For decades, farmers in Salman Pak, a lush townland by the Tigris river, used canopies of date palms to shelter orange groves from a broiling sun. When insurgents took over the area earlier this year they used the foliage to hide stolen cars, weapons caches and supply routes from American drones buzzing overhead.
The insurgents’ presence was no secret. They razed the police station, set up checkpoints and turned the surrounding district of Madaen into a stronghold.
But last week it emerged that the palms may have concealed more than just equipment. Police in Suwayrah, a town 24km downriver, reported recovering at least 57 bodies from the Tigris, fuelling claims that Madaen had been turned into an oasis of murder.
Some of the corpses were bound and without heads or limbs, some were bloated and badly decomposed. Most were men but there were several women and children.
When The Guardian, embedded with the 7th US Cavalry’s 3rd squadron, rolled into Madaen on Saturday with a fleet of Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, all was quiet. The insurgents had fled a week earlier, apparently in boats across the Tigris. They left derelict houses which had served as their quarters as well as tonnes of ordnance, a firing range, a car bomb workshop and guerrilla warfare manuals.
One house had pistachio nuts and two glasses of black tea on a floor furnished with rugs. There was an intravenous drip hooked to the wall. A pair of pale blue socks hung on a front door. The only physical evidence of violence was dried blood on the wall of another house.
”There is something going on down here. Folks are scared,” said Captain Brett Bair of the 7th US cavalry.
In a Humvee behind him sat a masked informant who claimed 400 bodies had been dumped in the Tigris. He was a new, untried source and the Americans had yet to evaluate his reliability. His fear was not in doubt: left unattended for a moment, he trembled and almost began to cry.
Residents stayed indoors, leaving the streets, orchards and rows of date palms deserted. The few who agreed to be interviewed spoke in the presence of Iraqi and US soldiers who were wondering whether to search their houses.
”No trouble here, everything is fine,” said one middle-aged woman, a Sunni. Her Shia neighbour nodded. ”Yes, no troubles.” They denied knowledge of any hostages or killings, or that the police station down the road was a burnt-out shell.
One farmer, Abdul (41) initially said the same before confiding that insurgents had abducted and released his son for ransom and threatened to return and punish those who talked. ”They said they would cut it out,” he said, sticking out his tongue and making a slicing motion.
When news of the 57 bodies emerged last week, it sparked a political storm.
Shia leaders said the dead were hostages kidnapped and slaughtered in Madaen by Arab Sunni insurgents waging a campaign of sectarian ”cleansing”.
A public funeral for 19 of the dead was held in the Shia holy city of Najaf while people seeking missing relatives flocked to Suwayrah to inspect gruesome police photographs. It was declared an atrocity shocking even after two years of war.
But the incident remains a puzzle. The tour of Madaen over the weekend revealed one wall stained with blood, but no proof of slaughter.
Without doubt people were killed here, but linking Madaen with all the corpses downriver may be a stretch. The confusion is a telling illustration of how insecurity inhibits accurate information about Iraq, leaving events open to distortion and speculation.
The fertile plain 22km south of Baghdad was an idyll of villas and rose gardens for senior Ba’athist officials. It forms a northern tip of the so-called triangle of death and has had a reputation for lawlessness since the US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.
US and Iraqi officials said the area slid under complete insurgent control soon after rebels were flushed from Falluja last November. ”There was a gap in our coverage and they came here to hang out and operate,” said Captain Bair.
The new arrivals destroyed the police station and massacred dozens of interior ministry troops who entered Salman Pak in February, leaving them free to mount what some residents said was a sectarian campaign of intimidation, extortion and murder against ordinary Shias, including motorists abducted at highway checkpoints.
Rumours trickled out but the road to Madaen, like all roads out of the capital, was unsafe and journalists stayed in Baghdad. The story broke two weeks ago when Shia politicians claimed that 150 people had been taken hostage and threatened with death.
Compelled by the outcry, Iraqi security forces entered the area last week only to find it calm, with no trace of hostages or kidnappers. Sunni leaders dismissed the story as a hoax, or at best a gross exaggeration, and the media agreed.
Then President Jalal Talabani announced that dozens of bodies had been found downriver, and that the story was true. It may have suited the Kurdish president to back the Shia version at a delicate stage in talks to form a government but, since the corpses were real, that seemed irrelevant.
The bodies did not, however, prove a massacre upriver. Falah al-Permani, head of the Suwayrah health department, told the Associated Press that all the bodies were more than three weeks old, predating the report of 150 hostages in Madaen. Police said the discoveries started in late February at the rate of one or two a day and could have come from anywhere.
But that is little comfort for Abdul. Staff Sergeant James Pikula tried to reassure him: ”We are here now. You don’t need to be afraid.” Abdul smiled but appeared unconvinced. Neighbours begged to be left alone lest they be deemed collaborators.
The Americans detained nine suspects but failed to catch a gunman spotted flitting through an orchard. ”With them in linens and flip flops and us in 80 pounds of gear they’re going to win that one,” said Captain Bair, sweating in the heat.
In private meetings tribal and community leaders echoed concern that militants could return but made no mention of hostages or killings. Nevertheless several US officers concluded there probably was a link between Madaen and the corpses.
Divers will continue searching the Tigris this week, and Iraqis with missing relatives will continue hoping it is not their loved ones who emerge from the murk. – Guardian Unlimited Â