Iraq and Mass Graves....cnyndwllr...maybe you should see this. You go ahead and continue thinking that Saddam was just a sweet old man.
usaid.gov
the US Agency for International Development's report on mass graves.
Families recover victims of Saddam
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq First the grave digger found some teeth.
.
"Please, just barely scrape the sand," Adel Rahaif Hani, whose brother Satter, was arrested as a political prisoner in 1995, begged the digger. "I'm worried he's just below this layer."
.
Hani came to a cemetery here, like dozens of other Iraqi families, 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 the people convicted as enemies of Saddam Hussein's regime and then made to disappear. Their graves were not dignified with names but with numbers painted on metal plates that spread like rusty weeds in the cemetery, covering more and more feet of desert every year that Saddam held power.
.
But now that he is gone, the families 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 2 kilometers (1 mile) away - merely because the regime considered them a threat. Many of them were Shiite Muslims more active in their religion than the Sunni-dominated regime felt it could tolerate.
.
"This is all because of Saddam!" shrieked Ali Majid Shamali, in tears, as he waved his arms Thursday at the long rows of graves marked with metal signs, well over 1,000 of them. "My brother! My brother!"
.
He sat on the ground and stroked the dirt on the grave of his only brother, Walid, arrested in October 1993. A man from another family at the graveyard tried to comfort him. "You lost only one person?" the man asked. "We lost eight here." Two women in black wailed. Both the men started to cry.
.
"Why these innocent people?" Shamali yelled. "Why?"
.
The thousands - more probably tens or hundreds of thousands - of Iraqis executed as political prisoners might have been unidentified forever, except that Saddam's regime kept records of almost everyone it killed. These were not available to ordinary Iraqis.
.
But now a new organization, the Committee for Free Prisoners, says it has received millions of documents from the custodians of Iraq's graveyards for executed political prisoners. The numbers are contained in these documents.
.
The head of the group, Ibrahim Raouf Idrisi, who says he spent 6 of his 35 years in Saddam's prisons because he joined a Muslim party, has opened the records to family members to find what happened to their loved ones - and they are coming here every day.
.
Sitting Thursday in the abandoned house in Baghdad of one of Saddam's generals, whose rooms are now piled with fat green record books of torture and execution, Idrisi mused at the hundreds of millions of dollars Saddam spent jailing and killing his enemies.
.
"If he had spent only half that money on the people, they would have loved him," he said. "He is a terrorist, the only terrorist in the universe."
.
He said that the documents represented only a small part of what existed on cemeteries around Iraq before the regime went on a spree of paper shredding in its last hours.
.
But much survived. Hani, for example, now has the death certificate of his brother, which states plainly that, on Aug. 23, 1997, he was "executed by hanging."
.
A slightly broader picture of the long-held secrets of what happened at the cemetery and prison here, some 24 kilometers west of Baghdad, can be found, too, from the chief grave digger, just 21.
.
Mohammed Muslim Mohammed said he began digging graves here when he was 14, to fulfill his military service.
.
He said that he received the bodies every Wednesday at about 11 a.m., after the weekly hangings, which were 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 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.
.
The oldest graves in the cemetery, he said, date to 1983, four years after Saddam took power. The most recent, he said, was from six months ago, about the time that Saddam declared an amnesty for prisoners at Abu Ghraib as the threat of an attack by the United States rose.
.
He says he personally helped bury 700 people, but has no idea how many bodies are in the cemetery, a walled-off part of the huge Islamic cemetery here. The area is sizable, measuring about 130 graves by 25 graves, which if full might hold more than 3,000 bodies.
.
Slowly, the area is emptying of its corpses. In the two weeks since Saddam's regime fell, the families have been coming, but were not able to find their relatives amid the numbers until the Committee for Free Prisoners recovered the documents. So far, Mohammed said, about 80 bodies have been removed.
.
It is not easy, even for families who have the numbers. On Thursday, a 40-year-old tailor named Hassan Jassim arrived with a scrap of paper scrawled with the number 849, which was supposed to mark the grave of his brother, Selim.
.
A student in the Hawsa, the Shiite religious school in An Najaf, about 135 kilometers south of Baghdad, Selim was arrested in 1998 at the family's home in Baghdad. The military then destroyed the house
.
What Jassim wanted was to provide his brother with a proper Islamic burial, in which the body is ritually washed and wrapped in white linen. But he could not find the grave: The numbers ran from 847 to 848, then skipped up to 853.
