On Sabbath Eve, Families Keep Vigil at Martyrs’ Graves : Kuwait: The weekly tradition of paying respects to the dead is taking on political and symbolic overtones.

They come each Sabbath eve, the white- and black-robed mourners, to squat in the sand beside the graves of their martyrs.

They read the Koran, they weep and they pour sweet rose water over the dusty marble headstones. Some plot revenge.

About 300 men and women killed during the occupation by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops are buried in this desert cemetery, about six miles west of Kuwait city. The Muslim priest who washed and wrapped the bodies said many had been tortured and mutilated.

Nearly three months after Kuwait’s liberation, the tradition of paying respects to the dead on the evening before each Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, has begun to take on political and symbolic overtones.

Red, white and green Kuwaiti flags are carved into many headstones, and in the parking lot Thursday, even several Mercedes-Benzes were plastered with “Free Kuwait’ and “Operation Desert Storm” bumper stickers.

As a pallid sun set into a dust storm, five black-veiled women kept vigil over the grave of 22-year-old Hamza Abbas. They said he had helped the resistance and was found with 19 bullets in his body, holes drilled through his ribs, his fingernails torn out.

“Maybe after Saddam’s head is cut, we will be happy, but we will never forget our martyrs,” said Abbas’ cousin, Narges Hussein Ali Hussein.

“This thing will be unhealed,” she said. “It will not be forgotten by the Kuwaitis, forever. Even the next generation will know what happened in Kuwait.”

Abbas’s brother Imir was also executed by the Iraqis, Hussein said. Their mother was pregnant, and the family hid the truth from her until she had given birth to a baby girl.

“They took her to Saudi Arabia and told her that her two sons had been released,” Hussein said. “They waited until she delivered the baby and then they told her (the truth). . . .”

The spiritual patron of this 20-year-old graveyard is Hassan Mohammed Dashti, 55, the imam of a nearby mosque. Through an interpreter, Dashti explained that several months into the seven-month-long occupation, he learned that the cemetery’s workers had all fled in terror after seeing the condition of some of the bodies being brought there.

“Some had their tongues, ears, noses cut off,” Dashti said. “They took their eyes out. And they did something to men and women I cannot say. . . . It is too horrible to describe.”

Believing it a sin to abandon a soul in need of burial, Dashti himself washed and wrapped the corpses, about 500 in all, and said the traditional prayers for the dead. Some appeared foreign, but he gave them proper Muslim burials just in case.

“There was no one else to do it,” Dashti said. “I am a representative for all Kuwaitis to take care here. I cannot leave the corpses without burying them.”

He waved a foreign visitor through the narrow burial ground, past simple graves no more than gravel-covered humps and past polished marble slabs.

“You and all the media are welcome here,” he said. “We want to show the world what they did to us.”

He stopped at the graves of two other brothers, whose headstones heralded their membership in the Massila Resistance Group.

Relatives praying there said Hussein Ali, 21, and Khalid Ali, 25, were among eight young men who ambushed and shot two Iraqi officers in an empty grain warehouse on Feb. 25, two days before liberation. But Iraqi soldiers surrounded the building and threw grenades inside, killing all eight.

In the confusion of the Iraqi withdrawal, the brothers’ bodies ended up at separate hospitals, said their sister, Azziza Ismail Hussein Ali. The family claimed Hussein’s body but could not find Khalid. With no telephones and no electricity, it was days before they learned he was dead, and by then, he had been buried in a different cemetery.

Now, every Thursday their four sisters and their 55-year-old mother make pilgrimages, first to one cemetery, then the next, bringing bottled water and perfume to wet each grave.

“We feel that this martyr is waiting for us, to read the Koran for him and give a blessing for him,” said their mother, Kubia Ali Mohammed. “His body has died, but his soul is in paradise.”

But another sister, kneading a tissue in her fist, appeared less sanguine.

“Every Thursday of our lives, we will come,” she said.