VIII. A Survivor

According to local officials in al-Hilla, several persons who were taken to the al-Mahawil mass grave sites managed to survive the executions at the al-Mahawil brick factory mass grave site. Human Rights Watch was able to locate one such survivor, and his remarkable story provides important clues about the manner in which the mass execution campaign was conducted in al-Mahawil.

Nasir Khadi Hazim al-Husseini was only twelve years old at the time of the 1991 mass arrest campaign. On March 16, 1991, his twenty-eight-year-old mother Khulud `Abud Naji took Nasir and two other thirteen-year-old relatives, his uncle Muhanad `Abud Naji, and his cousin Muhammad Yassin Muhammad, from their home in the al-Sa`da neighborhood to leave for their grandfather’s house in the Sha’awi neighborhood.

On their way, a soldier stopped the group, asked them where they were going, and accused them of being looters. Nasir’s mother explained that they were just going to their grandfather’s house, but the soldier arrested all of them and took them to a nearby school building: “They put us in a school in a classroom. By the evening, the classroom was filled with people because they kept arresting people.”¹⁷

As evening fell, the people gathered in the classroom were taken to the al-Mahawil military base:

They blindfolded us and bound our hands, and then they put us in landcruisers with shaded windows and a bus. We were about twenty-five to thirty people [detained].… They took us to the al-Mahawil military base. Some of us were taken to another area [of the al-Mahawil base]. They put me, my mother, my cousin, and my uncle in a tiny room. In the night of the same day, they brought a fourteen-year-old girl and a thirty-year-old woman to the same room.¹⁸

The family spent the night in the tiny room, and received no food since their arrest the prior day. The next morning they were taken for investigation, where high-ranking officers, including a lieutenant-colonel, took down their names, the neighborhood they came from, and similar details. Following the perfunctory investigation, they were taken to a large hall at the al-Mahawil military base, where they were again joined by other detainees:

They took us to a big hall [and] started bringing in people now and then. We stayed there for two days. There were so many people... They were children, women, and men. We were sitting in [family] groups, me with my relatives and the others with their relatives. No one dared to speak to the other groups.¹⁹

Toward the end of the second day—the evening of March 18, 1991—the detainees gathered in the big hall were taken outside and lined up in the yard of the compound. “They brought some blankets which they ripped and they tied our hands and blindfolded us with those,” Nasir recalled. “They covered our eyes and put us inside some TATA buses looted from Kuwait. We were between forty-five and fifty people on each bus. It was very crowded, there were two people on each chair.”²⁰

After the detainees were loaded on the buses, they were told that there were some checkpoints on the road, and that if asked, they should say they were going to Baghdad. Nasir, who could see a bit through the blanket covering his eyes, recounted the route taken by the bus:

There was an asphalt road from the door of the military camp. Then we turned off into a remote, dusty dirt road, an agricultural road. We turned off the main road, and I didn’t know where we were going. I was sitting on the bus at the chair near the window. There was an abandoned canal, I was sitting on that side of the bus. … I couldn’t see clearly, but there was a building—later, when I looked [after the executions], it was a brick factory.²¹

Almost as soon as the buses stopped, the executions began. People were pulled off the buses, thrown in a pre-dug pit, machine-gunned, and then buried with a bulldozer. Nasir told Human Rights Watch how he miraculously survived:

When they started taking us off the bus, some of us began reciting the shahada [Muslim declaration of faith]. My mother told me, “Repeat the shahada, because we are about to die.” I heard the shouting of the children. We grabbed each other’s hands—me, my mother, my cousin, and my uncle. They pulled us, we were all together.

They threw us into the dug-out grave. When I fell down, there were so many bodies underneath me. I layed down on top of them. They started to shoot on us.

There were two [groups of] men. One was taking the people off the bus, and others were shooting at people in the hole.

One of them pulled at my clothes, and said “That one isn’t dead, shoot him.” They shot again, but still I was not shot.

So they gave an order to the bulldozer driver to bury the grave. I was at the edge of the grave. When the shovel came, I spontaneously tried to crawl out. It was sundown now. I crawled to the edge of the grave, and got to a place where the bamboo was on my face and I was able to breathe through it. I heard the man who was standing on the hill instruct the shovel driver to bury us more—he had seen that I was not yet buried—but the driver left the place and didn’t do it.²²

After he heard the noises of the vehicles fade away, Nasir crawled out of the mass grave, leaving his dead relatives behind. He made his way to the main al-Hilla-Baghdad road, and met four sympathetic Shi`a Iraqi soldiers who helped him return home.