.
They decided to dig anyway. "Do you want me to dig up everything or just the head?" the gravedigger asked. Jassim decided just to see the head, because he believed he could identify his brother by the two missing back teeth.
.
"There are so many graves that don't have numbers," he said. "We don't know what to do." The dirt was dry and easily dug and soon the gravedigger held up a skull. "It's not him," Jassim said. "The teeth are complete."
.
At grave No. 444, a large family worked together to unearth Hamid Omran, who was 31 when he was arrested in 1994. As the family carefully lifted the bones onto fresh linen, his cousin, Farhan Jassim, 47, exploded in anger.
.
"I don't think there was a regime in the world that treated political prisoners the way Saddam did," he said. "You can't imagine such exaggerated injustice."
.
The jaw surfaced. Saddam, the cousin said, "hated every Iraqi. Believe me, he hated all Iraqis."
.
Then the family found the skull, which showed a crack in a temple, which the family said was from a kick from a guard when he was first arrested.
.
Another cousin, Thaer Ghawi, 27, wept as he smoked a cigarette once all the bones were out of the grave.
.
"We are just people who opposed the regime," he said. "Why couldn't he just put political prisoners in prison?"
.
Hani, the man whose brother disappeared in 1995, spent three hours picking through the grave of his brother. It was laborious. After the teeth, they found a few small bones, perhaps from the feet or hands. Finally, he had found enough to fill a small coffin. He did not find the skull.
.
"It is enough for me," he said as he loaded the coffin onto a truck. "I feel relieved. What worried me before was I didn't know if he was alive or dead. Now I know." Families recover victims of Saddam
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq First the grave digger found some teeth.
.
"Please, just barely scrape the sand," Adel Rahaif Hani, whose brother Satter, was arrested as a political prisoner in 1995, begged the digger. "I'm worried he's just below this layer."
.
Hani came to a cemetery here, like dozens of other Iraqi families, 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 the people convicted as enemies of Saddam Hussein's regime and then made to disappear. Their graves were not dignified with names but with numbers painted on metal plates that spread like rusty weeds in the cemetery, covering more and more feet of desert every year that Saddam held power.
.
But now that he is gone, the families 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 2 kilometers (1 mile) away - merely because the regime considered them a threat. Many of them were Shiite Muslims more active in their religion than the Sunni-dominated regime felt it could tolerate.
.
"This is all because of Saddam!" shrieked Ali Majid Shamali, in tears, as he waved his arms Thursday at the long rows of graves marked with metal signs, well over 1,000 of them. "My brother! My brother!"
.
He sat on the ground and stroked the dirt on the grave of his only brother, Walid, arrested in October 1993. A man from another family at the graveyard tried to comfort him. "You lost only one person?" the man asked. "We lost eight here." Two women in black wailed. Both the men started to cry.
.
"Why these innocent people?" Shamali yelled. "Why?"
.
The thousands - more probably tens or hundreds of thousands - of Iraqis executed as political prisoners might have been unidentified forever, except that Saddam's regime kept records of almost everyone it killed. These were not available to ordinary Iraqis.
.
But now a new organization, the Committee for Free Prisoners, says it has received millions of documents from the custodians of Iraq's graveyards for executed political prisoners. The numbers are contained in these documents.
.
The head of the group, Ibrahim Raouf Idrisi, who says he spent 6 of his 35 years in Saddam's prisons because he joined a Muslim party, has opened the records to family members to find what happened to their loved ones - and they are coming here every day.
.
Sitting Thursday in the abandoned house in Baghdad of one of Saddam's generals, whose rooms are now piled with fat green record books of torture and execution, Idrisi mused at the hundreds of millions of dollars Saddam spent jailing and killing his enemies.
.
"If he had spent only half that money on the people, they would have loved him," he said. "He is a terrorist, the only terrorist in the universe."
.
He said that the documents represented only a small part of what existed on cemeteries around Iraq before the regime went on a spree of paper shredding in its last hours.
.
But much survived. Hani, for example, now has the death certificate of his brother, which states plainly that, on Aug. 23, 1997, he was "executed by hanging."
.
A slightly broader picture of the long-held secrets of what happened at the cemetery and prison here, some 24 kilometers west of Baghdad, can be found, too, from the chief grave digger, just 21.
.
Mohammed Muslim Mohammed said he began digging graves here when he was 14, to fulfill his military service.
.
