‘We knew death awaited us’

HILLA, Iraq -- Just past a cold, cloudy midnight in March 1991, Abdelraheem Ali Moussa -- blindfolded, hands bound -- stumbled onboard a stolen Kuwaiti bus. With 30 men, women and children, he was driven to a field behind Mahaweel Republican Brick Factory, where everyone was shot.

The others died. Moussa survived.

He remembers how the killers -- security officials and villagers loyal to Saddam Hussein -- forced the prisoners to sit in rows of five to eight. He sat in the back near a swamp, as voices sobbed or prayed aloud.

"We knew death awaited us," he says. "There were dogs around us and I knew then that when they killed us, the dogs would eat us."

He remembers two children, separated from their parents, quietly settling beside a woman who begged with her captors. "She said, 'I have a boy who went missing during the war. I am not from Hilla. I have done nothing wrong. Please -- let me go!' "

The gunmen ignored her. The woman pulled her abaya , a long black traditional robe, around her body like a burial cloth. "She had already given up to her fate. She was preparing herself to die, and they didn't have any mercy on her."

She and the others were but a few of the regime's victims over three decades.

Days after the end of 1991's Persian Gulf War, for example, Shiites in southern Iraq rose against Saddam's Baathist regime. Then-President George H.W. Bush encouraged them, publicly urging Iraqis to "take matters into their own hands."

The Baathists brutally suppressed the uprising, slaughtering tens of thousands of Shiite soldiers and civilians. As U.S. forces stood by along Kuwait's border, Iraqi army helicopters swarmed over Shiite cities, attacking or ferrying troops.

Thousands of people were rounded up, hauled to secluded areas, executed and buried -- sometimes alive, according to medical experts and witnesses. The elderly and the handicapped, women and children, died along with military-age Shiite men. Shiite leaders estimate the toll at 200,000.

In the north, Kurds were slain with a vengeance -- 180,000 to 300,000, according to Kurdish officials, including 5,000 gassed in a chemical attack on the village of Halabja. Minority Turkomen, political opponents, anyone who displeased Saddam or was suspected of disloyalty, or who simply stood in the wrong spot at the wrong time, died.

The bodies, perhaps as many as 1.3 million, were thrown into mass graves across Iraq.

Since Saddam's collapse, their graves have been steadily uncovered. They pose an unprecedented challenge for Iraqis and the U.S.-led coalition trying to rebuild Iraq.

'Why are you going to kill us?'

Abdelraheem Ali Moussa, now 42, is one of just four Hilla villagers known to have survived the execution lines of March and April 1991.

Early on March 6 he had arrived in Hilla, 50 miles south of Baghdad, to see his young bride and family after three months of military duty in Kurdistan, in the north. Instead of reuniting with his pregnant wife, his arrival coincided with the landing of a helicopter carrying Iraq's then-vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan.

Three of Ramadan's men rushed up to passengers stepping off the bus; Moussa's friend, Ali Abd Hussein, asked them what was wrong. "The men began to beat him until he was bloody."

Moussa, his friend and other bus passengers were forced into a military truck and driven to Mahaweel Military Camp, then herded into two halls. Before being blindfolded, Moussa saw women and children among the prisoners. Anyone who tried to talk was struck with rifle stocks. All day long, more frightened Iraqis arrived.

Moussa's blindfold slipped; the cord binding his hands loosened. Around 5 p.m. he saw guards setting tires ablaze outside -- thick black smoke filling the air. Buses, stolen from Kuwait during the Iraqi army's retreat, hauled away prisoners and returned empty, every 15 to 20 minutes, he estimates.

Eventually, he was among those led to the buses.

"Two Baathists came running up to a thin, blindfolded man, and they took him and carried him by his hands and feet and threw him in the fire," he says. The man shrieked as flames enveloped him, then went silent.

Moussa sat in the bus next to an elderly man of perhaps 75. Prisoners asked where they were going; back home, the guards replied. "They were trying to calm us down. ...

