In Iraq grave, evidence of regime's horrors

HATRA, Iraq -- Leaning over the jumble of corpses in their bright purple and turquoise dresses, Greg Kehoe pointed out the blindfolds still tightly drawn around the women's skulls.

Kehoe was striding around Ninawa 2, a trench that held the bodies of 300 Kurdish women and children who were executed 16 years ago by Saddam Hussein's regime. The killers used pistols to shoot their victims in the head at point-blank range on a slope leading up from a dust-blown seasonal riverbed, or wadi.

''We have charted how the bodies were thrown into this grave at various levels," said Kehoe, the top American official working with the Iraqi court responsible for trying suspected war criminals. ''We are pretty confident there was a bulldozer that they just bulldozed those bodies in."

An American forensic team, including more than a dozen archeologists, anthropologists, and technicians, is midway through the grisly process of transforming this mass grave into courtroom evidence against Hussein and his henchmen that meets the strictest international legal standards. This is the first of 10 sites that Kehoe plans to excavate.

Kehoe, a former federal prosecutor, led a group of reporters on a helicopter trip this weekend to this remote desert spot about 200 miles north of Baghdad, showing the meticulous exhumation work at the grave site and the extensive forensic analysis taking place since Sept. 1 at a morgue at the nearest US Army installation, Forward Operating Base Jaguar.

Officials waited until now to publicly discuss their first exhumation because they did not want to endanger workers at the site by revealing its location. Kehoe began assembling his investigative team in June. One immediate focus was the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where Hussein's forces crushed an independence movement in the 1980s with brutal repression that killed thousands of Kurdish villagers.

''I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," said Kehoe, who spent five years investigating mass graves in Bosnia for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia.

Just up the hill, in the trench called Ninawa 9, the bodies of Kurdish men appeared frozen in action against the far side of a much deeper hole.

Spent machine-gun bullet casings, ripped clothing, and the clustering of corpses on the far wall have convinced Kehoe that the men were tied together and led to the bottom of the trench before their killers opened fire, probably with an AK-47.

''Once the shooting begins, people begin to wince and move, and that's when you get the odd person here or there will have a stranger trajectory because they're hiding," Kehoe said.

The only sound here is the whistling wind, which kicks up chokingly fine dust. Miles from the town of Hatra, the site is impossible to see from the dirt track that weaves through a desert plain.

Kehoe said Iraqi informants told investigators that thousands were executed here.

The remoteness that led this place to be chosen as a killing field is also why Kehoe chose it as the first site for exhumation. It is removed enough from the insurgent violence plaguing the country to make it safe for his team to work.

The executioners picked their location carefully, driving their victims to a dusty wadi about 2 miles from the nearest town, hidden from the road by a long, sloping, sandy ridge.

Sometime in late 1987 or early 1988, roughly 300 Kurdish women and children were brought to this dustbowl from their village in the verdant hills around Lake Dukan, as part of Hussein's Anfal campaign against the Kurds.

Here, they were systematically executed, shot with pistols in the back of the head or in the face before their bodies were bulldozed into a narrow pit.

Some of the women were pregnant. They appeared to be carrying all their belongings, some wearing as many as 11 layers of clothing.

In the morgue, investigators such as Jessica Mondero sort fetal bones, jewelry, and money from the corpses' clothing.

''We're finding lots of items contained in the clothing," Mondero said, cleaning a woman's blue dress with a toothbrush. ''Lots of children's clothing, medication, beads, money, change purses layered within the clothing."

The men buried in the nearby trench, about 156 of them, were probably brought to the killing field on a different day, investigators believe.

Michael K. ''Sonny" Trimble, the US Army Corps of Engineers archeologist supervising the excavation, said it is clear the men were executed in the bottom of the trench that became their grave.

''There's only two ways" to put victims in a mass grave, he said, standing at the bottom of the trench. ''Put them alive down here and shoot them, or you shoot them up on the edge and throw them in. I really believe from what I see here is that a lot of the people were already down here."

A broken tibia protruded from the top layer of bodies left in the men's grave. Many of the skulls still had hair, even though the flesh had melted away.

Until now, professional investigators have not worked on any untouched grave sites like this one.

Immediately after Hussein's government fell, people destroyed the value of many mass graves as courtroom evidence when they dug them up to reclaim relatives' bodies.

A nationwide insurgency has put much of the country off limits to Kehoe's single exhumation and forensic team; they can excavate only one grave at a time, and they can operate only in areas removed from rebel-controlled zones.

Hussein's government killed an estimated 300,000 people, most of them Shi'ite Muslims or ethnic Kurds, rights groups say. The Iraqi government has identified about 40 mass graves, but until now none has been scientifically exhumed -- in part because European forensic teams won't collect evidence that might be used to win death penalty convictions.

In order to prove Iraqi leaders guilty of genocide or crimes against humanity, the tribunal must show orders linking the regime to actual atrocities, like the grave in Hatra.

It is a slow process.

Kehoe's team set up shop here on Sept. 1, and only this week finished exhuming about 200 bodies from the two trenches. A laboratory team will spend another two months cataloguing and analyzing the remains.

Human Rights Watch estimates that 50,000 Kurds were killed in 1988, when Iraqi troops destroyed hundreds of Kurdish villages and used chemical weapons against the Kurds, most notoriously in Halabja, killing 5,000 people in one afternoon.

For the last six weeks, a forensic team several dozen strong, including anthropologists and archeologists, has been reconstructing in excruciating detail the mass murder that took place on the outskirts of Hatra.

In a long morgue tent at FOB Jaguar, P. Willey, an anthropology professor on leave from California State University, Chico, supervised the analysis of the remains. Willey said his team doesn't have to examine every body in the grave, just a representative sample. So his morgue is processing the remains of only 125 bodies from the trench full of women and children.

Anthropologists lay the skeletons in anatomical order on waist-high stainless steel gurneys. Two gold-capped teeth glinted from a woman's skull, capped by a tightly knotted black head scarf.

At the end of the process, the team will produce evidence packets for each individual case in the form of slide presentations. Kehoe showed some of the slides:

One series showed a boy, first in the grave holding a red-and-white-striped ball, then his skeleton and clothes laid out in order.

Another showed a mother and her infant son. The mother's severed hand was found in her child's blanket with the baby's skeleton. The forensic pictures show his T-shirt, which bears the legend ''Summer," and the mother's five pairs of gold earrings.

''People wonder why this takes so long," Kehoe said. ''It's a very tedious process; it's not just a matter of pulling bodies out of the ground."

The former federal prosecutor admitted frustration that he doesn't have more teams or a bigger budget. The Regime Crimes Liaison Office, which Kehoe heads, got $75 million for two years of work.

He said he'd like to have collected far more evidence by now for the Iraqi tribunal that has yet to issue a formal indictment against Hussein and 11 other top regime officials.

In the punishing sun at the Hatra wadi, Kehoe's voice dropped to a whisper when he discussed the murder of the women and children in trench No. 2. Years of exhumations in Bosnia have inured him to the sheer horror of mass killing, he said, but he finds it especially hard to understand the reason for killing these victims.

''Why? What, the fact that they were Kurds?" he said. ''This 2-year-old baby that was born as a Kurd deserved to be executed? It's much different, it's much more emotional, because you just can't find any place to put it."

Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.