A voice for Hussein's victims

SEDAR, Iraq -- The first thing Abdullah Mohammed Hussein wants to talk about on the witness stand at Saddam Hussein's trial are his seven dead children, and how they were dumped into a shallow grave in northern Iraq after they were shot in the head, along with their mother.

Then Abdullah wants to talk about this village, which has improbably sprung back to life after the former dictator's army killed most of its inhabitants, dynamited its houses, and sowed salt in its vineyards during a genocidal campaign that literally left scorched earth in its wake.

Abdullah, 57, said he is tired of looking backward, as he did for so long after his family was murdered in 1988 while he battled the regime as a Kurdish peshmerga fighter one mountain range away from his hometown.

Now, for a change, he is looking forward to something: the chance to testify so that he might give individual voice to Saddam Hussein's Anfal campaign, which claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 Kurds.

''I am happy that the corpses of my family will be used as evidence against Saddam," Abdullah said. ''I will go to the court and spit at him and curse him. I will ask him, for what reason did he kill these women and children? I would like to tell him to his face that these women and children were guilty of nothing."

The Iraqi government has vowed to open formal legal proceedings in January against Ali Hasan al-Majid, known as ''Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in the Anfal campaign, which was designed to crush a Kurdish revolt that had smoldered for decades and concentrate the Kurdish population in selected cities where the Iraqi military felt it could more easily control them.

Saddam Hussein, Majid, and 11 other senior Ba'ath regime officials are currently in custody and are expected to stand trial within the year on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ultimately, however, the legal cases against them will depend on stories like that of Abdullah and others in Sedar, nestled in the mountains 60 miles northeast of Kirkuk. Investigators must find individuals who can testify to Ba'athist atrocities; prosecutors in turn will have to connect those specific crimes to orders signed by regime leaders.

Testifying at a war crimes trial, Abdullah said, would give meaning to the senseless slaughter of his family.

Still, Abdullah sometimes cannot contain his grief, like when he cradles in his palm the thumbnail-sized, black-and-white identity photographs of his wife and two of his children. Then, as he does often when he remembers his lost family, Abdullah apologizes, stops talking, and convulses with sobs.

But he counts himself among the lucky. Of the few dozen survivors from Sedar, Abdullah is the only one whose relatives have been positively identified in a mass grave excavated miles away by American forensic specialists gathering evidence for the trials.

And he has rebuilt a life for himself, along with about a hundred other villagers determined to undo the Anfal's murderous effect at one of the first villages destroyed in this fertile crescent, which curves around Dukan Lake, once a prime resort destination in the Kurdish mountains, almost down to the oil city of Kirkuk in the plains.

Wounds run deep
Sedar feels like the end of the earth in an already remote stretch of northeastern Iraq, over two ridges of mountains from the nearest main road.

The only ways to reach Sedar are on foot, donkey, or in four-wheel-drive vehicles. (Some of the government troopers parachuted in at the beginning of the Anfal campaign, when Sedar was one of many mountain outposts used by Kurdish peshmerga in the guerrilla war for Kurdish independence against the regime in Baghdad.)

After taking two turns off the ragged asphalt road to Dukan, the track to Sedar degenerates into a rutted mud track, which frequently converges with the riverbed. It is nestled deep in a narrow valley, where brown sheep graze and new grapevines lend a purple hue to the green hillside.

There is no telephone or cellular service here, but many of the roughly 130 inhabitants who now live in Sedar have satellite television. Because the village has so little communication with the rest of Iraq, Sedar celebrated Ramadan on the schedule announced over Arab satellite channels from the Gulf -- beginning a day earlier than the rest of Iraq.

On a recent holiday, Abdullah sat with his brothers in the flat, packed-mud courtyard of his two-room house. All have remarried since their wives were taken away on March 5, 1988, and killed.

Abdullah has two young sons and a daughter with his new wife, a woman just over half his age whom he married in 1997. Nazaneen Ali, 33, is from a much bigger village.

