Escaping Death in Northern Iraq
Video Feature: Surviving an ISIS Massacre [includes graphic images]
Surviving an ISIS Massacre
ISIS massacred hundreds of Iraqi military recruits in June. Ali Hussein Kadhim survived. This is his improbable story.
Video Credit By Mike Shum, Greg Campbell, Adam B. Ellick and Mona El-Naggar on
Publish Date September 3, 2014.
Image CreditBryan Denton for The New York Times
DIWANIYA,
Iraq — Ali Hussein Kadhim, an Iraqi soldier and a Shiite, was captured
with hundreds of other soldiers by Sunni militants in June and taken to
the grounds of a palace complex in Tikrit where Saddam Hussein once
lived.
The
militants, with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, separated the men
by sect. The Sunnis were allowed to repent for their service to the
government. The Shiites were marked for death, and lined up in groups.
Mr. Kadhim was No. 4 in his line.
As
the firing squad shot the first man, blood spurted onto Mr. Kadhim’s
face. He remembered seeing a video camera in the hands of another
militant.
“I saw my daughter in my mind, saying, ‘Father, father,' ” he said.
He felt a bullet pass by his head, and fell forward into the freshly dug trench.
“I just pretended to be shot,” he said.
A
few moments later, Mr. Kadhim said, one of the killers walked among the
bodies and saw that one man who had been shot was still breathing.
“At that point,” Mr. Kadhim said, “I had a great will to live.”
He
waited about four hours, he said, until it was dark and there was only
silence. About 200 yards away was the edge of the Tigris River.
He
made it to the riverbank, where the reeds gave him some cover. There,
he met an injured man named Abbas, a driver at Camp Speicher who had
been shot by militants and shoved into the river.
Mr.
Kadhim stayed there three days with Abbas, who was so badly wounded he
could barely move. Mr. Kadhim ate insects and plants, but Abbas was in
too much pain to eat much of anything.
“It was three days of hell,” Mr. Kadhim said.
As Mr. Kadhim planned his escape, Abbas begged him to come back for him, and, if he could not, to at least tell the story.
“Let everyone know what happened here,” Abbas told him.
A Cruel Fate
Back
now at his family home here in southern Iraq, Mr. Kadhim, 23, recounted
his story on a recent afternoon while taking a break from harvesting
dates in his uncle’s orchard.
His
is one of a very few witness accounts, and perhaps the most detailed,
to emerge after the June massacre of Iraqi soldiers stationed at Camp
Speicher, a former American army base in Tikrit, Mr. Hussein’s hometown.
Mr.
Kadhim spoke plainly and evenly about his experience, and how he set
off from the riverbank on a nearly three-week, underground
railroad-style journey through insurgent badlands, relying on
sympathetic Sunnis to deliver him to safety.
In
an earlier interview with a video journalist, Mr. Kadhim still had the
marks on his wrists from the handcuffs. Elements of his story were
corroborated by a Sunni tribal sheikh who protected him on his journey,
and by Abbas’s father, who reached out to Mr. Kadhim after he saw an
interview he gave in the local news media.
The
suspected scale of the massacre — ISIS claimed it killed 1,700 Shiite
soldiers, a figure that some Iraqi officials and Mr. Kadhim believe is
accurate — would make it the deadliest sectarian atrocity in Iraq’s
recent history, more reminiscent of the mass killings carried out by Mr.
Hussein’s government than anything the country faced during the
sectarian civil war in 2006 and 2007.
The
militants are also believed to still be holding perhaps hundreds of
other soldiers from the base in Tikrit as hostages, according to Mr.
Kadhim. An adviser to the departing prime minister, Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki, said the government believed that the hostages were being
held in Anbar Province.
Interactive Graphic: A Rogue State Along Two Rivers
The story of the massacre tells as much about the woeful state of the Iraqi military, a force created and trained by the United States at a cost of billions of dollars, as it does about the cruelty of ISIS.
After
militants stormed Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, on June 10, they
continued their offensive south toward Tikrit. In Tikrit, chaos and fear
enveloped Camp Speicher, where Mr. Kadhim, a trainee who had joined the
army just 10 days before Mosul fell, was posted. The American-trained
army officers fled, as they had in Mosul, Mr. Kadhim said.
“We were alone,” he said. “So we decided to flee, because there were no officers.”
He
and his comrades took off their uniforms, put on civilian clothes —
track suits and sandals for many of them — and, in a large group that
Mr. Kadhim said amounted to about 3,000 soldiers, started walking out
the front gates.
It
was a terrible decision and a cruel fate: To this day, Camp Speicher
has not fallen to ISIS. Had Mr. Kadhim and his friends stayed where they
were, they would almost certainly have been safe.
They thought they would walk as far as Baghdad, almost 120 miles south.
But
just a few miles down the road, near Tikrit University, the men ran in
to a group of about 50 ISIS fighters in armored vehicles, he said.
“They told us, ‘Don’t worry, we will take you to Baghdad,' ” Mr. Kadhim said. “They tried to make us feel safe.
“They tricked us.”
Packed into trucks, the men were taken to the Tikrit palace grounds.
Over
the next three days, the militants carried out wave after wave of
killings around the palace and elsewhere in Tikrit. Human Rights Watch,
which analyzed satellite imagery and examined photographs released by
ISIS, says it has confirmed that 560 to 770 men,
at the least, were killed during that stretch. The group acknowledged
that the total number may be higher still, and ISIS itself put the
number of men it killed there at 1,700.
