In the spacious courtyard under the window, a procession of people file in, reading the lists posted on the insides of the garden walls. It’s a strangely quiet throng, although from time to time a woman wails or a man shouts in pain. The names on the lists: those known to have been executed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Under the window, a knot of people gathers to get the attention of the Committee for Missing Persons, convened now in that living room. One man holds up three black-and-white photos of young men. He doesn’t say anything. A woman named Saad Jaber Abadi clutches a picture of her brother, Atta, to her chest. “He was a brave son of Iraq, an athlete in international competitions, a runner. They just told us he’s been hanged, but we never got the body.”
Then others gather below the window. Everyone is considerate, no one interrupts one another; it’s not the usual unruly Iraqi crowd scene. “They hanged one of my brothers, and these two are missing,” says Basil Abdul Saoud Jaber, of Saad Jaber, 17, and Kaseem Jaber, 18. “Saad was only a boy, he didn’t even have a mustache yet.” Someone else raises his hand to be recognized. “Excuse me, this is even worse,” says Shehed Sahar Khodar. “My brother disappeared in 1981. My mother and father kept asking at State Security for his body and one day they disappeared, too. They told us don’t come here asking again.” Amin Hashem Amin raises both hands, displays eight fingers, thrusting them forward until he’s recognized. “Four first cousins and four good neighbors I lost,” he says. “We found the body of only one of them. Then they took our houses and our farm.” His face crumples, the other men look away politely, and Amin weeps. Some of these people are just looking; others, like Amin, have found their loved ones’ names on the lists. “I have 16 dead of my friends,” the next man to raise his hand says. “They gave us back two bodies, both without their eyes.”
And so it goes now at the offices of the Committee, hour after hour, day after day. Anyone who doubts the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime need only spend a little time here, at the epicenter of efforts to unravel what happened, account for the dead and missing, locate the bodies in the mass graves that are daily being discovered throughout the country.
Working from archives seized from many of the regime’s buildings housing secret police, state security, military intelligence, Baathist Party headquarters and so on, the Committee so far has produced a list of 10,000 names of those executed by the regime. After cross-checking, they post lists of those confirmed executed; as of this week there were 5,663 names posted on sheets of white paper taped to the courtyard walls. Most are handwritten. “We’ve only gone through 1 percent of the files so far,” says Ameer Ali Saleh, who is in charge of the Committee’s files section. “You can do the arithmetic yourself.” That could be as many as half a million victims, then, an astonishing figure, far worse even than most of Saddam’s critics had imagined.
At a time when government ministries in Baghdad as vital as water supply and power generation are struggling to reorganize, and doing a poor job of it, the Committee has become one of the country’s few functioning institutions. It’s an entirely homegrown effort. Started by Ibrahim al-Idrisi and a small group of his friends, all former political prisoners, they initially called themselves the Committee of Free Prisoners.
In the first weeks after Saddam’s fall, Iraqis were convinced that their missing were all in secret prisons scattered around the country, and the Committee began by hunting for them. So did Coalition troops, responding to one tip after another from Iraqis. But to date no secret prison has been found. Instead, they found documents, and from them the picture of routine, large-scale executions of prisoners began to take shape. The Committee squatted in the villa in Kadhimiyah, abandoned by its owner, Safyan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s top personal bodyguard. With three ancient computers looted from the Mukhabarat, the secret police, and furniture donated by friends, they went to work.
Soon it snowballed. The crowds around the villa daily got larger. People were contributing files found throughout the country. Every available corner of the building was full of stacks of folders and documents. Security became a major concern. Twice someone drove by and fired shots at the building. Looters tried to get in at night. Five days ago a bomb was discovered in a car parked out front; fortunately, it was a dud. The questing crowds themselves were a problem.
One day American officers dropped by to see what was going on. The Third Infantry Division’s Third Brigade had set up a base not far away in the old Iraqi military intelligence headquarters. They wanted to take the files into safekeeping in their base. Ibrahim al-Idrisi drove a hard bargain. He would let them take the documents, but he wanted a written guarantee that the Committee would have unfettered, daily access to them. He wanted American ID cards and laissez-passers to enter the base and peruse the files. And he wanted the right to post guards with automatic weapons in the villa. After some dickering, the Americans agreed. A week ago, Capt. John Billmyer showed up with six armored dump trucks, 12-wheelers. It took three trips to remove everything, 18 truckloads of files. “This is a very impressive group,” Billmyer said. “We want to make sure they can keep doing their work in safety.”
Idrisi was less complimentary. He’s suspicious of American intentions in Iraq, and is not looking to the U.S. military for anything except protection of their documents. “It’s not a question of being happy about it,” he said. “There’s no other solution to making the files safe.” Added committee member Saleh: “I think the Coalition forces are interested in the oil more than in humanitarian causes or human-rights cases.”
Ibrahim al-Idrisi and his fellow Committee members are hard, unsmiling men. Toughened in Saddam’s prisons, most are devout Shiites; the centers of their foreheads bear the scars that come from fervent prayer, striking their heads against the little prayer stone that Shiites call a turbah. Sunnis often deride them as “head-bangers.” Idrisi, now 35, was picked up in 1986 as a teenager for his membership in a banned Shia group, called the Hizbullah al Wahed, the One Party of God. He was tortured, his wrists lashed together behind his back, and then hung by the arms from the ceiling; it was a common technique that often leaves its victims permanently unable to raise their arms much above their shoulders. He spent his young adulthood locked up, condemned to death but kept alive in the hopes he would lead them to other party members, until he joined a prison breakout in 1994. Then he was a hunted man until the regime collapsed. Hizbullah al Wahed only had 150 members at its peak; 31 were hanged, two others died of torture, many fled the country, others simply disappeared.
