Robert Fisk's World: 'Collateral damage' or targeted killing, the effect is much the same - One grandfather lost all his sons and grandsons. His family line came to an end
The Independent, 11 October 2008
All kinds of horrors flop on to my Beirut doormat. There's The Independent's mobile phone bill, a slew of blood-soaked local Lebanese newspapers – "Saleh Aridi's blood consolidates [Druze] reconciliation", was among the goriest of the past few days – and then there are files from the dark memory lane through which all Middle East history has to pass.
The repulsive Baath party archives of Saddam Hussein are the latest to find a place on my coffee table, all marked "Secret", unpublished – though they formed the basis for the old man's trial and for his depraved hanging by the Iraqi government more than two years ago. I reprint them now without excuse, for they have a bitter taste in the "new" Iraq and in the "new" Afghanistan about which we still fantasise as we send more Nato troops into Asia's greatest military graveyard.
The documentary evidence of Saddam's brutal inquiry into the killings at the Shia Muslim village of Dujail in 1982 provides frightening, fearful testament to the earnestness and cruelty of totalitarianism, the original files of Saddam's mukhabarat security services in their hunt for the men who tried to assassinate the Iraqi dictator more than a quarter of a century ago. Saddam was then the all-powerful leader of a nation at war with Iran – an eight-year conflict that would cost the lives of more than a million Muslims on both sides – and whose most ruthless enemies were members of the Iranian-supported Al-Dawa Party (including a certain Nouri al-Maliki). Saddam's closest allies at this time were the Gulf oil sheikhdoms – and the United States, which was sending military supplies, chemical precursors and satellite reconnaissance photographs to Baghdad to assist Saddam in his war against Iran, a nation he had invaded two years earlier.
On his passage through Dujail, Saddam's heavily armed convoy was attacked by 10 villagers armed with Kalashnikov rifles. All were killed at the time or hunted down and murdered later. In their subsequent investigations, however, the mukhabarat – in this case operating under the ominous title of the "Regime Crimes Liaison office" – were able to use the system of tribe and sub-tribe in Dujail to tease out the names of everyone associated with the attackers.
The patriarchal lineage – wherein all males carry their father's, grandfather's, and great-grandfather's names, sometimes back eight generations – enabled the secret police to trace the male line of entire families and thus to liquidate them all. Their womenfolk were tortured, many of them raped. The men were butchered. One grandfather lost all his sons and grandsons. His "treacherous" family line came to an end. The ruthlessness of Saddam's "Crimes Liaison Office" comes across in their surviving reports.
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