"I hate the [Baath] Socialist Party for destroying the country," he says. "I hate them."
Raouf doesn't know it yet, but in a few days, his committee will receive a very important list. It contains the names of 1,500 people killed by Hussein for their political views, and the location of their bodies. The names have been copied from a tattered green book, which Abbas, the cemetery manager, keeps on the dashboard of his car.
photo: Thorne Anderson
The Kirkh Islamic Cemetery, which contains numerous graves of prisoners of the Hussein regime
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All of the dissidents buried at the Kirkh Islamic Cemetery were once held at Abu Ghreib prison, the country's largest and most notorious jail, from which Hussein released nearly 10,000 inmates last October. When word of their release came, the prisoners—from petty thieves to political dissidents, and all kept in horrendous conditions—overran the guards and stampeded the iron gates. Abu Ghreib is also the name given to Iraqi fathers who no longer have children.
Khalid Abbas stands near the cemetery's mosque, surrounded by the grave diggers. A light rain falls, and gunfire can be heard nearby, as the gun market down the road winds down for the evening. Abbas has soft white hair and wears matching brown herringbone pants and a shirt. He holds his awful green book close to his chest, and explains how members of Iraq's General Security Office started disposing the regime's political enemies here in 1985, after another cemetery used for that purpose became too full.
According to Abbas, all the prisoners who came here had identification tags on their wrists, and he kept their records in his book. At first he says there is nothing of interest in the graves that are unmarked, and perhaps the numbers just fell off. Later, after some parents arrive, he changes his mind, saying some of the prisoners had been tortured, and were not identifiable—hence the unmarked graves. According to Abbas, the security office did not start providing him the reasons for execution until three years ago. And if someone came to ask about a loved one, he would refer them to the Mukhabarat to obtain official permission to know. Abbas says this permission was granted maybe 30 times.
"Of course I was sad about what went on here," he says. "But what could I do? It was my job."
Jabaar Mohammed and his wife, Umm Sitar, have arrived to inquire about their missing sons and nephews. Abbas asks them to wait, but they insist he help. Abbas pulls out his green book and asks for the names and the dates of imprisonment. He drags his finger across a few pages and then calls out the names. "Ali Jabar Adwan. Sitar Jabar Adwan." Umm Sitar starts beating her chest, and then she breaks down. "Leith Adel Luawayli. Saad Abdul Rudda." This is the first news the couple have had of the boys since 1991, the year they were arrested.
The walk to the cemetery is a long one, and Umm Sitar screams, appealing to God to kill Saddam Hussein and his sons, so that they might trade places with her boys. They stop at a hole in the fence, and look across the football-size burial ground, and the graves and numbers that sprout like tin flowers from the ground, in a faded yellow bloom, on stems of sawed-off metal. They look for numbers 854 to 857, the four boys resting in a row under a tree.
It is not clear why the four were arrested, but there is some suggestion they helped hatch a plan to kill a government minister. None of them, swears their father, pulled the trigger. The man who did escaped to Iran. Mohammed says he spoke with the family of the minister, and they told him they knew his boys weren't guilty. There was never a trial, and never a visit. The boys have been dead for two years now. Mohammed says he will move them south to Najaf, and bury them there.
Abbas says he kept the secret of the cemetery from everyone, even his family. He insists that each grave holds only one body, and that he has supervised the whole operation since 1985. And he mentions that 15 other families found names from his list at the committee offices in Baghdad, and that he expects them soon. Mohammed interrupts to ask about arrangements to move the bodies, and he inquires about other missing relatives, who do not appear in Abbas's book.