Idrisi found four survivors, and they became the nucleus of the Committee. “Nobody gave us any help,” he said. “We are doing it all ourselves. When we started we were even working on the floor.” Now there’s a yard-sale hodgepodge of furniture; last week they finally got a CD-ROM drive so they could begin reading secret files on disks. No one knew how to use it at first; computers had been strictly controlled under Saddam’s regime. They were hopeful that foreign human-rights groups would come and offer aid, but only one representative from Human Rights Watch has visited, Idrisi said, and nothing has materialized. “We’re disappointed,” said Saleh. “We thought human rights should be the concern of the whole world. Maybe all anyone is interested in is Iraq’s oil.”
Two other windows opening on the courtyard have had the glass knocked out of them too, and in each one a scribe sits with a ledger for the missing. Those who don’t find their loved ones posted on the walls report there to record the person’s name and details. So far they’ve filled six of the ledgers; each has a hundred pages, each page holds 50 names. That’s 30,000 so far, though there may well be duplication, and the Committee’s clerks are adding names nearly as fast as they can write. Some people come with the green death warrants that record the judicial verdict and the sentence imposed; often they were given these but never told where the body had been buried. Others have nothing but their memories, as vivid as the day the person disappeared. What he wore, who took him, the look on his face when they saw him led away. Some disappeared two months ago, others 10 and even 20 years before, but the need to know what happened is undimmed by time.
The Committee’s view is that Saddam Hussein’s regime slaughtered 8 million people; in a country of 25 million that’s a pretty extreme estimate. “Hitler was a minor student in the school of Saddam, and not a very good student by comparison,” Idrisi said. “Just in my small family, my cousin was in prison, my father, brother, and five or six other cousins disappeared,” he said. Saleh agreed. “No family in Iraq is without its missing. My brother, too. Still I haven’t reached his grave, but I saw the file.”
Challenging such over-the-top figures provokes annoyance among the Committee members. “How can we have 8 million? I’ll show you.” Saleh produces an armful of fat file folders. “Look at this one. Look at the file number.” It’s stamped TOP SECRET, labeled Department of General Security, Branch 45, File No. 12584. Branch 45 specialized in the banned Shiite group Al Dawa. This is a case file concerning one Satter Jaber Meslain, an investigation that lasted from 1981-1983. As the result of his confession and other investigative leads that his interrogation produced, 55 persons are implicated; all are listed here as condemned to death on one page, and then, on a paper dated hours later, confirmed “hanged by a rope until dead.” On the front of the file folio is a strip of computer stickers, the kind used to track inventory, bearing the number 507989493; they seem to be file locators. “Look how big that number is. It was indescribable what they did. There are millions of files, millions.”
He pulls out another, quite similar file, Branch 45, File No. 1055. An investigation into one person, led to 54 persons executed. And a third file, 28 executed. And a fourth, 26 executed. The floor next to his desk is stacked high with these; and that’s just this day’s work.
The doors of the villa are tightly controlled now, by guards with their AK-47s laid across a desk blocking the way. Only those on Committee business are let inside, and those whose discoveries on the walls outside have made them so distraught they need comforting. Committee members speak in hushed tones to the bereaved; it helps to know how many others have had the same experience. In his quiet, stern way, Idrisi has the same message, over and over. The files also had the names of the torturers and the executioners. They’re in code, but they hope to break that code. “We will catch them. And when we catch them, we won’t do the same thing they did to us. We will take them to court and put them on television and let the people see who they are, and what they did.”
Basil Jaber, the man whose brother had not yet grown his mustache, leaves oddly reassured. He never really expected to find his brothers alive, anyway, but at least someone is trying to do something about it. “We are not animals,” he says. “There is law. Those who did this will go to court. My brothers were only going to pray, that’s all they did.”
The guards have let a woman named Suheila Daoud come inside; she is wailing and beating the sides of her head with both fists. Only her face can be seen under the black abaya; it is wet with tears. Her neighbor is let in to try to calm her. One of her brothers had been an opposition agitator; authorities first arrested him and then came later for her other four brothers. The youngest, Muhammed, was only 12 years old, another, Ali, was 13, the rest in their 20s. She has just found their names on the wall outside, ordered hanged many years before. Late last year she saw the Iraqi minister of information, Mohammed Sayid al Sahaf, on the street, and got down on her knees in front of him. “I kissed his hand and said, ‘Please, just let me see one of my brothers, only the small one, he’s still a baby, let me come to him, please.’ And he said, ‘OK, all will get out, don’t worry.’ They lied.” Then the Americans came and she was filled with hope that her brothers would come out alive from one of the prisons, until she saw their names on the Committee’s wall lists. “I want only one thing now, to catch Saddam and bring him in front of us. Tell Mr. Bush our hearts will never rest until he is punished.”
Idrisi and the other Committee members set their faces and walk back upstairs to their inner sanctums. Guards politely block the staircase after them. Saleh returns to his boiler room of computers and files and ashtrays piled high with the butts of cheap Iraqi cigarettes. Idrisi settles at his desk, an old table in the living room, a huddle of other serious men around him. And on the other side of the jagged frame of the picture window, the solemn searchers continue to come and go.