''I told my husband I will take the children and leave him unless we move to a city by springtime," she said. ''Moving here was like coming to a grave."

Like many of the men who returned to Sedar in 1994 to resettle and rebuild the village, Abdullah and his brothers often wallow in their hometown's tragic past.

Village under siege
In the spring of 1988, fighting raged all across northeast Iraq between peshmerga and government forces. With the close of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein turned his full attention to the persistent Kurdish rebellion, and ordered the Anfal, which means ''The Spoils," a reference to a verse in the Koran.

According to the international group Human Rights Watch, the Anfal campaign killed as many as 100,000 people, displacing tens of thousands more, while destroying about 4,000 villages.

Shelling was heavy in the mountains where Abdullah was fighting, he recalled. When he got word his own village had fallen under attack, Abdullah said, ''I couldn't go to save my family."

Those who escaped told Abdullah and his brothers that Iraqi troops blocked the path into the village with a bulldozer before rounding up residents.

Out of 115 people in Sedar, villagers say, about 85 were taken away that March day.

Abdullah's family was taken to a concentration camp in Top Zawa, a town near Kirkuk, where families were sorted, according to the testimony of those who survived.

His elderly mother was taken to Nugra Salman, a fort near the Saudi border where many older people were transferred and either left to die of exposure or eventually released.

It took nearly five years for the village to return to something approaching normal. Aid groups and Kurdish political parties contributed building materials and new livestock for the residents.

Only last year did a European group fund the construction of cinder-block latrines, which now prevent human waste from flowing into the river that runs through the center of the village.

Most of the Anfal survivors from Sedar were men who were away fighting when the regime's soldiers passed through. Now the village echoes with the sounds of young children from the remarried fighters. There are virtually no people between the ages of 10 and 30 in the village.

In rural Kurdistan, older peshmerga veterans like Abdullah rely on party leaders like feudal lords. In this part of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan holds sway.

In 1997, when Abdullah realized his wife was probably dead, he went to Talabani and demanded cash -- enough to woo a new wife. He said he refused to leave Talabani's courtyard until the leader handed him a wad of cash worth more than $1,000.

Last year, in the summertime, Abdullah received the first word about the fate of his family. Peshmerga fighters, and then US military investigators, began excavating a trench at a mass grave in Hatra, outside the city of Mosul. There, they found hundreds of bodies of women and children, some of them with identity cards.

Painful truth revealed
Kurdish satellite television stations aired pictures of the identity cards, and eventually the news filtered to Abdullah.

''Until then, I had no idea what had become of them," he said.

In the mass grave at Hatra, investigators identified the bodies of Abdullah's wife, Aisha Abdullah Hussein, 38; son Nasser, 15; and daughters Shirin, 12, and Shler, 8.

Still unaccounted for are four sons, Ibrahim, 8, twins Kemal and Jamal, 5, and a newborn named Mohammed.

Abdullah returned to PUK leader Talabani last summer with a second demand: the return of his family's remains.

''He promised me he would bring the bodies back after the trial," Abdullah said. ''If the corpses are brought back for me, I will feel alive again."

Abdullah and his brother, Hassan Mohammed Hussein, 54, have prepared a family plot on the ridge above the village, shaded by an almond tree and protected from grazing sheep by a low stone wall and some barbed wire. They moved their father's bones here from the village cemetery. The rest of the ground is reserved for the bodies of their family members killed in the Anfal.

Only in the past month have investigators started interviewing potential witnesses, including Abdullah. It is unclear how long it will take the Iraqi Special Tribunal to prepare formal indictments against Majid, Saddam Hussein, and other leaders responsible for the crimes against the Kurds.

But Abdullah is willing to wait.

He watched carefully on television when the former dictator appeared for the first time in the dock this summer. Now, he counts the days to the trial, and the repatriation of his family's remains to the graveyard in Sedar. After that, he said, he will let go of the demons of the past.

''We have suffered for so long," he said. ''I will come to court and tell Saddam all these stories."

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