Iraqis Seek Answers in Newfound Grave

As survivors desperate for news of missing relatives looked on, a big yellow backhoe methodically cut a trench in the sandy dirt, bringing up two more bodies Sunday.

One was desiccated, a shinbone protruding from a pair of green trousers. The other was sodden. It let off a stench as workers tugged it from the yielding loam.

It was a small harvest of bodies for a hot morning’s work, but it did not deter Sheik Khadim Fartousi, the leader of an Islamic charity, who told reporters that they were standing on a mass graveyard -- the site where some of the last executions of political prisoners of Saddam Hussein’s regime had taken place.

Citing witnesses and former employees of the Iraqi intelligence service, Fartousi said that four busloads of political prisoners had been brought to this area near the infamous Salman Pak training camp and chemical weapons facility and executed in April, only five days before U.S. forces took nearby Baghdad.

Like a water diviner guided by some extrasensory antenna, Fartousi, whose organization is called Al Walah, or Loyalty, stood next to the backhoe and motioned to the sweating, white-turbaned operator to move his shovel a little to the left and try there. He watched until satisfied, then walked away, his long brown robe flowing with his determined gait.

So far, he said, seven bodies had been revealed in two days of work, and he expected to find others in the brown mottled earth in the immediate vicinity.

“You could hear the shooting,” recalled Mustafa Saad, an 18-year-old who lives in the area. “It happened during a dust storm.”

According to Saad and other townspeople, the buses had driven along the dirt track that runs along the Tigris River here, laden with prisoners. When the buses came back, Saad said, they were empty. The executioners had been in such a hurry to flee that they had not had time to bury those killed, and others came later to do that, he said.

“We saw hands torn away,” he said. “One was holding a Koran. In one of the pockets we found cigarettes and a lighter.”

The newly found gravesite is at a place that -- according to defectors -- was used by the Hussein regime to train assassins for the intelligence service. It is along the river where it makes a loop 15 miles south of Baghdad. And unlike other mass graves that have been uncovered in the two months since U.S. and British forces took control of Iraq, these graves are recent. Religious leaders say they are convinced that up to 150 political prisoners met their fate here in Salman Pak on April 4, when Hussein’s regime was gasping its last breath.

Several dozen men were helping with the excavation Sunday. They scampered over the hot soil, some in bare feet, brushing back dirt and picking up the remains with hands covered with plastic bags or latex gloves. When recovered, the remains were inspected for any documents and wrapped in two layers of clear plastic.

Among those waiting, desperate for any scrap of information, was Kamal Sagban, 58, a grizzled farmer who had arisen at 4 a.m. to drive from his home in Samawah, 130 miles south, on the faintest of hopes that he might find the remains of his younger brother, who had been taken away by the regime’s security service in February 1992.

Sagban had heard about the discovery of the Salman Pak gravesite on television and decided at once to investigate, as he had several other mass graves in recent weeks since the collapse of the Hussein regime.

“They claimed he was a member of the Dawa Party [a mainly Shiite group with a long history of resistance to Baathist rule], but he had nothing to do with that,” Sagban said of his brother Abul Zahra, who would now be 53 and left behind two wives. “Maybe at least I will find his ID.”

Ajiba Ali Salma, teary eyed, her leathery face framed by a black chador, voiced similar feelings about her son Moussa Hadi Moussa, who would be 40 now. He has been missing since his arrest at his home in Baghdad in 1991.

“As soon as they took him, I started searching for him. Whenever I hear any news, I go there to find him,” she said. “I go to the Freed Prisoners Society. Now I am going to all the mass graves. But I am about to lose my hope.”

Fartousi said that his organization would take the remains and provide proper Muslim burials if no one claimed them. They will be photographed and cataloged and put into the association’s records, available for scrutiny by families still looking for loved ones.

According to Fartousi, the land in which the bodies are buried was taken by the intelligence service from a landowner in Salman Pak, who now wants to reclaim his property and plant crops here. To do so would be forbidden for religious reasons, Fartousi said, until the bodies were dug up and moved to proper cemeteries.

He dismissed the possibility that any serious forensic work could be done on the remains by criminal investigators to determine their identities.

“Saddam made Iraq a ruins, so we have no facilities to make such investigations,” he said.

Besides, he said, the crime is obvious.

“All the media is here,” he said. “They can see everything: The bodies are blindfolded, their hands are tied or their legs.... Their clothes are the clothes of prisoners. I know this well because I myself was a prisoner in Saddam’s prison for 12 years.”

Asked what comfort he could give people like Salma and Sagban, who may never find their loved ones, he looked puzzled.

“What we tell them,” he finally said, “is that we will never give up.”