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Something terrible happened here. Something murderous
The Observer ^ | April 6, 2003 | Paul Harris

Posted on 04/05/2003 4:16:38 PM PST by MadIvan

The coffins are laid out in neat rows in an abandoned warehouse. In each is a crumpled bag of bones, old and dusty but still recognisably human. In the open end of one sack a skull is buried among the fragments of a skeleton. Its eye sockets are empty. Its teeth are smashed. Beside it, two ribs point out like accusing fingers.

Something terrible happened here. Something murderous. Something evil.

The proof lies in a cargo container nearby. Its metal door hangs open and inside are pages and pages of files. Each sheaf of notes contains a picture of a man or woman. Each and every one has been shot in the head. Their wounds are mangled and gaping. Many of them barely looked human any more as the anonymous photographer chronicled their dead faces. It is a horror almost beyond words.

It is hard not to see the black and white photographs - two for each victim - and want to look away. Yet each was a brother, a father or a son. Or a mother or daughter or sister. Each had a past and hopes for a future. Yet each ended here, in this dry and dusty hall of the dead. There must be at least 200 of them in the plywood coffins roughly hammered together by a hurried carpenter. All of them are in bags, jumbled together in anonymous piles of remains.

'Whoever they are, they have been desecrated in their death. No one should ever treat the dead like this,' said Sergeant Simon Brain, a veteran of tours in Bosnia who has seen places in the Balkans that look similar to this. 'That is two countries now that I have seen mass graves,' he added with a shake of his head.

There are signs of torture too. Outside the warehouse stands a wall. It is dotted in the centre with a spray of bullet holes. Nearly all of them are at head height. There is a ditch behind it. If anyone was shot against the wall, their blood would have drained cleanly away. In another warehouse a dozen tiny concrete cells have been built of breeze blocks inside the hangar. In some of them portraits of Saddam Hussein stare from the grey walls. In several an iron pole has been hung from the roof. Dangling from it are rusting metal hooks. They are ideal torture chambers.

'We can't speculate on what this is until an investigation has been carried out,' a British military spokesman said. But one officer, speaking privately and clearly shocked by what he had seen, was more blunt. 'Just look at those photos,' he said. 'Look at this place. People were being tortured and executed here.'

The building has now been declared off limits after being discovered by British soldiers of the Third Regiment of the Royal Horse Artillery yesterday morning. An investigation will now be launched into exactly who lies in the coffins. War crimes investigators have been alerted to the discovery and the building sealed off and guarded.

No one will envy the officials who will have to venture inside. The warehouse lies on a sprawling and abandoned military base on the outskirts of Az Zubayr, a small town near Basra. No one lives nearby. It can only be reached by rough and pitted mud causeways that traverse a lunar landscape contaminated by oil leaks from nearby refineries. Multi-coloured slicks soak into the dust of the drained saltmarshes as they bake in the sun. There is no sign of life apart from the stray dogs that swarm over this part of Iraq.

The base itself is a mess. Most of the buildings have been trashed or looted and destroyed over the previous decade or so of war and sanctions. There are holes in many of the buildings and roofs missing from some of the barrack huts.

Yet the warehouse of bones was locked and intact. There is little doubt that the bones are several years old. No flesh remains on the long brown leg and arm bones or bits of rib. Only a few tufts of tough black hair lie scattered on the floor, where dogs have tugged at a few of the bags and spilled their grim contents on the unforgiving concrete.

But there is no doubt the base was inhabited until only a few weeks ago. Among the buildings are Iraqi army shirts still in their bags, new gas mask respirators, signal huts for an artillery unit and maps with military drawings on them. Yet the Iraqi soldiers who were here were literally living beside hundreds of corpses.

Exactly who they were is so far a mystery. But there are a few clues. Some of the bags are made of plastic and inside them can be seen a few pieces of military equipment. The green belt of the Iraqi army is plainly visible in several of the sacks. Were they soldiers suspected of disloyalty in recent years? Were they Shia rebels from 1991, many of whom were in the army? More than 50,000 Shia were killed by the forces of Saddam Hussein in their doomed revolt. But in most of the bags there is no trace of clothing. Just bones.

In one sack a single photograph lies. It is a simple ID card. From it a middle-aged man stares out. He has black hair, a long face and a drooping moustache. In life he would perhaps have looked pensive. But lying half covered by his own dusty remains, the man pictured looks sad and forlorn, regretful for the life stolen from him. A splotch of bloodstain on the corner of the card is reminder enough of the brutality of how all his hopes must have died.

It is hard to stay in the warehouse long. In one corner empty coffins are stacked four or five high. Whoever was doing this grim work was stopped before they finished their task.

That is a small mercy, but no respite for those already dead.

Inside the hangar the dusty air hangs close around the clothes and almost makes one retch to think of what is being breathed into the lungs. It is a relief to leave the charnel house. Outside the sun shines. A breeze blows some of the bone dust away. But inside the horrors remain, testimony to the crimes of a regime that, while facing death itself, will leave images of terror that time may never erase.


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia; United Kingdom; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: atrocities; blair; bodies; bush; coffins; embeddedreport; iraq; iraqifreedom; saddam; uk; us; war; warlist
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To: MadIvan; *war_list; W.O.T.; 11th_VA; Libertarianize the GOP; Free the USA; knak; sakka; ...
OFFICIAL BUMP(TOPIC)LIST
21 posted on 04/05/2003 4:38:19 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach (Where is Saddam?)
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To: MadIvan
Why would they have left these remains in this warehouse for so long? Why not just dig a huge hole and bury everything?

