Charting grisly
evidence in Iraqi desert
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.
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