BAGHDAD - Two Kurdish witnesses at Saddam Hussein's genocide trial gave
harrowing accounts of surviving killing fields where guards executed hundreds of
detainees at a time in sprays of gunfire.
Ali Hasan al-Majid gestures while
addressing the court during Saddam Hussein's genocide trial in Baghdad.
Saddam's troops drove terrified Kurdish villagers into the desert and
gunned them down by the truckload, witnesses have told the ousted Iraqi
leader's genocide trial. [AFP] |
One said Wednesday he fell wounded into a ditch full of bodies. He said he
climbed out and ran for his life past mounds in the desert, the mass graves of
other victims in a 1987-88 military offensive against Iraq's Kurds.
Both witnesses described prisoners making their last prayers for God's
forgiveness of their sins as they rode in trucks to the execution site _ and
said some detainees made desperate attempts to attack guards in hopes of
escaping.
The testimony came in the trial of Saddam and six other co-defendants for
their roles in Operation Anfal, an offensive during which the prosecution says
some 180,000 Kurds were killed and hundreds of their villages cleared. The seven
face execution by hanging if convicted.
Saddam sat silently as both Kurds testified from behind curtains to protect
their identities. One co-defendant, his cousin Ali al-Majid, scoffed at their
accounts.
"You told us a story from which a blockbuster could be made," said al-Majid,
who is accused of directing Operation Anfal and became known as "Chemical Ali"
for toxic gas attacks on Kurdish villages during the offensive.
The two witnesses said they were held at the Tob Zawa prison camp in northern
Iraq with hundreds of others after attacks on their towns. They each described
separate massacres in 1988 of detainees who were herded onto trucks and told
they were being taken to another prison camp.
The first witness said the truck he was in stopped on an unpaved road in the
desert of western Iraq. A prisoner named Anwar warned that they were going to be
executed, the witness said.
He "asked us to recite the Islamic prayers before death and plead for
forgiveness. He said 'We are going to die in minutes, it is the forgiveness time
for people who are going to die,"' the witness said in Kurdish.
"It was dark when they brought a group of people (prisoners) in front of the
vehicle. The drivers got out of our vehicles and turned on the headlights," he
said.
Some prisoners tried to grab an automatic rifle from a guard, but failed
because "we were so weak," he said.
Soldiers then opened fire. "I ran and fell into a ditch. It was full of
bodies. I fell on a body. It was still alive. It was his last breath," said the
witness. "It was really unbelievable, the number of people being killed like
this."
Slightly wounded, he stripped off his clothes, thinking he was more likely to
blend into the color of the sand if he were naked, the witness said. He then
began running again.
"As I was running, I saw many pits, I saw many mounds, and I saw lots of
people who had been shot," he said. "The desert was full of mounds that had
people buried underneath."
The witness said he took refuge with Kurds living nearby, then traveled
north. For the next 15 years he lived in hiding, moving frequently, until
Saddam's ouster.
The second witness described a similar massacre, saying he was in a group of
about 500 prisoners taken from Tob Zawa. When the trucks stopped in the desert,
they heard gunfire.
"We knew it was the people in the other vehicle being shot and our turn would
be next," he said. "We exchanged forgiveness and we were weeping."
"At that point, we decided that if they came to kill us, we would attack
them," he recalled. "We decided that even if one person survived, he could be a
witness and tell the world of our fate. I was flashing back to the image of my
son, who was 2 years old, and I was thinking of my mother, who was going to lose
her son."
He said when the guards began taking the detainees out of the truck, the
prisoners attacked, but the guards opened fire.
"They continued to fire all over the vehicle from every direction and I was
injured by a bullet in my back," the witness said.
He said he managed to get out of the truck and hide in bushes. Several other
wounded prisoners also escaped, he said.
Saddam and al-Majid are charged with genocide. They and the other five
defendants also face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, all of
which carry a possible death penalty.
The trial is the second for Saddam. A verdict in his first trial _ for a
crackdown on a Shiite Muslim town in the 1980s _ is due November 5, with many
people expecting a death sentence that could inflame Iraq's sectarian violence.
Shiites and Kurds are eager to see Saddam executed. But many in the
once-dominant Sunni Arab minority see the trial as an exercise in vengeance by
Shiites and Kurds, who have controlled Iraq's government since Saddam's fall in
April 2003.
Associated Press writers Sinan Salaheddin reported from Baghdad, Iraq, and
Jamal Halaby from Amman, Jordan. Some material in this story came from a pool
report at the trial in Baghdad.