He said that he received the bodies every Wednesday at about 11 a.m., after the weekly hangings, which were 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 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.
.
The oldest graves in the cemetery, he said, date to 1983, four years after Saddam took power. The most recent, he said, was from six months ago, about the time that Saddam declared an amnesty for prisoners at Abu Ghraib as the threat of an attack by the United States rose.
.
He says he personally helped bury 700 people, but has no idea how many bodies are in the cemetery, a walled-off part of the huge Islamic cemetery here. The area is sizable, measuring about 130 graves by 25 graves, which if full might hold more than 3,000 bodies.
.
Slowly, the area is emptying of its corpses. In the two weeks since Saddam's regime fell, the families have been coming, but were not able to find their relatives amid the numbers until the Committee for Free Prisoners recovered the documents. So far, Mohammed said, about 80 bodies have been removed.
.
It is not easy, even for families who have the numbers. On Thursday, a 40-year-old tailor named Hassan Jassim arrived with a scrap of paper scrawled with the number 849, which was supposed to mark the grave of his brother, Selim.
.
A student in the Hawsa, the Shiite religious school in An Najaf, about 135 kilometers south of Baghdad, Selim was arrested in 1998 at the family's home in Baghdad. The military then destroyed the house
.
What Jassim wanted was to provide his brother with a proper Islamic burial, in which the body is ritually washed and wrapped in white linen. But he could not find the grave: The numbers ran from 847 to 848, then skipped up to 853.
.
They decided to dig anyway. "Do you want me to dig up everything or just the head?" the gravedigger asked. Jassim decided just to see the head, because he believed he could identify his brother by the two missing back teeth.
.
"There are so many graves that don't have numbers," he said. "We don't know what to do." The dirt was dry and easily dug and soon the gravedigger held up a skull. "It's not him," Jassim said. "The teeth are complete."
.
At grave No. 444, a large family worked together to unearth Hamid Omran, who was 31 when he was arrested in 1994. As the family carefully lifted the bones onto fresh linen, his cousin, Farhan Jassim, 47, exploded in anger.
.
"I don't think there was a regime in the world that treated political prisoners the way Saddam did," he said. "You can't imagine such exaggerated injustice."
.
The jaw surfaced. Saddam, the cousin said, "hated every Iraqi. Believe me, he hated all Iraqis."
.
Then the family found the skull, which showed a crack in a temple, which the family said was from a kick from a guard when he was first arrested.
.
Another cousin, Thaer Ghawi, 27, wept as he smoked a cigarette once all the bones were out of the grave.
.
"We are just people who opposed the regime," he said. "Why couldn't he just put political prisoners in prison?"
.
Hani, the man whose brother disappeared in 1995, spent three hours picking through the grave of his brother. It was laborious. After the teeth, they found a few small bones, perhaps from the feet or hands. Finally, he had found enough to fill a small coffin. He did not find the skull.
.
"It is enough for me," he said as he loaded the coffin onto a truck. "I feel relieved. What worried me before was I didn't know if he was alive or dead. Now I know." Families recover victims of Saddam
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq First the grave digger found some teeth.
.
"Please, just barely scrape the sand," Adel Rahaif Hani, whose brother Satter, was arrested as a political prisoner in 1995, begged the digger. "I'm worried he's just below this layer."
.
Hani came to a cemetery here, like dozens of other Iraqi families, 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 the people convicted as enemies of Saddam Hussein's regime and then made to disappear. Their graves were not dignified with names but with numbers painted on metal plates that spread like rusty weeds in the cemetery, covering more and more feet of desert every year that Saddam held power.
.
But now that he is gone, the families 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 2 kilometers (1 mile) away - merely because the regime considered them a threat. Many of them were Shiite Muslims more active in their religion than the Sunni-dominated regime felt it could tolerate.
.
"This is all because of Saddam!" shrieked Ali Majid Shamali, in tears, as he waved his arms Thursday at the long rows of graves marked with metal signs, well over 1,000 of them. "My brother! My brother!"
.
He sat on the ground and stroked the dirt on the grave of his only brother, Walid, arrested in October 1993. A man from another family at the graveyard tried to comfort him. "You lost only one person?" the man asked. "We lost eight here." Two women in black wailed. Both the men started to cry.
.
"Why these innocent people?" Shamali yelled. "Why?"
.
The thousands - more probably tens or hundreds of thousands - of Iraqis executed as political prisoners might have been unidentified forever, except that Saddam's regime kept records of almost everyone it killed. These were not available to ordinary Iraqis.
