,' he recalled. 'My body wasn't covered with the dirt, just my head. 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." But the driver, maybe he didn't hear, because he didn't come.'"
-- The New York Times, June 1, 2003
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"In a pile in one of the rooms used for torture were textbooks for children: a science book for third-graders, an agriculture book for sixth-graders. Whole families, including infants and toddlers, were held in this prison. This was a form of mercy, this keeping the families together."
-- The Baltimore Sun, April 20, 2003
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"In another neighborhood, a group of some 100 children, clothed mostly in rags and newly released from one of the regime's prisons, hugged and kissed the Marines who had freed them."
-- The Washington Post, April 10, 2003
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"Former United Nations worker Vanessa Lough said children as young as four have been taken from their parents during the night over the past fortnight and murdered after extremists targeted families thought to have been helping the Coalition forces.
"'Some children were hanged as their helpless parents were forced to watch,' said Ms Lough, 37. She heard of the atrocities during a water drop on the outskirts of Basra, Iraq's second largest city and a Ba'ath party stronghold. 'In one street alone, they said three children could at one point be seen hanging from the lampposts and around the corner another child lay burned on the road. Parents and children who resisted were badly beaten.' Ms Lough said that, at first, the three women, all middle-aged, were reluctant to talk about what they had seen for fear of persecution.
"'They were genuinely afraid for their lives,' she added. 'Through what I can gather, they knew of at least 11 deaths but said there were many more elsewhere in the city.'
"'One of the ladies said Ba'ath party leaders and several henchmen had ordered and carried out the killings after their headquarters were bombed last week. It was their way of getting back. One of the men told a father his son was being killed because the father had been seen laughing with several men from the British Army that day. They told him he had "betrayed" Saddam in an act of treason. He received a broken leg and a severe beating. The men made the father watch as they set his son alight with petrol.'"
-- The Mail on Sunday (London), April 6, 2003
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"Perhaps saddest were two rooms, each hardly bigger than a normal bedroom, reserved for children; they had been crammed with scores of kids from 12 to 16 years old, say the former inmates. Ali Nasr, 13 at the time, was caught up in a sweep when Shiites throughout Iraq rioted after the murder of their Grand Ayatollah, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sader (also called Sader II) in Najaf. ... Ali spent six months in the juvenile wing of Unit Four, sleeping on his feet when the cell was too crowded to lie down, or taking turns on the floor with other prisoners. The boy was still too scared to talk about it, even now."
-- Newsweek on line, April 8, 2003
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The Athletes: A High Price for Defeat
"Abas Rahim, a speedy 24-year-old left wing for Police, is one of Iraq's finest players. After returning home from 1997 Junior World Cup qualifying matches in South Korea, Rahim was jailed for 21 days. He was the team captain, as well as the tournament's most valuable player, and he was punished for the team's failure.
"Five years later, after trying to quit the team, Rahim missed a crucial penalty kick against the Union Club in Qatar. He was held captive in Hussein's Republican Palace for seven days, he recalled, blindfolded the entire time. Today, he played unafraid."
-- The Washington Post, May 17, 2003
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"Two years ago, Iraqi wrestler Maitham Ali Hadi was competing in the Arab championships in Syria and defected. 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. 'At night, we used to hear the voices of our colleagues being tortured. We felt their pain alongside them,' former wrestling federation head Loai Sateh said in a recent interview."
-- Associated Press May 11, 2003
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"Fakher Ali al-Jamali, who headed Iraq's handicapped team, was whipped with electric cables for two days after two members of his team went missing during a 1998 tournament. He was released only after they showed up."
-- Associated Press May 11, 2003
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"One of the tools used by Odai to torture athletes is currently on display at al-Hikma Mosque in Baghdad. 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. 'Whenever I tried to move my body, I would feel the burn of the metal rods,' said the man, displaying scarred legs and hands."
-- Associated Press, May 11, 2003
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"'The players would start crying,' said Emmanuel Baba, 69, a former player who became a coach renowned throughout the Arab world, where he is known by his nickname, Ammo Baba. 'They would tremble with fear.'"
"'When they got out of prison, they would come to me and lift their shirts to show me the red stripes on their back. They had been beaten with a metal cable. Then the guards threw salt water at them, so the scars would stay for life.'"
-- The Washington Post, April 24, 2003
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"The friendly between Iraq and Kazakhstan ended in a 2-1 defeat for the home team. The Iraqi footballers had flunked a crucial penalty, and they dreaded what Uday Saddam Hussein had in store for them after the final whistle.
"Ahmed Sabat, considered one of the most talented Iraqi soccer players of his generation, told the story of that fateful day six years ago.... 'It was a friendly but we'd lost, and we knew what would happen once the spectators left,' said the 27-year-old...."
'The players and the coach were made to lie down on the pitch,' he explained, 'and Uday's men came and beat us with sticks on our feet and on our backs and punched us to punish us.' 'We suffered in silence. The psychological pressure on the players was enormous, especially when it came to penalties.'"
-- Agence France-Presse, April 23, 2003
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"'I thought many times of leaving soccer,' said Laith Hussein, captain of the national team and a star in Iraq. 'But how could I? 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.'"
-- The Washington Post, April 24, 2003
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"'There was a room painted in red in the Olympic Committee building where athletes were held in isolation for days on end,' said Sabat, who has a passing resemblance to the French football star Zinedine Zidane. 'We were all terrified of this room.' Iraq's state-sponsored sporting violence even extended to journalists who covered competitions and matches. 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 24-year rule. 'I was tortured because I'd criticised the government's sport policies,' he said. 'They took me to one of their special prisons. They blindfolded me and then tortured me with electricity.'"
-- Agence France-Presse, April 23, 2003
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"Though the tales of punishment were not a closely guarded secret in Iraq, it is only now that many athletes are talking freely about their experiences. 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."
-- The Washington Post, April 24, 2003
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"Former Iraqi weightlifter Raed Ahmad, who defected to the U.S. during the 1996 Games in Atlanta, told the Daily News that athletes are routinely deprived of food and sleep, and the soles of their feet are caned. They are chained to walls for days, he said, and sometimes thrown into tanks filled with raw sewage."
-- The Daily News (New York), April 2, 2003
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"Haydar, who played 12 years on Iraq's junior and senior national teams, said the troubles started in 1986, when he joined professional team al-Rashid, which was owned by Hussein. When the team lost, Haydar said, players were imprisoned for several days.
"'I was tortured for the first time in 1993, after the Iraqi national team lost 2-0 to Jordan,' Haydar told ESPN.com. ... A few months later, when Haydar suggested he might not be able to play because of a bleeding ulcer, he was arrested at his home at 2:30 a.m. and sent to prison.
"'He took me right to the Olympic prison, where the guards whipped my feet 20 times a day for three days,' he said. 'They gave me nothing to eat or drink other than a daily glass of water and slice of bread. Then they sent me to al-Radwaniya for four more days of punishment, and this time, I got the full treatment.
"'They took my clothes off, laid me down on my back and dragged me by my legs across hot pavement until my back was a bloody mess. Then they made me roll in the sand. And just to make sure that the wounds got infected, I had to climb a 15-foot ladder and jump repeatedly into a pit of sewage water filled with blood and who knows what else. All because I wanted to stop playing soccer.'"
-- The Miami Herald, April 6, 2003
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