VII. The Victims

While many of those buried in the al-Mahawil mass graves remain unidentified, those remains that have been identified by relatives establish that the bodies are those of Iraqis arrested during the 1991 uprisings and killed in Iraqi government custody. Human Rights Watch conducted interviews with many of the relatives of the persons identified in the mass grave, making the crucial link between their disappearance in 1991 and the discovery of their remains in the al-Mahawil mass graves.

Kamil Muhammad Dawud, a Baghdad lawyer aged seventy-four (all ages are given as of the time of their disappearance), and his son Khalid, a twenty-nine-year-old university student, drove down from Baghdad to al-Hilla around March 9 or 10, 1991, searching for Kamil’s older son, then a soldier in the Iraqi army. While the older brother soon returned home, Kamil and Khalid disappeared. Their family found Kamil’s half-looted car near the al-Mahawil army base sometime later, but received no indications as to their fate. On May 17, 2003, their bodies were identified by the family at the large al-Mahawil mass grave site, based on the father’s watch and the son’s identification document. The father was blindfolded, and both men had their hands bound.¹⁰

Karim Hadi Kadhim, aged forty-two, was at the al-Mahawil grave site looking for five relatives who went missing from a rural village in the al-Madhatiyya district, located some twenty kilometers southwest of al-Hilla. According to Karim Hadi Kadhim, three of his brothers were arrested on March 23, 1991, when local Ba’th officials demanded that all local villagers attend a meeting at the local Ba’th party headquarters and arrested some fifteen people. His farmer brothers Subhan, aged fifty-four, Hamid, aged forty-four, and Salim, aged thirty-six, were among the arrested and were never seen again. Karim himself was briefly arrested with the other three, but was released just as they were taken to al-Mahawil military base, because he was a soldier on active military duty who had not abandoned his post during the war. Karim was able to identify the remains of one of his brothers, Subhan, among the bodies recovered from the al-Mahawil mass grave, based on the identity documents he found on the remains.

Two other relatives of Karim Hadi Kadhim were also arrested around the same time. Haidar Hamid Hadi, the twenty-one-year-old son of his brother Hamid, and Ali Omran Kadil, aged twenty-two, were soldiers returning to duty. A person who said he was an eyewitness told Karim Hadi Kadhim at the time that the two were arrested at a Ba’th Party-operated checkpoint on their way to their military division.¹¹ The two cousins remain missing, but as they were arrested around the same time as relatives whose remains have been identified in the mass grave, the family believes they are likely to have been executed and buried around the same time.

Ahmad Fadil Yasir, a forty-year-old teacher, told Human Rights Watch that loyalist Iraqi forces had entered his district in March 1991:

The military entered al-Shamali [the northern part] on March 15, and the cleansing operation started in the villages. They destroyed many houses in the villages using bulldozers. They cut down the palm trees and the orchards. They chased and traced all the sons of my tribe. They arrested many people who were on the street, even people just passing through the area. … They distributed checkpoints all over, they controlled all the roads.¹²

Nine relatives of Ahmad Fadil Yasir were arrested on the same day in March 1991. His only brother, Hassan Fadil Yasir, a twenty-five-year-old army deserter, was arrested from his home by a group of Ba’th party members, security officials, and police officers; his thirty-one-year-old cousin Karim Jabir Yasir, an army officer, was also arrested from his home; his father’s uncle Muhammad Obaid Hussein, aged fifty-four, was arrested at his home with his three sons: twenty-three-year-old Ali Muhammad Obaid, a soldier, twenty-seven-year-old Abbas Muhammad Obaid, an agricultural worker, and twenty-nine-year-old Hashim Muhammad Obaid, a soldier. Sixty-seven-year-old Hadi Obaid Hussein, another uncle of his father, was arrested as he was coming home from his shop; Salem Awad Obaid, a thirty-year-old teacher, and Ibrahim Kadim Obaid, a farmer cousin whose age he did not know, were also arrested. At the al-Mahawil mass grave, he was able to identify the remains of Abbas Muhammad Obaid, the agricultural worker, and Hadi Obaid Hussein, the shopkeeper, based on the identity documents found on their remains. He believed that his other relatives were also buried in the same mass grave, as they were all arrested and “disappeared” on the same day.¹³

