The mullah, the Muslim holy man, finished reciting The Exordium, the opening chapter of the Koran. The assembled men, standing at the head of the great trench opened by the bulldozer, recited the ritual responses, their palms turned upward to heaven. He continued with the prayer over the dead, customary with Sunni Muslims of Iraqi Kurdistan, consisting of instructions to those who died.2

"Oh servant of God, do not forget your covenant: that there is no God but He, and Muhammad is his prophet.
You have left this world and gone to the Hereafter, either to the Gardens of Paradise or to the hell of fire.
Now two Angels will come to you and ask:
Who is your God?
Who is your prophet?
What is your Qibla?
Who are your brothers?
Who are your sisters?
You must answer clearly:
Allah is my God.
Muhammad is my prophet.
Mecca is my Qibla.
The Holy Koran is my guide.
Believing men are my brothers.
Believing women are my sisters."

Then the mullah took a handful of earth and, scattering it into the open trench, said:

"From this you were created, to it we return you now, and from it you will be brought forth again."

The men formed a line, passing from one to another the twenty seven individual wooden boxes containing the bones of Koreme's dead. The boxes were small and cubical, because they did not have to accommodate the skeleton laid out at full length. They had been built originally for the forensic team's use, to transport the skeletons from the mass grave site at Koreme to the morgue at Dohuk General Hospital. At the morgue, the skeletons had been painstakingly reassembled through weeks of work.

The forensic team had succeeded in positively identifying each of the twenty seven skeletons. After recording the facts of pathology and trauma bearing on cause and manner of death, it turned each skeleton and its effects over to the deceased's family. The families and the village decided on a joint funeral in conjunction with the local peshmerga and political party organization, in which the dead would be reburied according to proper Islamic rites in a new village cemetery.

On June 19, 1992, in the morning, the procession began from Dohuk morgue, a line of cars and trucks and Toyota Landcruisers that had been captured from the Iraqi security forces. Each box of remains was strapped to the top of a car, with flowers and often a photograph of the deceased; relatives rode inside, usually widows or mothers. Several hundred peshmerga fighters were also there carrying their weapons and wearing uniforms combining military dress and traditional Kurdishclothing. The line of cars slowly made its way out of Dohuk, passed through Mengish, and finally climbed the hill to Koreme. From the top of the hill, the mountain crest marking the border with Turkey, across which the dead men and their families had sought to flee, was visible in the distance; there were still snow patches on the peaks even though it was late June.

At the gravesite, there was no further need for the wooden boxes; in accordance with Islamic custom, the bones were to be buried wrapped in white linen. Inside the large grave trench, individual tombs had been laid of cement block; each linen sack of bones was laid in its tomb, the head facing toward Mecca. The top of each tomb was sealed with more cement blocks, and bunches of dry grass were laid on thickly. Men with shovels filled in earth around the individual tombs, and finally the bulldozer closed the trench.

The women did not join the men at the gravesite. They remained on the other side of the hill, mourning their dead with wailing and keening. A few young boys proudly carried their fathers' weapons slung across their shoulders through the crowd of mourners, assault rifles sometimes as tall as they were.

The forensic team's scientific leader, Dr. Clyde Collins Snow, gave an interview to local Kurdish television; it was a mistake, he said, for those who violated human rights to think they could hide their crimes by burying them. Ample evidence -- the evidence of the bones -- often remained.

There were political speeches by leaders of the local branch of the KDP. They eulogized the dead men and boys of Koreme as martyrs. They called them heroes and warriors of the Kurdish struggle, whereas in fact they were frightened and desperate men seeking refuge for themselves and their families. But, in the midst of Anfal there was no refuge to be found. And the teenage boys who died were just boys who, on a day in late August 1988, were lined up on the slope of a hill outside their own village and shot.

The disappeared of Koreme remained disappeared. After the funeral the forensic team's engineer, a Kurdish man of great devoutness, remembered them aloud. He expressed the hope that the skulls of the disappeared, whether buried under the sands of some Iraqi desert, or in a shallow grave in the courtyard of a fortress, or somewhere else, were facing toward Mecca and that they would not be forgotten.

Thus Koreme's dead were laid away.

1 The Koran, 1:1, trans. N.J. Dawood, Viking Press, 1990.

2 Translated by a local Iraqi Kurd working with the forensic team, for whose help the forensic team is indebted.