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In all, the investigators have excavated nine mass
graves — from among the more than 200 scattered
around the country containing, by some estimates,
tens of thousands of victims — and have completed
more than 330 files.
The forensic files will come into play for the first
time on Aug. 21, when Mr. Hussein is to stand trial
on genocide charges, accused of trying to annihilate
the Kurdish people in 1988. He is alleged to have
ordered military operations that wiped out entire
villages, sometimes with chemical weapons, killing
at least 50,000 people.
The team, part of the Regime Crimes Liaison Office
organized by the United States Justice Department,
has been helping the Iraqi judicial system try Mr.
Hussein and members of his government.
It is also preparing files on Mr. Hussein’s brutal
suppression of the Shiite uprising across southern
Iraq at the end of the Persian Gulf war in early
1991. At least 100,000 Shiites, and possibly twice
that number, died, according to court officials.
Those would be the second and third trials of Mr.
Hussein before an Iraqi special tribunal. The first
concerned the deaths of 148 men and boys in the
mostly Shiite town of Dujail after an assassination
attempt against Mr. Hussein in 1982. It has been
adjourned until October, when a verdict is expected.
The forensic team did not participate in that case.
The forensic case files are a result of painstaking
work that began on barren sweeps of desert where the
team was led by informants or by satellite imagery
that suggested that the ground had been disturbed.
In a meticulous process of documentation, the
investigators used sophisticated imaging technology
to map the contents of the graves, including the
location of each body, spent cartridge and bullet.
The remains were then flown by helicopter to the
team’s laboratories in a fortified compound in
western Baghdad.
On a gray wooden work table in the Forensic
Anthropology Laboratory, two yellowing skeletons lay
side by side. One was that of a woman between the
ages of 35 and 50 with a bullet hole in the back of
her skull. Next to her were the tiny bones of an
infant no older than a year. A separate bullet had
shattered the baby’s skull, which investigators
reassembled using surgical tape.
These were Case No. 19 (the baby) and No. 20 (the
woman), two of the 123 victims whose bodies Mr.
Trimble’s team pulled from a mass grave in a remote
area about 60 miles from the northern town of Hatra.
The grave, known as Nineveh 2, is one of three sites
the investigators are using to help build the
Kurdish genocide case against Mr. Hussein. The
skeletal remains, still clothed, were found lying
face up, the woman’s left arm around the child, who
was wrapped in a blanket decorated with a bunny
appliqué.
The woman may have been the child’s mother, or
perhaps a relative or a neighbor — the investigators
cannot say for sure. But what is certain is that
they died in an embrace.
Raad Juhi, the chief investigative judge, said the
victims had been told that they were being relocated
from their villages near Sulaimaniya to a
residential complex elsewhere.
Case No. 20 was dressed in five layers of clothing,
suggesting that she had not been allowed to pack a
suitcase and had left home in a hurry. She was
carrying a handbag with some baby clothes and
personal items: a spool of thread, a tube of
antibiotic ointment, matches, a metal container,
some coins, a barrette and five pairs of gold
earrings.
The child was dressed in soft white pants, a red
pullover and a white long-sleeved shirt decorated
with red trim, a drawing of a red sun hat and the
word “summer.”
Like thousands of other victims, Mr. Juhi said, the
victims were herded aboard buses and driven to a
holding camp near Kirkuk called Topzawa. From there
they were driven into the remote desert, separated
into groups — men in one, women and children in
another — and then corralled into trenches.
It all “was very systematic, highly organized,” Mr.
Trimble said
In some cases, gunmen stood above the mass graves
and sprayed their victims with automatic gunfire.
The women and children in Nineveh 2, though, were
executed in a far more meticulous fashion: one by
one, with gunshots to the back of the head, the
investigators said. Of the 123 victims, 95 were
children, 88 of them no older than 12.
In another tent, Mark Smith, the team’s
archaeological field director, stood before a
computer screen and demonstrated how researchers had
reduced the tragedy to digitized data to aid
prosecutors in constructing a precise narrative of
those final gruesome minutes.
He went through several different graphic renderings
of a mass grave associated with the Shiite uprising:
one showed the outlines of all the bodies, others
the bodies color-coded by age range, the number of
gunshots they suffered and whether they were wearing
blindfolds or had their hands bound.
Those maps help investigators analyze how the
victims were marched in, where the gunmen were
standing, the trajectory of the bullets and how the
bodies fell. “We’re looking for patterns,” Mr. Smith
said.
Several yards away, in the Cultural Objects
Laboratory, Ariana Fernández, a cultural
anthropologist from Costa Rica, studied the clothes
and artifacts found on the bodies in an effort to
draw further clues about their identities and their
fates.
Mannequins dressed in recovered clothing populate
the laboratory, giving it the look of a wardrobe
workshop. On a large plywood board, Ms. Fernández
had laid out the clothing that Case No. 19 and Case
No. 20 were wearing when they were murdered.
“You take them from the ground, you lift them up and
they’re individuals again,” she said. “It humanizes
them.”
The researchers have given some of the victims
nicknames: Quinn — after the Bob Dylan song “Quinn
the Eskimo” — for a boy who was found in a ski
jacket with a fluffy hood; Pochahontas for a girl
wearing a shirt with a beaded design; and Gray Guy,
Brown Guy and the Blue Man.
“It’s not a deliberate thing,” explained Kerrie
Grant, an archaeologist on the mass graves team. “We
get attached to them. It gives them some of their
humanity back.”
There was also “The Little Girl With the Ball.” She
was found in Nineveh 2 with a red-and-white ball in
her hands. “You spend enough time with these
individuals, you really want to see them go home,”
Mr. Trimble said.
But it is a cold reality of the job that the team’s
mandate — and budget — do not encompass the return
of the victims’ remains to their home villages.
That work, they hope, will be taken up by other
organizations if the violence eases. But so far no
group has come forward, and until then, the hundreds
exhumed by the mass graves team will have to speak
for the tens of thousands of others who remain
buried.
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