.
But now a new organization, the Committee for Free Prisoners, says it has received millions of documents from the custodians of Iraq's graveyards for executed political prisoners. The numbers are contained in these documents.
.
The head of the group, Ibrahim Raouf Idrisi, who says he spent 6 of his 35 years in Saddam's prisons because he joined a Muslim party, has opened the records to family members to find what happened to their loved ones - and they are coming here every day.
.
Sitting Thursday in the abandoned house in Baghdad of one of Saddam's generals, whose rooms are now piled with fat green record books of torture and execution, Idrisi mused at the hundreds of millions of dollars Saddam spent jailing and killing his enemies.
.
"If he had spent only half that money on the people, they would have loved him," he said. "He is a terrorist, the only terrorist in the universe."
.
He said that the documents represented only a small part of what existed on cemeteries around Iraq before the regime went on a spree of paper shredding in its last hours.
.
But much survived. Hani, for example, now has the death certificate of his brother, which states plainly that, on Aug. 23, 1997, he was "executed by hanging."
.
A slightly broader picture of the long-held secrets of what happened at the cemetery and prison here, some 24 kilometers west of Baghdad, can be found, too, from the chief grave digger, just 21.
.
Mohammed Muslim Mohammed said he began digging graves here when he was 14, to fulfill his military service.
.
He said that he received the bodies every Wednesday at about 11 a.m., after the weekly hangings, which were 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 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.
.
The oldest graves in the cemetery, he said, date to 1983, four years after Saddam took power. The most recent, he said, was from six months ago, about the time that Saddam declared an amnesty for prisoners at Abu Ghraib as the threat of an attack by the United States rose.
.
He says he personally helped bury 700 people, but has no idea how many bodies are in the cemetery, a walled-off part of the huge Islamic cemetery here. The area is sizable, measuring about 130 graves by 25 graves, which if full might hold more than 3,000 bodies.
.
Slowly, the area is emptying of its corpses. In the two weeks since Saddam's regime fell, the families have been coming, but were not able to find their relatives amid the numbers until the Committee for Free Prisoners recovered the documents. So far, Mohammed said, about 80 bodies have been removed.
.
It is not easy, even for families who have the numbers. On Thursday, a 40-year-old tailor named Hassan Jassim arrived with a scrap of paper scrawled with the number 849, which was supposed to mark the grave of his brother, Selim.
.
A student in the Hawsa, the Shiite religious school in An Najaf, about 135 kilometers south of Baghdad, Selim was arrested in 1998 at the family's home in Baghdad. The military then destroyed the house
.
What Jassim wanted was to provide his brother with a proper Islamic burial, in which the body is ritually washed and wrapped in white linen. But he could not find the grave: The numbers ran from 847 to 848, then skipped up to 853.
.
They decided to dig anyway. "Do you want me to dig up everything or just the head?" the gravedigger asked. Jassim decided just to see the head, because he believed he could identify his brother by the two missing back teeth.
.
"There are so many graves that don't have numbers," he said. "We don't know what to do." The dirt was dry and easily dug and soon the gravedigger held up a skull. "It's not him," Jassim said. "The teeth are complete."
.
At grave No. 444, a large family worked together to unearth Hamid Omran, who was 31 when he was arrested in 1994. As the family carefully lifted the bones onto fresh linen, his cousin, Farhan Jassim, 47, exploded in anger.
.
"I don't think there was a regime in the world that treated political prisoners the way Saddam did," he said. "You can't imagine such exaggerated injustice."
.
The jaw surfaced. Saddam, the cousin said, "hated every Iraqi. Believe me, he hated all Iraqis."
.
Then the family found the skull, which showed a crack in a temple, which the family said was from a kick from a guard when he was first arrested.
.
Another cousin, Thaer Ghawi, 27, wept as he smoked a cigarette once all the bones were out of the grave.
.
"We are just people who opposed the regime," he said. "Why couldn't he just put political prisoners in prison?"
.
Hani, the man whose brother disappeared in 1995, spent three hours picking through the grave of his brother. It was laborious. After the teeth, they found a few small bones, perhaps from the feet or hands. Finally, he had found enough to fill a small coffin. He did not find the skull.
.
"It is enough for me," he said as he loaded the coffin onto a truck. "I feel relieved. What worried me before was I didn't know if he was alive or dead. Now I know |
