BAGHDAD, Iraq – Two Kurdish witnesses at Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial gave harrowing accounts Wednesday of surviving killing fields where guards executed hundreds of detainees at a time in sprays of gunfire.
One said he fell wounded into a ditch full of bodies. He said he climbed out and ran for his life past mounds in the desert, the mass graves of other victims in a 1987-88 military offensive against Iraq’s Kurds.
Both witnesses described prisoners making their last prayers for God’s forgiveness of their sins as they rode in trucks to the execution site – and said some detainees made desperate attempts to attack guards in hopes of escaping.
The testimony came in the trial of Hussein and six other co-defendants for their roles in Operation Anfal, an offensive during which the prosecution says some 180,000 Kurds were killed and hundreds of their villages cleared. The seven face execution by hanging if convicted.
Hussein sat silently as both Kurds testified from behind curtains to protect their identities. One co-defendant, his cousin Ali al-Majid, scoffed at their accounts.
“You told us a story from which a blockbuster could be made,” said al-Majid, who is accused of directing Operation Anfal and became known as “Chemical Ali” for toxic gas attacks on Kurdish villages during the offensive.
The two witnesses said they were held at the Tob Zawa prison camp in northern Iraq with hundreds of others after attacks on their towns. They each described separate massacres in 1988 of detainees who were herded onto trucks and told they were being taken to another prison camp.
The first witness said the truck he was in stopped on an unpaved road in the desert of western Iraq. A prisoner named Anwar warned that they were going to be executed, the witness said.
He “asked us to recite the Islamic prayers before death and plead for forgiveness. He said, ‘We are going to die in minutes. It is the forgiveness time for people who are going to die,’ ” the witness said in Kurdish.
“It was dark when they brought a group of people (prisoners) in front of the vehicle. The drivers got out of our vehicles and turned on the headlights,” he said.
Some prisoners tried to grab an automatic rifle from a guard, but failed because “we were so weak,” he said.
Soldiers then opened fire. “I ran and fell into a ditch. It was full of bodies. I fell on a body. It was still alive. It was his last breath,” said the witness. “It was really unbelievable, the number of people being killed like this.”
Slightly wounded, he stripped off his clothes, thinking he was more likely to blend into the color of the sand if he were naked, the witness said. He then began running again.
“As I was running, I saw many pits, I saw many mounds, and I saw lots of people who had been shot,” he said. “The desert was full of mounds that had people buried underneath.”
The witness said he took refuge with Kurds living nearby, then traveled north. For the next 15 years he lived in hiding, moving frequently, until Hussein’s ouster.
The second witness described a similar massacre, saying he was in a group of about 500 prisoners taken from Tob Zawa. When the trucks stopped in the desert, they heard gunfire.
“We knew it was the people in the other vehicle being shot and our turn would be next,” he said. “We exchanged forgiveness and we were weeping.”
“At that point, we decided that if they came to kill us, we would attack them,” he recalled. “We decided that even if one person survived, he could be a witness and tell the world of our fate. I was flashing back to the image of my son, who was 2 years old, and I was thinking of my mother, who was going to lose her son.”
He said when the guards began taking the detainees out of the truck, the prisoners attacked, but the guards opened fire.
“They continued to fire all over the vehicle from every direction and I was injured by a bullet in my back,” the witness said.
He said he managed to get out of the truck and hide in bushes. Several other wounded prisoners also escaped, he said.
Hussein and al-Majid are charged with genocide. They and the other five defendants also face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, all of which carry a possible death penalty.
The trial is the second for Hussein. A verdict in his first trial – for a crackdown on a Shiite Muslim town in the 1980s – is due Nov. 5, with many people expecting a death sentence that could inflame Iraq’s sectarian violence.
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