In keeping with Kurdish tradition, many -- probably most --Koreme men, went armed into the mountains when the village fled. Some were armed with up-to-date Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, other with older weapons, including shotguns and old M-1 rifles. Some carried pistols. In some cases, these weapons were obtained through peshmerga service.
Returning to surrender at Koreme, some men hid their weapons in the dirt and brush in the mountains, fearing that soldiers might open fire on them from a distance if they saw weapons. They also knew the weapons would be taken from them in any case if they surrendered, so they had nothing to lose by hiding their weapons and hoping to return for them in the future. Other men, however, kept their weapons as they returned to Koreme, and when they were met by soldiers, just outside the village, put their hands "high into the air." The soldiers immediately separated the villagers into three groups -- women and children, old men, and young and adult men. They disarmed those men who were armed, and searched them and the other men to find any other weapons.
The squad of soldiers -- estimates of the number of soldiers ranged from several dozen to over a hundred -- was accompanied by National Defense Battalions units, estimated to number in the hundreds. The National Defense Battalions led the remaining animals away; the villagers did not see them again. It was afternoon on August 28, 1988; estimates of the time range from early afternoon to early evening. The number of villagers captured by the soldiers in this incident was somewhere between 150 and 300.
The Iraqi soldiers were led by two lieutenants, reportedly both appearing to be in their twenties. They were Arabs, spoke Arabic to each other and to the villagers, some of whom spoke Arabic as well as Kurdish, and communicated with their commander in Mengish by walkie-talkie. One of the lieutenants separated a group of village men, finally reduced to thirty three, from the group of young and adult men. Survivor reports differed as to whether these men had all been carrying weapons on their return to Koreme; some said that all had weapons, while others said some did but others did not.
Whether or not all of the men and boys taken aside were carrying weapons when they were captured -- it is irrelevant to the legal assessment of the crime that followed -- survivor accounts are uniform that these men were made to form a line. A lieutenant told them to sit down, and they did so, squatting on their heels rather than sitting in the dirt. The other villagers, including those men not singled out, were led away behind the hill near the partly-ruined village schoolhouse. Women and men screamed and cried out for their loved ones as they were taken away, and the soldiers and militiamen tried to quiet them down.
"We just want to ask them some questions," a soldier reportedly said to the wife of one of the detained men. "Why do you think something's going to happen?" One of the lieutenants went down the row of men, pulling aside those he apparently thought too young. An argument developed over whether one boy was twelve or thirteen; he was finally allowed to go free. One boy, who tried to stand with his father, was taken out of the line. Another young teenager, holding his baby sister in his arms, was also taken out of the line. By the time the boys had been pulled aside, there were thirty three men and teenage boys left in line. No one was asked for identity cards or other papers. The villagers near the schoolhouse, behind the hill, could no longer see the men, but they continued to call out to them, weeping and wailing despite the assurances of the soldiers.
The thirty three detained men, too, wept and pleaded for the lives, although the soldiers insisted that nothing would happen to them. One of the lieutenants offered them cigarettes and water; meanwhile, some twelve to fifteen soldiers had taken up positions facing the line. Some of them, too, told the men that nothing would happen. The commander, they said, was going to call for orders from Mengish, so they would know what questions to ask.
Shortly thereafter, one of the lieutenants called on his walkie-talkie for orders from his commander in Mengish. He reported capturing "armed subversives" and asked for instructions. The men in the line could not hear the reply from Mengish. However, according to survivors, as soon as he put down the walkie-talkie, he turned around to the soldiers facing the men and shouted at them to shoot.
The soldiers opened fire at the line of thirty three squatting men from a distance of about 5-10 meters. (See Plan of Koreme Execution Site and Appendix III.) The soldiers were armed, according to execution survivors, with Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles, and they sprayed bullets along the line. It was not possible to determine how long the firing went on orhow many rounds were fired. Some survivors reported that the firing went on for several seconds. The forensic team, sweeping the whole execution site, recovered 124 cartridge cases, although these do not establish the total rounds fired. Sixty-three cases were obtained at the site surface and were piece-plotted, allowing forensic analysis of the number of weapons and their movement during the execution.
Ballistics and forensic experts examining the cartridge cases and their location on behalf of MEW/PHR have determined that there were at least seven individual firearms used in the execution.1 The firearms were all semi-automatic or fully-automatic 7.62 x 39mm caliber. Physical evidence strongly indicates only a single event involving the firing of over 100 rounds of 7.62mm caliber ammunition. Of the seven shooters at minimum taking part in the execution, at least one fired thirty seven rounds, at a minimum, as determined by forensic examination of firing pin imprints on the cartridge cases. Assuming a full AK-47 or similar weapon magazine of 30 rounds, that particular individual apparently reloaded at least once during the execution. This same shooter, in addition to reloading at least once during the execution, also moved closest to the victim line compared with the other shooters, on the basis of the dispersal of piece-plotted cartridge cases.