"One man asked, 'Why are you going to kill us?' " A guard swore by his honor, his faith and his love for his children that no one would be executed.

Moussa heard the prisoner who asked the question grimly say, "'Rest assured, we will be executed, because a Baathist swore by his honor -- and Baathists have no honor.'

"Despite our pain, we all softly laughed."

Thoughts before dying

At the field behind the brick plant, the victims sat on the ground in rows. Moussa remembers his thoughts as he waited to be killed:

"I started to think of my family. I had just gotten married nine months ago, and my wife was pregnant and we knew it was going to be a boy. The tears began to fall down my cheeks. The boy would come into the world without a father. My wife would be a widow. I was becoming hysterical. I wished I had never married."

A heavyset Egyptian in front of him leaned back to whisper something. As he did, the shooting started.

"The Egyptian sprang up and they shot him, and he took all the bullets and he fell back on me." Moussa sprawled backward, right hand pinned behind him, head sliding toward the swamp water. A dead Iraqi toppled onto the dead Egyptian.

"I didn't know if I was dead or alive. The only thing that told me I was alive was the pain in my arm. The guy beside me was making some throaty coughs" -- Moussa demonstrates, a gagging sound -- and someone "yelled out 'He's still alive!' and they came and shot him dead."

The executioners walked off to bring up a front-end loader, as Moussa struggled from under the bodies in the blackness. He tested his legs to make certain he could stand. Then he slipped into a sugar-cane field and hid from the front-end loader's lights as it dumped bodies into the swamp, piling sand on top of them.

He staggered to a nearby village. In the darkness dogs ran up, attracted by the scent of blood and snapping at him. "The taste of the Egyptian man's blood was in my mouth. My hands felt sticky, and I tried to clean them with dirt."

"I was dazed ... 'Am I still alive, or am I a ghost• How did the dogs bite me if I am a ghost?' So I took a one-dinar coin out of my pocket and felt it and bit it, and I could feel it in my teeth and I realized I was alive."

Help from a stranger

As dawn broke, Moussa could see he was covered in blood. He tried to wash himself in a stream. "I thought, if I take off my clothes, that will look strange. But wearing the bloody clothes also looks strange."

He noticed a man watching him from a nearby house. The man, apparently sensing something was wrong, walked over "with a strip of wood and began brushing what were pieces of brain off my shoulder," then invited him to come inside.

Moussa was afraid to tell what had happened. Still, the man offered to take him home; they drove only to within three miles of Moussa's village because of a curfew. Moussa rubbed dirt over his bloodstained clothing and began walking. When he reached his home, he found that everyone had fled.

"There were flyers that said, 'We want you to evacuate or we will use chemical weapons against you,'" he remembers. He could see that a missile had hit the second floor of his home; he showered and tried to burn his bloody clothes.

Weeks later, he found the stranger who helped him and made the man swear on the Koran that he would tell no one about that morning. Then Moussa told other villagers that he and the man were enemies, just in case the man talked.

He found his family; the purges and attacks in the south halted. He told no one about his ordeal -- his wife guessed what had happened from his nightmares -- and tried to live normally, opening a photography shop in Hilla. But he never shook the fear.

"Anytime I saw a Baathist, I was afraid. Anytime they focused their eyes on me, I was afraid. ... I was afraid that if my wife and I had a fight, she would tell on me."

In 2001, Moussa used a forged identity card to escape to Lebanon. He returned last January, figuring Saddam's regime would collapse.

"The secret I had to keep for 12 years, it hurt and harmed me," he says, sitting in his small shop once more.

Then, smiling for the first time, he declares: "I considered the day Saddam fell the day I came back to life."

Additional Information:

Details

As many as 1.3 million Iraqis were murdered and buried in hundreds of mass graves under Saddam Hussein. Trib Middle East correspondent Betsy Hiel crisscrossed the country for six months, conducting hundreds of interviews to compile an account of the dictator's brutality.

In Monday's Trib

A team of Danish forensic experts meticulously unearths a killing field.