`Aziz Hussein Muhammad `Ali, a forty-six-year-old worker, was arrested and “disappeared” on March 12, 1991, as he was coming home from his shop in al-Hilla, together with a son, a soldier. A second son, Ahmad `Aziz Hussein, sixteen at the time of the arrest, told Human Rights Watch that he was in the car with his father and brother when they were stopped at a checkpoint operated by the General Security (al-Amn al-`Am): “The Amn had the names of my father and brother, and said they needed to investigate them.”¹⁴ Ahmad identified the remains of his father `Aziz at the al-Mahawil mass grave based on identity documents found on his remains, and was still attempting to locate his brother’s remains at the time of the Human Rights Watch interview.

Thirteen-year-old Khalid Hassan Khudayyir and his thirty-three-year-old cousin Fuad `Abd al-Hussein Kadhim left their native village of Albu Alwan on March 4, 1991, walking by foot toward the nearby city of al-Hilla to purchase food. Fuad had been a soldier two years before the 1991 uprising, but had returned to civilian life. The two young men disappeared, and for years the family had no information about their fate. Their bodies were found at the al-Mahawil mass grave, and the men’s identity documents were found on the corpses.¹⁵

Many more families told similar stories of unresolved “disappearances” to Human Rights Watch, but were still attempting to find their relatives. Balqis `Abud Hassan, a forty-five-year-old woman, was typical. Her fourteen-year-old son `Ali went missing on March 7, 1991, after she had asked him to go fetch some water from the river in al-Hilla’s Bab al-Hussein neighborhood. When she attempted to ask the soldiers stationed on a bridge nearby about him, they threatened to shoot her and ordered her to leave. She never heard again of her son, and failed to locate his remains after looking through hundreds of bags containing human remains at the al-Mahawil mass grave site.¹⁶

Human Rights Watch was provided with a list that, according to local officials, contained more than 1,200 names of identified victims from the two al-Mahawil mass graves. However, the list appears to have some serious inaccuracies that limit its reliability. The actual numbering of the victims was sloppy¾the list suddenly jumps from victim 830 to victim 931, many victims take up more than one number, and some victims are listed multiple times. A closer examination of the list suggests that probably just under one thousand victims from the mass grave were claimed by relatives. Identifications were arrived at in a variety of ways, some of dubious reliability. While relatives found some remains containing identity papers, in other cases family members made suppositions as to identity based on much more circumstantial criteria, such as items of clothing, medications, and cigarettes found with corpses.

It is similarly difficult to estimate the number of unidentified persons exhumed from the two al-Mahawil mass graves, as no records appear to have been kept. Local officials gave widely varying figures, but a count of the remaining bodies by Human Rights Watch just before the reburial of unidentified remains found about 1,200 bodies left at the large al-Mahawil mass grave and just over one hundred bodies left at the al-Mahawil brick factory mass grave. It appears, moreover, that some of the bodies from the brick factory mass grave were moved to the large al-Mahawil mass grave site. Taken together, it seems unlikely that more than 2,300 bodies were recovered from the two al-Mahawil mass graves.

Although the list of claimed victims provided by local authorities is of limited reliability in terms of numbers of victims, it does provide some crucial information about the likely identity and residence of the victims. The vast majority of the victims appear to have been young men from the general area around al-Hilla, indicating that the mass grave was a result of a localized campaign of arrests and executions in the al-Hilla area. The relatively few residents of Karbala, Diwaniyya, al-Najaf, and Baghdad claimed from the mass grave appear to have been traveling through the al-Hilla area at the time of their detention, rather than arrested elsewhere and transferred to the area. Among the victims are more than a dozen Egyptian nationals who were working and living in the al-Hilla area.