The massacre families who bay for Saddam’s blood
Times of London ^ | 6/12/05 | Ali Rifat
Posted on 06/12/2005 4:49:59 PM EDT by wagglebee
NOT even the news of Saddam Hussein’s approaching trial and possible execution can quench Um Talal-Khuraytli’s thirst for revenge. Her one wish in life, she says, is to drink his blood.
“If they hanged Saddam in front of me and I was given the chance to cut him to pieces, it would not be enough,” said the elderly Shi’ite, whose tears flowed as she remembered her dead children. “Each of them was worth 1,000 Saddams.”
Um Talal’s horror stretches back to July 1982, when her family’s village, Dujail, 40 miles north of Baghdad, hosted a visit by Saddam. Tired of decades of repression by his Sunni-dominated Ba’athist security forces, the Shi’ite men risked all on an assassination attempt.
Trying to kill Saddam, protected as he was by a bristling security entourage, was hopelessly naive and the president’s revenge was inevitable. As troops and helicopter gunships razed Dujail, Um Talal’s family was rounded up.
Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Um Talal may at last see justice. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister, said last week Saddam would go on trial before the end of the year and the Dujail massacre emerged as one of 14 thoroughly documented cases that will be used in his prosecution. Um Talal will be a key witness.
Apart from the brutal suppression of Kurdish and Shi’ite uprisings, other charges against Saddam will probably include the killing of rival politicians and the invasion of Kuwait.
Among those involved in the Dujail attack was Sheikh Faris al-Dujaili. Last week he recalled the events of July 8, 1982, and how he and 18 other young men planned to ambush Saddam’s fleet of vehicles as it came down the main road.
Armed with machineguns, the group had lain in wait in farmland for days. At 1.30pm, their scout sent back news of the president’s approach: his was the 13th vehicle in a convoy of 22 Mercedes cars. As the limousines neared, the men opened fire.
“But we did not know the cars were bulletproof,” al-Dujaili lamented. “If only we’d had RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), we would have saved Iraq from this oppressor.”
Despite being so badly outnumbered and outgunned, al-Dujaili and his insurgents put up a plucky fight. He saw Saddam scramble for shelter beneath his car while his bodyguards and escorts laid down covering fire. Nine of al-Dujaili’s colleagues were killed and he claimed 22 of Saddam’s men also died.
Anxious to preserve his strongman image, Saddam continued with his visit. But within an hour of his departure, the gunships and special forces arrived. Al-Dujaili and his surviving comrades hid for five days, then stayed in the home of a Baghdad dentist for a month before moving on to Iran. The dentist and her husband were later executed.
Those left in the village faced a terrible fate. Hundreds of families were arrested and thousands of acres of palm and fruit plantations, the main source of income for the villagers, were put to the torch. Even today, the scars are visible — the main road is pocked with holes from the shells that rained down 23 years ago.
Despite having played no part in the fighting, Um Talal’s family was rounded up, including her husband, six daughters, six sons, a daughter-in-law and a six-year-old grandson. Saddam’s troops executed 15 villagers immediately; then the interrogations began.
Most of those arrested were taken to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, where Um Talal last saw her menfolk.
Dujail’s Special Committee of Freed Prisoners, which has submitted the case to the lawyers preparing Saddam’s prosecution, said it had found documents listing 148 inhabitants executed by a special decree signed by Saddam and dated July 23, 1985. Most of them had endured show trials. The committee estimates that in total 385 were executed.
Witnesses speak of Abu Ghraib’s torturers pulling out nails and teeth, and administering electric shocks. Victims were whipped and had their skin cut with razors. Women were brought naked in front of their husbands and sons and threatened with hanging to extract confessions.
According to government officials, the brutal repression of the village was led by Barzan al-Tikriti, a half-brother of Saddam who was head of intelligence; Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice-president; and three other senior Ba’athist officials. All five are expected to stand trial alongside Saddam.
Khalil al-Dulaymi, one of Saddam’s lawyers, said they had not been formally notified of any charges, but added: “It is natural when someone tries to assassinate the president for him to respond in a firm manner against such a threat and to remove everything that may repeat such an attempt.
“After investigations they found that the people responsible were being financed by terrorist cells outside Iraq and that they were linked to the Daawa party, a banned party in Iraq at the time, whose intention was to destabilise the security of the country.”
Um Talal’s grim odyssey did not end at Abu Ghraib. Women, children and the elderly were moved to a huge prison in Bassiyah, stuck in the desert that stretches towards Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia.
“No one could come in or escape,” she said, describing how she and her daughters spent 4 years incarcerated. In an act of appalling cruelty, she said, the guards killed Raida, her pregnant daughter-in-law, by tying her legs together when she was in labour.
“She screamed in pain for hours,” she said. “They left her in labour and would not untie her. Eventually she and the unborn baby died.”
Afterwards Raida’s son Muthana, who was six, was taken away to the men’s section of the prison. He died there later.
Other survivors echoed Um Talal’s terrible story. One was 10 when she, her parents and her elder brothers were arrested. She is the only survivor. “I used to cry with my mother each time they brought her back from interrogation and torture,” she recalled.
Firas Mahmoud Yakoo was only seven when his mother, father and elder brothers and sisters were arrested. “Four years in hell,” he wrote in an internet blog last year. “We were isolated from the world.”
When the women and children were eventually freed, they returned to their village to find their properties and savings confiscated by the regime.
Dujail is now held by insurgents, but its people are fiercely proud of their attempt to kill Saddam and have readily helped the prosecutors.
The Dujail massacre carries a special resonance for many members of Iraq’s new government. Al-Dujaili and the men who carried out the assassination attempt were indeed members of the Daawa party, whose leader is now the prime minister, al-Jaafari.
After the terrors she has witnessed, Um Talal sees no sentence as too harsh for Saddam, returning to her favoured punishment for the man who has destroyed her life. “I wish they would let me drink his blood so that I can quench the fire in my heart,” she said. A former member of the Wolf Brigade, the elite Iraqi police commando unit, blew himself up yesterday in a failed attempt to assassinate its leader. Three members of the unit died in the attack in Baghdad.
The US military said it killed 40 insurgents in airstrikes near the Syrian border.
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Witnesses speak of Abu Ghraib’s torturers pulling out nails and teeth, and administering electric shocks. Victims were whipped and had their skin cut with razors. Women were brought naked in front of their husbands and sons and threatened with hanging to extract confessions.
The left was content to let Saddam stay in power because nobody had panties put on their heads. |
