Victims in Mass Graves Hid Clues in Clothing in Iraq
Osama bin Murtha
Victims in Mass Graves Hid Clues in Clothing
Concealed Iraqi ID cards provide a wealth of information for an upcoming
Hussein trial.
By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer
June 27, 2006
BAGHDAD - Perhaps they were so terrified they didn't trust the officers who
demanded their identification cards and they hid the cards beneath layers of
clothes.
Or maybe they sensed their horrible fate and decided against giving up the
last legal proof of their lives before gunshots turned them into anonymous
corpses to be devoured by the desert.
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Whatever their reasons, more than 10% of the victims found thus far in
Saddam Hussein-era mass graves managed to die with their Iraqi identity
cards still with them. The phenomenon has dramatically altered the course of
the investigation into the former regime's alleged crimes by allowing
prosecutors to trace the victims back to their hometowns and construct more
complete narratives of their harrowing journeys toward death.
"They had hidden them in secret pockets or sewn them in secret areas,
especially the women," said Michael "Sonny" Trimble, a forensic archeologist
who oversees a team exhuming and examining mass graves linked to the former
regime, including from the 1988 Anfal campaign, in which Kurdish villagers
were deported from their homes and later executed.
"They were coming from the north," said Trimble, who is attached to the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers. "They were told they were being resettled. But they
knew."
Trimble spoke Monday during the first media tour of the laboratories of the
Mass Graves Team at the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, the law enforcement
agency attached to the American Embassy that is helping an Iraqi court
prosecute Hussein and his deputies on charges of human rights abuses.
The nine-tent compound on the outskirts of Baghdad includes an array of
digital technology used to scan bones and map out gravesites and is staffed
by international specialists in the art of resurrecting the lives and deaths
of war crimes victims.
Team members say the women's successful efforts to keep their identity cards
may foil the former regime's attempts to hide the killings and help Iraqi
prosecutors win the upcoming Anfal trial, in which Hussein is accused of
killing up to 180,000 Kurdish villagers.
"We can go back to the area where the identity cards were issued [and] we
can find survivors," said Raid Juhi, chief investigative judge of the Iraqi
High Tribunal, which will begin proceedings on the Anfal after Hussein's
current trial ends. "We can find out about mechanisms and dates."
The laminated identification cards known as gensiya have already gone a long
way in helping the Mass Graves Team prepare the Anfal case, officials said.
Unlike the trial of Hussein and seven deputies on charges of human rights
abuses against the Shiite villagers of Dujayl, now in closing arguments, the
Anfal case will focus primarily on forensic evidence amassed by Trimble and
his team.
The discovery of the gensiya allowed prosecutors to begin tying bodies to
specific hometowns and surviving witnesses, who will be called upon to
testify against Hussein.
Since starting operations in August 2004, Trimble has unearthed and
dissected six mass grave sites in northwestern and southern Iraq. In all,
the bodies of about 335 of the tens of thousands of victims believed to be
buried in mass graves have been unearthed and analyzed.
Iraq's security woes have prevented the team from venturing out to all but
the safest sites. Unlike human rights groups, Trimble searches only pristine
gravesites to build up a criminal case instead of attempting to ascertain
the full scope of the crimes.
Many of the largest mass grave sites have been damaged by relatives
searching for loved ones, he said. Getting a total count of victims might
take decades.
"For me, a sample of 75 people is enough," he said. "It's a matter of, Can
we link the location to a possible event and a defendant? If the [grave] is
disturbed, I don't want any part of it. From a crime-scene standpoint, it's
the end of the world."
Tips from locals have pointed investigators in the direction of some
gravesites.
For example, Bedouins tipped off U.S. Marines about a key Anfal site in
Muthanna province near the southern city of Samawa shortly after the 2003
American-led invasion, a U.S. Embassy official said.
Using mapping software, Trimble's team creates a digital model of each site
he examines, looking for geographic anomalies.
In the case of a Karbala gravesite unearthed in May, the search team spotted
an "artificial rise," a classic indicator of a mass grave, amid the miles of
undifferentiated desert terrain, said Mark Smith, an archeologist on the
Mass Graves Team.
The scientists ascertain the size of a grave with test trenches. Backhoes
remove the first layer of dirt, and then diggers get on their knees and
carefully employ hand tools once they near the bodies. Often, the victims
are buried under enormous volumes of sand and soil, what officials say were
concerted efforts to erase the mass slayings from the pages of time.
A mass grave site in Nineveh province containing 64 men allegedly killed
during the Anfal campaign was buried under more than 10 feet of dirt.
Trimble called it "the deepest grave I've ever excavated in my life."
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"These people were not to be found again," he said. "That was clear."
Before removing corpses, Trimble's team painstakingly maps a mass grave site
by marking off 40 points around each body and storing the location of each
in a computer database. Using metal detectors, the investigators find each
bullet shell and casing and record their locations.
Once the information is compiled, the scientists make three-dimensional maps
showing the bodies, casings and bullets, and suggest narratives for what may
have gone on during the killings.
The bodies are sealed in bags, placed into plastic boxes and flown by
helicopter to the forensic analysis facility.
In one tent, scientists separate clothes and belongings from human remains,
meticulously labeling each item. In the cultural objects tent, victims'
clothes are cleaned with brushes and laid on white boards or put on wooden
mannequins as possible courtroom displays.
Ariana Fernandez, a Costa Rican forensic anthropologist, displayed a
mannequin of one apparently pregnant woman found clutching her stomach. "She
might be Kurdish because of the way she's dressed," Fernandez said.
Before they were loaded onto trucks and buses, the female victims of the
Anfal, allegedly told they were being relocated, were believed to have been
given a bit of time to gather up their belongings and put on multiple layers
of clothing. Many accounts of the Anfal campaign have stated that security
forces seized the victims' IDs before killing them.
It was among the women's clothes that investigators began discovering the
identification cards, hidden in secret compartments or beneath thick layers.
Often the women were hiding several IDs, including those of their children.
For investigators, the discovery of the cards during the team's first
excavation of Anfal sites in Nineveh in 2004 changed the endeavor from a
forensic analysis of bones and bullet wounds to an effort to track down
survivors.
The identity cards, which include a photograph, name, birth date and place
of issue, provided a key to the victims' stories, linking them definitively
to the Anfal campaign.
"The focus changed," Trimble said. "It was dramatic. We went from, 'Let's do
the clothes and forensic analysis' to 'Let's do the clothes, the bones can
wait.' Our whole Anfal investigation was based on finalizing IDs and then
running them over to the FBI and the Regime Crimes Liaison Office."
Even the digital equipment used to photograph remains was employed in the
effort - to help gain information from frayed or faded IDs. During the tour
of the photography lab, Australian David Hempenstall took the badly damaged
gensiya found in one gravesite and sharpened the contrast to reveal the name
and picture of a young woman born in 1964 in the Dukan section of
Sulaymaniya province.
"From the gensiya you know the person, which office [issued the card], which
family, which village," said Jaafar Mousawi, a prosecutor in Hussein's
Dujayl case.
The mystery remains as to why and how the women decided not to give up their
last ties to their identities. In the mass grave in Muthanna province,
investigators found the body of a woman who had hidden away five ID cards,
all of which survived the two decades since the Anfal.
"She was either the sister or mother, [and] she was hiding their family's
gensiya," Juhi said. "Maybe the authorities didn't know they were hiding
them. They told them, 'We're not going to kill you, we're going to move
you.' Maybe they felt danger around them. Who knows?"
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