Some men were killed immediately by rifle fire. Others were wounded, and a few were missed altogether. Remarkably, given the volume of firing, there were six survivors out of the thirty three men and boys. After the soldiers stopped shooting, several soldiers approached the line of slumped bodies on orders of the lieutenant and fired additional individual rounds as a coup de grace. The soldiers then left the execution site, without burying the bodies or otherwise touching them, according to survivors who lay among the corpses.
Survivor testimony is clear that the execution was ordered by superior officers at the Mengish headquarters, several kilometers away. Although the lieutenants in charge did not organize a regular execution with any formal procedures other than having the thirty three men squat in line, neither were they surprised by the order. Nor did their men seem surprised by the order, when given, to open fire. Executions of this kind appear to have been contemplated as part of the military operation, even if the reason for selecting these particular men and not others is unclear.2
On the evidence, it therefore appears this was not a case of a local officer acting beyond the scope of his command. The local officers proceeded on orders from above. Moreover, other units, with other commanders and other headquarters, proceeded in the same manner. This was an atrocity of a systematic character, part of the Anfal campaign, and carried out according to the orders of the day.
The identities of the twenty seven men and boys who died in front of the firing squad at Koreme on August 28, 1988 are as follows:
Name Age Village
1. Huseen-Kader, Sagvan 16 Koreme
2. Huseen-Kader, Shaaban 14 Koreme
3. Mohamed-Abdullah, Khalil 43 Koreme
4. Khalil-Mohamed, Adnan 13 Koreme
5. Othman-Mostafa, Morad 19 Koreme
6. Mostafa-Saleh, Zahir 39 Koreme
7. Mostafa-Saleh, Zober 37-38 Koreme
8. Hamdy-Mostafa, Chaban 25 Koreme
9. Khalil-Mohamed, Abdulsalam 26 Koreme
10. Abdullah-Kader, Hameed 23 Koreme
11. Abdullah-Kader, Sedeek 17 Koreme
12. Hasen-Merza, Salam 20 Koreme
13. Hasen-Merza, Saleh 16 Koreme
14. Mohamed-Fatah Fatah 15 Koreme
15. Huseen-Omer, Abdulrahman 38 Koreme
16. Soleman-Esmaeel, Haje 38 Koreme
17. Mostafa-Esmaeel, Khaled 25 Koreme
18. Mostafa-Esmaeel, Salah 23 Koreme
19. Shareef-Fatah, Akram 34 Chalkey
20. Shareef-Fatah, Abdulsata 24 Chalkey
21. Shareef-Fatah, Mosa 18 Chalkey
22. Hasen-Taha, Fadel 19 Chalkey
23. Jaafer-Taha, Rasheed 19 Chalkey
24. Yacoob-Kasem, Mohamed 38 Chalkey
25. Hakeem-Yacoob, Morad 24 Chalkey
26. Yacoob-Kasem, Ahmed 39 Chalkey
27. Abdulkader-Fatah, Norey 34 Chalkey
There were six survivors of a total of ee men and boys in front of the firing squad; their full names cannot be released for reasons of their personal security, except for the name of one survivor who was later captured and disappeared by Iraqi forces at Dohuk fort: Abdulkader-Fatah, Fatah, age unknown, of Chalkey village.
The mean age of the victims was 25.5 years. Ten of the twenty seven dead were under 20 years old. Five were 16 years old or younger, and the youngest was 13.
Despite the conclusion that the execution was not an isolated act of indiscipline, it also appears that the soldiers performing the execution were not as diligent as they might have been. The fact that there were six survivors out of 33 men, some of whom were not hit at all, despite having been sprayed with automatic weapons fire by a seven or more men from a distance of 5-10 meters, suggests that some of the soldiers fired over the heads of the squatting men.
Even the coups de grace appear to have been unsystematic. One survivor reported feeling the bullet of the coup de grace go directly past his ear, but miss him altogether.
Another survivor, Aba, who was born in 1954, reported that in the initial round of bullets, he was hit in the left leg. The force of the bullet blew him over backwards from his squatting position, shattering bones in his leg, and caused him to roll down a slope. "I fell into a stony ravine, among some boulders," he said. No soldiers pursued him down the hill but, he said, they shot at him as he rolled. He said he was "partly visible and partly hidden by grass and stones." Aba said that he remained on his back at the ravine bottom for twenty-four hours. Occasionally through the night, he said, soldiers up the hill "would shoot at me. But no one came after me, because they thought I was dead."
On the afternoon of the following day, Aba said, soldiers finally came down the hill and found that he was alive, because "I tried to stand up." The soldiers "spoke to me, but I didn't understand, because it was Arabic," he said. They called by radio to the commander in Mengish, he said, and "I understood enough Arabic to know they said 'Calling Mengish, calling Mengish'. I thought they were going to finish me off." Instead, however, "about 20 Jash [National Defense Battalions] took me up the hill to an ambulance" and from there to the clinic in Mengish. Aba spent two days in the hospital at Mengish, where he was treated by a doctor who "only washed the wound out with water, and I have a bad limp still and can't be a farmer anymore."
