Four Years Later, Neighbors Overcome by Grief and Anger

Standing in the rubble of what was once his home and his life, a blind man named Esmaeel Alwan Agool on Sunday was cast back to the night when the authorities came to his house and arrested his sons and went next door and took away his relatives. They bulldozed the other house on the spot, and flattened his own house a week later.

Agool lost his sight just after the arrests, and whatever explanation science might offer, he blames it on that night four years ago.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I was crying too much.”

When Agool returned to the wind-whipped vacant block Sunday, he met a neighbor he hadn’t encountered since that night. The two men clasped each other with a kind of desperation and wept. The sound, wrenched from deep in their chests, was like sorrow welling out of the very earth they stood upon. People all around were affected, and their eyes filled too.

A few weeks ago, before the Saddam Hussein regime fell, it wouldn’t have been possible for the two old friends to stand on this place with its terrible memories and cry for all that was lost that night. Everyone was too afraid.

At least 120 Basra Shiites, many of them from the Jameyat Al Escan district where Agool, 76, still lives in a rented room, were arrested in March 1999 and never seen again.

Days after the arrests, the rest of their families were jailed, including women and children and anyone who had not yet fled. All their houses were destroyed.

The crackdown came in the wake of Shiite violence that had been sparked by the assassination of Mohammed Sadr, a leading Shiite cleric in this southern city.

The discovery of a list in the ruins of the Security Ministry five days ago containing 120 names of the executed has brought the heartbreaking news that many families suspected but could never quite accept.

Some have gone into mourning. Others are angry, warning that unless those responsible are punished, there could be a wave of revenge killings in Basra.

Here in the volatile south, the scene of a failed 1991 Shiite uprising, the tensions over the killings and the hunger for justice underscore the delicacy of the task of rebuilding the nation and healing past wounds without unleashing waves of sectarian violence.

In one house in the neighborhood Sunday, women from the family of one of the dead, Mohammed Ali Hameed, gathered for three days of mourning in which they would beat their breasts, tear at their clothes, pull out their hair and weep. Hameed, Agool’s brother-in-law, and his three sons were all taken away that night.

On another corner, a white flag of mourning was flying to signal a family’s grief.

In yet another home, a funeral was being planned.

*

Repression of Shiites

Although Shiites are in the majority in Iraq, the minority Sunnis ruled the country under Hussein. Repression of Shiites was particularly marked in the south after the 1991 uprising to try to topple the regime in the wake of the Persian Gulf War. Shiites here feel that the United States abandoned them then, allowing the regime to brutally quell the rebellion.

On that Sunday four years ago, Baath Party officials, led by local party leader Ebraheem Abdul Rahman, and police officers, came at 5 a.m. They searched Agool’s house and arrested his two sons.

“It was chaos. The women were weeping and shouting, the children were crying. Everyone was begging for them to release my sons,” Agool said. “We tried our best. But if you begged too much, or touched them, they could arrest you too.”

Standing in the street and watching the next-door house being bulldozed, Agool understood that, singled out as enemies of the regime, their lives would never be the same.

“I was crying just like a woman,” he said. “I felt as if my life was already over. I knew it would be miserable from then on.”

Agool and other family members spent eight months in jail in communal cells with families of other arrested men. Many were beaten. They were released under an amnesty declared by Hussein.

Grief had already come to Agool and his family. In 1985, another of his sons, Sabah, had been executed. The 24-year-old had been away in the army fighting in the war against Iran. Agool was never told the charge, just summoned with his wife to Baghdad, where they were given a few agonizing minutes to see their son for the last time.

Sabah fell and kissed his father’s feet, but they had barely greeted each other when the parents were hauled out.

Today, Agool rents a room a few hundred yards from his demolished house. To get to it, he has to walk down an alley with an open gutter in this neighborhood haunted by the terror of four years ago.

Nearby, Sohad Kadem, 29, sat as still as a sculpture of stone in her father’s home Sunday recounting the last night she saw her husband, Osama Mohammed Ali. Every inch of her body was swathed in black, from the thick gloves on her hands to the face covering with no eye slots. She said her husband was part of a group of pious Shiites bitterly opposed to the regime, though she was unclear of whether their opposition extended to underground opposition activities.

“He told me they rejected the regime, he and his brothers and even his sisters,” she said. “Every morning when he woke up he would say, ‘Please God, take Saddam.’ ”

*

A Mother Mourns

Mohammed Abdul Ali Noori, 28, also was executed. His family will hold a funeral next week. His mother, Shama Bandar, 57, held her dead son’s photo aloft Sunday, beating her chest and smacking her head, moaning and rocking, as a surviving son, Ahmed, recalled the night the Baath Party members came and took Mohammed away. Ahmed, his father and another brother were arrested and younger siblings were later barred from schooling.

The list of 120 names, found by two students, was copied and taped to a tin shed at the Sayed Ali al Hakeem mosque here. The wind had peeled away the tape and whipped away one page.

A teacher at the mosque, Dawood Al Katrani, 57, said he tried to console families who gathered to see the list and weep. He tried to persuade those set on revenge killings to instead forgive.

“We have to think of our future,” he said. “We want peace and stability.” He said a special court should be set up to deal with regime crimes.

“If they’re not punished, the families will go and punish them,” he said.

Abbas Kheshin Lazem, 60, desperately needed to tell the story of how his son, Khaled Abbas, 36, one of the 120 dead, was killed.

“I have a fire burning in my soul,” he said. “I will kill anyone because I am crazy now. If there’s no justice, we’ll punish them with our hands.”