The silence and afternoon heat in the school gymnasium at Musayyib is broken by a sudden wail of grief beyond consolation. Nuria Jasen Shana has found her son at last.
The quiet had been that of death: the gym is filled with some 200 reassembled and partly clothed skeletons, wrapped in white cloth sheeting, from what was yesterday emerging as potentially one of the biggest and most gruesome mass grave sites of victims slaughtered by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Jasen and her daughter, Afra, were alone in this macabre space, surveying them, body by body, until they reached corpse number 165. The mother’s face froze with the disbelief of reluctant recognition as she started sifting through the clothing wrapped around the bones – a soiled pair of green shorts and a red T-shirt.
Then Afra pulled out an identity card: a photo portrait of Lafta Abu Shana, and his particulars, born in 1971.
‘My son, my son!’ she cried through her tears. ‘You did so much for me, and I could do nothing to help you. I was waiting for you all this time, thinking you were alive, and did not want to find you here.’ While she kissed the photograph, her son’s body was duly removed from its row, transferred to the line of those identified – the white cotton sheet acting as a hammock for the collection of bones and clothes, then loaded onto a truck which carried the grieving women away, leaving a trail of dust.
The grave itself was uncovered on Thursday, when the exhumations began, at a remote site out in the arid desert, some 15 miles from this town which is south-west of Baghdad.
All these victims were massacred following the Shia uprising against Saddam on the slipstream of the 1991 Gulf war, an intifada that was urged but unaided by then President George Bush Senior. The rebellion was left to its fate: a punitive onslaught by Saddam’s Republican Guard.
It was victims of that same surge by Saddam’s killers who also filled the mass graves uncovered two weeks ago at Hilla, close to ancient Babylon, where more than 3,000 skeletons were found under the dirt.
Forensic experts from the UK, Bournemouth-based Inforce, arrived yesterday to piece together exactly what happened to those who died and how, in order to use the information in potential criminal prosecutions.
Also clear from this latest mass grave is confirmation of just how close the Shia uprising came to taking Baghdad, had it been supported by the West. Musayyib is only a 45-minute drive from the capital itself.
Two graves are already being exhumed, with 470 bodies recovered since Thursday. Excavations have just begun on another two trenches, with four more graves further identified but as yet unworked. And as Karim Jasim – resting himself and his spade to wet his parched throat with water – says: ‘How many more are out there?’
Each cut of the workers’ spades unearths another collection of reddened bones and soiled clothing – some of the dead were wearing military fatigues, others were clad in sports or everyday clothes when they were killed, a track suit here, a pin-striped suit there. A skull appears every ten minutes or so, its teeth in a mocking grin.
This is what happened to the victims of Musayyib: in the wake of the insurrection, anyone suspected with taking part was ordered or taken to an outdoor space, and boarded onto trucks and buses. The vehicles were then driven from the river valley out into nowhere. There, the captives were lined up – hands tied and blindfolded – and pushed into the bottom of the pits. And in this earthy tomb, they were machine-gunned and the dirt replaced by bulldozer, by way of crude cover.
‘You do not necessarily die immediately from a machine gun,’ says Peter Bouckaert of the Human Rights Watch experts working with the excavation teams, ‘and so many of these people might well have been wounded but alive when they were buried.’
One man, a local construction worker called Husan Kalah, says he saw the trucks arriving at the scene: ‘I watched them come, usually in the morning, for two hours a day, turning off the road and into the desert. They came back a while later, they came away empty.’
Among the throng that has assembled, looking for clues that may bring back to them the corpses of missing relatives is Hatem Ibrahim. ‘They forced us down to the casino place where people go for Pepsi and tea – my brother, myself, two cousins and a friend. We were blindfolded and handcuffed, then they took us out to the trucks. They loaded the people on, and my brothers were the last before they shut the gate at the back of the pickup, but there was not room for me. They were so crowded, there was no space, so they uncuffed me and told me to go away.’
As midday heat slows the men’s grisly work, two smart four-wheel-drives plough on to the scene. This is the team from Inforce. Jonathan Forrest explains how most of the group had cut their teeth in the Balkans, their project now seeking ‘to combine forensic work with human rights’, exhuming remains not just to identify victims but to prepare evidence to the standards of a court of law.
The team is also accompanied by Colonel Ed Burley of the US Army, a former homicide prosecutor for the Justice Department in Washington, now seconded, he says, ‘to work on the forensic effort with a view to prosecutions’.
The ironic twist of the colonel’s visit is not lost on the excavator, Jasim. ‘It is a shame that he and his army was not here 12 years ago,’ he says with a bitter smile. ‘You see, sir, there are two Iraqs,’ he muses, ‘one above the ground, and another beneath it.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â