A Culture of Revenge
In
its campaign of blatantly sectarian- or ethnic-driven massacres like
the one in Tikrit, ISIS has been tearing open Iraq’s wounds, creating a
new wave of factionalism that has sent American officials scrambling to
call for better political inclusion and reconciliation. But many here
say those efforts already seem irrelevant.
Mr.
Kadhim and some other witnesses say that Sunni Arabs in Tikrit,
including some from Mr. Hussein’s tribe, assisted the militants in the
mass killing, a charge that the families of the victims have made in the
local news media. Parliament has said it will appoint a committee to
investigate, but few feel confident that justice will come of it. Dozens
of angry family members of missing soldiers stormed into Parliament on
Tuesday, destroying furniture and demanding to speak to lawmakers, most
of whom had quickly left the building.
ISIS’ Goals for Iraq and Syria
Background on ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Video Credit By Christian Roman on
Publish Date June 30, 2014.
Image CreditReuters
The
conquests of ISIS have reawakened a sense among Iraq’s Shiite majority
that they are facing a threat to their very existence from Sunnis — and
nothing highlights this in as dramatic a fashion as images of
industrial-scale killings of Shiites in Mr. Hussein’s hometown, with the
participation of the dead dictator’s tribesmen.
In
recent days the images and stories emerging from this massacre have
begun receiving wide play on Iraqi state television, whose programming
has also long included shows detailing the abuses of Mr. Hussein.
Many
here wonder how long the Shiites will restrain themselves from taking
widespread revenge against Sunnis, and plunging the country into the
sort of neighbor-killing-neighbor conflict of a few years ago.
In
other countries that have confronted a brutal past, like South Africa
and Bosnia, reconciliation has meant a painful process of apology and
forgiveness that Iraq has never seriously pursued.
Amer
al-Khuzaie, Mr. Maliki’s adviser on reconciliation, visited South
Africa last year to see if he could learn about how that country’s
experience might apply to Iraq. As he toured the prison on Robben
Island, where Nelson Mandela had been incarcerated, he asked the tour
guide how many prisoners were executed during Mr. Mandela’s
imprisonment.
“He
told me 125,” Mr. Khuzaie recalled. “This is an incomparable situation
between us and South Africa,” he said, referring to the trauma under Mr.
Hussein. “We would have a thousand in one day.”
He added: “The culture of Iraqis does not go for forgiveness. We come from the desert; our culture is for revenge.”
Here
in Diwaniya, in a region of fertile farmland where several of the
soldiers killed in Tikrit were from, the collective memory is still
scarred by the trauma of a Shiite uprising against
Mr. Hussein’s rule in 1991 that was encouraged by American officials.
But the United States then stood by as Mr. Hussein’s security forces
slaughtered tens of thousands of people.
That
explains why Shiites in the Iraqi south never trusted the Americans
when they invaded in 2003, even though the invasion upended the
political order of Sunni domination and placed the Shiites in power. It
explains, too, why many Shiites have greeted the recent American
military intervention in Iraq with suspicion.
It
was not massacres against Shiites, like the one in Tikrit, that
prompted American action, they say, but only because the Kurds in the
north, and Yazidis, an ancient Iraqi religious minority, came under threat.
“They
might want the scenario in 1991 to happen again, when they let the
Iraqi people die under the injustice of Saddam’s regime,” said Ali
al-Rubaie, a representative of the Shiite religious establishment in the
holy city of Najaf.
Unexpected Kindness
Back
on the riverbank, around 11 p.m., Mr. Kadhim said goodbye to Abbas and
entered the water. It was cold and the current was strong, but after
drifting downriver he managed to reach the other side.
In
darkness, hearing faint gunshots in the distance, he walked about a
half-mile north, he said, until he found an empty reed hut and fell
deeply asleep. The next morning he approached a cluster of houses in the
distance, and a Sunni family took him in and gave him his first proper
meal in days: eggs and yogurt.
Graphic: The Iraq-ISIS Conflict in Maps, Photos and Video
The
family, worried about what might happen to them if ISIS found them
sheltering a Shiite, drove him to the home of friends in another
village, where he was kept safe for three more days.
His
next stop on the journey was the town of Al Alam, at the home of a
Sunni tribal sheikh, Khamis al-Jubouri, who had been operating an
underground railroad-like system for Shiite soldiers on the run from
ISIS.
“We
also helped 40 Iraqi soldiers from Anbar, Diyala, Mosul and Baghdad get
home safely with fake IDs we made for them,” Sheikh Jubouri said.
Mr.
Kadhim stayed with the sheikh for almost two weeks before they judged
it safe enough to try to travel to Erbil, in the autonomous Kurdish
region, a trip in which they passed through several ISIS checkpoints,
Mr. Kadhim said.
In
Erbil, he met his uncle, who had flown up from Najaf. He finally
arrived home here the next night, after a long, circuitous drive.
“It was beyond happiness,” he said, of seeing his family again. “They were crying, and I was laughing.”
He had a thick beard, and he had lost weight. “My daughter didn’t recognize me, and she ran away,” he said.
Mr.
Kadhim has told his story in the local news media, and ever since his
phone has been ringing with calls from family members of missing
soldiers.
A
military intelligence officer visited him, took his testimony, and gave
him $430, a little less than half the monthly salary he earned as a
soldier — a job he said he would never go back to.
“For now, I am jobless,” he said. “I’m just trying to take care of my orchard.”
No comments:
Post a Comment