Charting grisly evidence in Iraqi desert

source: PUK website

By Thanassis Cambanis The Boston Globe
Thursday, October 14, 2004

HATRA, Iraq Leaning over the jumble of corpses in their bright purple and turquoise dresses, Greg Kehoe pointed out the blindfolds still tightly drawn around the women's skulls.

Kehoe was striding around Ninawa 2, a trench that held the bodies of 300 Kurdish women and children who were executed 16 years ago by Saddam Hussein's regime. The killers used pistols to shoot their victims in the head at point-blank range on a slope leading up from a dust-blown seasonal riverbed, or wadi.

"We have charted how the bodies were thrown into this grave at various levels," said Kehoe, the top American official working with the Iraqi court responsible for trying suspected war criminals. "We are pretty confident there was a bulldozer, that they just bulldozed those bodies in."

An American forensic team, including more than a dozen archaeologists, anthropologists and technicians, is midway through the grisly process of transforming this mass grave into courtroom evidence against Saddam and his henchmen that meets the strictest international legal standards.

This is the first of 10 sites that Kehoe plans to excavate. Kehoe, a former U.S. prosecutor, led a group of reporters on a helicopter trip last weekend to this remote desert spot about 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, north of Baghdad, showing the meticulous exhumation work at the grave site. The group also was shown the extensive forensic analysis taking place since Sept. 1 at a morgue at the nearest U.S. Army installation, Forward Operating Base Jaguar.

Officials waited until now to publicly discuss their first exhumation because they did not want to endanger workers at the site by revealing its location.

Kehoe began assembling his investigative team in June. One immediate focus was the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where Saddam's forces crushed an independence movement in the 1980s with brutal repression that killed thousands of Kurdish villagers.

"I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," said Kehoe, who spent five years investigating mass graves in Bosnia for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia.

Just up the hill, in the trench called Ninawa 9, the bodies of Kurdish men appeared frozen in action against the far side of a much deeper hole. Spent machine-gun bullet casings, ripped clothing and the clustering of corpses on the far wall have convinced Kehoe that the men were tied together and led to the bottom of the trench before their killers opened fire, probably with an AK-47.

"Once the shooting begins, people begin to wince and move, and that's when you get the odd person here or there will have a stranger trajectory because they're hiding," Kehoe said. He said Iraqi informants had told investigators that thousands were executed here.

The executioners picked their location carefully, driving their victims to a dusty wadi about three kilometers from the nearest town, hidden from the road by a long, sloping, sandy ridge.

Sometime in late 1987 or early 1988, about 300 Kurdish women and children were brought to this dust bowl from their village in the verdant hills around Lake Dukan. Here, they were systematically executed, shot with pistols in the back of the head or in the face at point-blank range before their bodies were bulldozed into a narrow pit.

Some of the women were pregnant. The women appeared to be carrying all their belongings, some wearing as many as 11 layers of clothing and carrying pots and pans with them.

In the morgue, investigators like Jessica Mondero sorted fetal bones, jewelry and money from the corpses' clothing.

"We're finding lots of items contained in the clothing," Mondero said, cleaning a woman's blue dress with a toothbrush. "Lots of children's clothing, medication, beads, money, change purses layered within the clothing."

The men buried in the nearby trench, about 156 of them, were probably brought to the killing field on a different day, investigators believe. A broken tibia protruded from the top layer of bodies left in the men's grave. Many of the skulls still had hair, even though the flesh was gone.

Until now, professional investigators have not worked on any untouched grave sites like this one. Immediately after Saddam's government fell, family members destroyed the value of many mass graves as courtroom evidence when they dug them up to reclaim relatives' bodies and give them proper burials.

A nationwide insurgency has put much of the country off limits to Kehoe's exhumation and forensic team, the only one of its kind under the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, which received $75 million for two years of investigations in Iraq. The team can operate only in easily protected areas removed from rebel-controlled zones.

Saddam's government killed an estimated 300,000 people, most of them Shiite Muslims or ethnic Kurds, according to rights groups. The Iraqi government has identified about 40 mass grave sites, but until now none has been scientifically exhumed, in part because European forensic teams will not collect evidence that might be used to obtain death penalty convictions.

Kehoe's team set up shop near Hatra on Sept. 1, and only this week finished exhuming about 200 bodies from the two trenches. A laboratory team will spend another two months cataloging and analyzing the remains.