Saddam was better, say victims of peace
ANTHONY BROWNE
THE TIMES, LONDON
KHAN BANI SAAD (Iraq), May 24. — The small dank cells with cold stone floors, tiny windows and iron bars for a door used to house criminals and the victims of Mr Saddam Hussein’s regime. Now Khan Bani Saad prison, overlooked by watchtowers and surrounded by razor wire, is filled with families who are victims, not of the war, but of the peace.
Mrs Sabrir Hassan Ismael, a mother of six, held her three-year-old daughter Zahraa in the cell that is now their living room and bedroom, and cried: “Look at my family. We live in prison. We can’t buy food because we don’t have money. We have no gas to cook. We can’t sleep because it’s very hot. There are huge insects that bite us. I live without any hope.” Outside, children play in the foetid puddles, swirling dust and searing heat of the prison courtyard, where prisoners once walked in dread.
Before the end of the war, Mrs Sabrir lived with her husband Mr Hassan Tahar Yassim on a farm in Khanaqin, close to the Iranian border. They are members of the Arab Saraefien. As opponents of Mr Saddam Hussein, they even welcomed the American invasion.
But it is the peace, and the disintegration of Mr Saddam Hussein’s grip, that has destroyed their lives. On 11 April, Kurdish fighters entered Khanaqin, ordering all 15,000 Arabs to leave within 48 hours.
The following day they returned. “They threw all our belongings out in the street, and we left,” said Mrs Sabrir’s son. After seven days of travelling, 1,500 of the tribe ended up in the abandoned prison.
They are part of the rising tide of internal refugees in Iraq, forced out of their homes by the ethnic conflict that in Thursday resulted in more gunfights between Kurds and Arabs in the town of Kirkuk.
Every day on Iraq’s highways, Arabs who have been forced out of their homes are drifting south hoping to find somewhere to live. Many, but not all, of the Arabs in Khanaqin had been forced to move there in 1975 from southern Iraq because they opposed Saddam’s regime.
Saddam wanted to Arabise the predominantly Kurdish towns close to the Iranian border.
Occupants of Khan Bani Saad prison just want somewhere they can call their own. The tribe has appealed for help to the coalition forces, but no one has visited them. They have eaten or sold almost all their animals, and have only a week’s food left. Now they hate the Americans. Mrs Sabrir’s son concludes: “We have discovered that Saddam was better than the Americans.”
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