After being released from the hospital, Aba was taken to the Dohuk fort where thousands of other Kurdish villagers, including those from Koreme, were being held. He had no explanation as to why he wasnot taken away from Dohuk Fort, when almost all other adult Kurdish males were removed and disappeared in the hands of Iraqi security forces.
The other five survivors appear to have lived because the bullets missed altogether, or because they were only lightly wounded. As the bodies were not buried immediately, and so the survivors were able to crawl away to hide when the soldiers had returned to their base up the hill.
[Reserved for Koreme Graves Plan]
Burying the BodiesAll the remaining inhabitants of Koreme -- between 150 and 300 persons, according to different accounts -- were removed from the village that same day, without being allowed to bury their dead. They were taken by soldiers and the National Defense Battalions to the fort and other installations in Mengish.
The bodies left at Koreme putrefied rapidly in the August and September sun. Kurds allowed to remain in Mengish reported that soldiers began to complain of the smell after a week or so even from their post further up the hill above the village. Somewhere between a week and three weeks after the massacre -- there are no available eyewitnesses -- Iraqi soldiers or the National Defense Battalions reportedly buried the massacre victims in two shallow pits, each containing two separate pits measuring approximately 2 x 2 meters. (See Koreme Graves Plan.)
The absence of identity cards or personal valuables on the bodies when disinterred by the forensic team indicates that someone had stripped the bodies of these items. The bodies were likely looted of these items before they were buried in the common pits where the forensic team disinterred them, since there was no indication that the bodies had been disturbed once covered over. It is logical to assume, though not proven, that since soldiers and the National Defense Battalions were the only persons allowed in the area between the date of the massacre and burial, soldiers, militiamen, or both, were responsible for looting the bodies.
Three of the four graves (Graves B-S, A-S, and B-N) contained earth disturbances, appearing to be artillery shell craters, from which shrapnel fragments were recovered. The artillery holes may have provided a convenient starting point for gravedigging. The four graves run along a line about 10 meters northwest of the line where the Koreme men were killed.
The graves were not disturbed between the date of burial and the forensic team's exhumation, so far as the forensic team was able to determine. One villager, an elderly man, who was sometimes given permission to leave the Beharke camp where the survivors were ultimately taken and who had sons in the graves, came to Koreme in 1990 and made a low wall of cinder blocks around each of the two pits containing the four graves.
The forensic team exhumed the two grave pits following standard archaeological and forensic procedures.3 Each grave pit was roughly 2x2 meters. The pits contained disturbances and shrapnel supporting that they had originally been artillery shell craters. A floating grid system was established for documenting the exhumation work; artifacts, clothing, and skeletal remains were recorded on standard field inventory forms and skeletons were removed from the pit in anatomical order. Evidence of trauma to each skeleton was noted on a skeletal checklist form as each bone was removed. Skeletons and other evidence were removed to the Dohuk Hospital Morgue where the forensic team undertook reconstruction and identification of each of the twenty seven skeletons.
The forensic team found that each of the twenty seven skeletons were male, ranging in age from early teens to middle 40s. Each of the twenty seven died from gunshot wounds. The primary target of the gunshots appeared to be the trunk of the body, with some indications that the executioners were aiming on a downward slant toward the front of the victims, although the pattern of wounds suggests that some victims were shot in the back or side as they involuntarily tried to twist or turn away as the volleys began. These findings are consistent both with survivor oral testimony and with ballistic analysis that the executioners were standing in a line facing a line of squatting victims.
Clothing, artifacts, and medical and dental testimony enabled the forensic team to positively identify each of the twenty seven victims.
1 See Appendix 3, Report on Firearms Identification of the Koreme Execution Site for the complete analysis of firearms and ballistics. MEW/PHR are grateful to Douglas D. Scott, Ph.D., who carried out this analysis.
2 Koreme was not the only Dohuk village where such executions took place; a similar execution of seven men from the village of Mergatou, also took place in late August 1988, as part of the same Anfal operation. The surviving witnesses from Mergatou, illiterate wives of the executed men, could not give an exact date, although they knew it was in late August. They, too, were captured as they fled the Anfal attack. Their village was much smaller and had fewer young or adult men.
According to relatives of the sole survivor, interviewed by MEW/PHR, who disappeared later from a hospital where he was taken for wounds suffered at the time of the execution, the squad leader received orders by walkie-talkie to execute the men of the village. He did not do so, and instead brought all the villagers to the local headquarters, where women, children, and the elderly were being put on trucks and sent to forts. According to the survivor's account to his relatives, the squad leader was rebuked by his commander and, the same evening, was sent back to the village with the eight men to execute them in the place where he had originally been ordered to do. Of the eight, later seven died, and one survived, wounded, until he was forcibly disappeared.
3 See Appendices 1-3 for discussion of exhumation methods, analysis, and results.