The only reason I can come up with is that they would parade people through this death house from time to time as a reminder of what might happen to them if they don't stay in line.
22 posted on 04/05/2003 4:38:53 PM PST by randita
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To: MadIvan
Demonic!
23 posted on 04/05/2003 4:39:41 PM PST by crz
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To: randita
It's worse - they have the pictures of these poor people right after they were executed. I hate to ask if Uday was involved, but he enjoyed seeing people die like this.

Regards, Ivan

24 posted on 04/05/2003 4:39:48 PM PST by MadIvan
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To: Geist Krieger
Civilized people have streets, my friend. The Arabs and their ROT culture have only produced the Arab Gutter.

Stop the ROT!
(Religion of Terror)
25 posted on 04/05/2003 4:40:31 PM PST by Thorondir
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To: Walkingfeather
"Yea... where is al Jazeara now.... ????"



filming Saddam's look alike....
26 posted on 04/05/2003 4:40:53 PM PST by Arpege92
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To: knak
You really have to wonder where the sick f--ks are that did the killing. Are they findable at this point? Maybe the records are kept on them as well.
27 posted on 04/05/2003 4:42:34 PM PST by Thebaddog (Fetch this)
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To: MadIvan
FoxNews Channel has been reporting basically the same thing as this article. There is very good evidence of atrocities committed by the Hussein regime.

So, a nice pat on the butt goes to the liberals who have cried that Saddam is not really a bad guy and that any word of atrocities by the USA and Britain was just lies concocted to move into Iraq to get their oil.

28 posted on 04/05/2003 4:44:24 PM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
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To: MadIvan
The picture of the coffins should be emailed to every French Government official, every German government official, to all the Democrats in the US government that are now DEMAGOGING Operation Iraqi Freedom, and to UN Sec. Koffi (I am a stooge) Annan.

As these atrocities are uncovered, the "peace" protests will evaporate into nothingness....
29 posted on 04/05/2003 4:44:48 PM PST by MangoCrazy
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To: Anamensis
Don't even get your hopes up about making leftists see the light.

The peaceniks don't care about this, they're on the side of evil. They'll still support Saddam as well as most of the Muslims --even if these victims are other Muslims.

30 posted on 04/05/2003 4:45:35 PM PST by FITZ
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To: FITZ
The peaceniks don't care about this, they're on the side of evil.

An essential truth worth reapeating!
31 posted on 04/05/2003 4:47:37 PM PST by Thorondir
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To: Jeff Chandler
From what Fox News has said, those records indicate that these deaths were executions. A lot of them say plainly, "Executed, shot to the head." There are also photos of the dead and a lot of them show beaten and bloody faces and the bodies show a lot of signs of torture. Let's see the libs explain this away.
32 posted on 04/05/2003 4:47:42 PM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
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To: MadIvan
If these are repatriated remains from Iran, as is being claimed, wouldn't the files & notes be in farsi rather than arabic ?
33 posted on 04/05/2003 4:48:03 PM PST by 1066AD
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To: MadIvan
Bump!
34 posted on 04/05/2003 4:48:26 PM PST by Inspectorette
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To: Anamensis
True enough. A lot of people (Americans included) refused to believe that Stalin was killing millions of his own people. They just dismissed it with the wave of a hand when the facts became inconvenient.

We'll never know for sure, but the few Russian records that were not shredded are now indicating that approx. 60-80 million people were killed by the Stalin regime.

35 posted on 04/05/2003 4:50:41 PM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
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To: Anamensis
I agree. Let's see even if the mainstream press picks it up. The horrible events that happened in Desert Storm/Shield were declassified last week: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/884889/posts

I only saw one media source write ANYTHING about it. And it was only a back page mention.

It is easier to dismiss information as a lie when hardly anyone knows about it.
36 posted on 04/05/2003 4:50:44 PM PST by Calpernia (http://www.politicsandprotest.org/attack.swf)
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To: MadIvan
A report on one of the news nets today said the locals were telling soldiers that Uday had videos made and sent to him. Those poor people.
37 posted on 04/05/2003 4:50:51 PM PST by mewzilla
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To: MadIvan
But its none of our business. < /sarcasm >
38 posted on 04/05/2003 4:51:42 PM PST by sweetliberty ("Better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to open your your mouth and remove all doubt.")
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To: randita
I am only speculating, but the meticulous record keeping hints of something Saddam's regime did in the 90's ... a pice of a 'lost loved one' would be removed from the corse and mailed out to the surviving family members if even a whiff of revolt arose; these remains are likely those of Shiia taken during uprisings against the Ba'athists and kept for intimate reminders to those allowed to live. Why else would the pictures and addresses be kept so meticulously? There was some reporting of this practice during the early nineties.
39 posted on 04/05/2003 4:54:49 PM PST by MHGinTN (If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote Life Support for others.)
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To: MadIvan
We should make the liberals line up and take a slow tour of places like this, just like we did with German civilians and the concentration camps at the end of WW2. It might drive home the reality of the terror they supported.
40 posted on 04/05/2003 4:55:11 PM PST by thatdewd
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