Missing Loved Ones
Photos by Stewart Innes
Text adapted from Peter Wilson's article "Seven Degrees of Liberation", The Australian.
Peter Wilson and Stwart Innes drove together through Baghdad and Southern Iraq retracing their steps from the beginning of the war, their arrest, incarceration in the Palestine Hotel and the stories they covered after the war.
Their eldest brother, Abu Mohammed was killed at the age of 34 while fighting in Saddam’s army in the 1991 invasion of Kuwait. In the wave of anger against Saddam after that war, his funeral had turned into an anti-Saddam protest.
“They took our two other brothers, Amer and Jassim on the day of the funeral,” said Kasim, who was a 24-year-old soldier in Saddam’s Republican Guard at the time. “I was not at the funeral but they arrested me the next day and brought me here.”
“I heard them being beaten and tortured in the room next to me, and screaming in the night,” said Kasim, whose face was lined with 12 years of painful memories. “After two weeks they interrogated me and right at the start they dragged Amer in and dumped him on the floor in front of me as a warning.”
After several beatings and 20 days in captivity Kasim was released because two witnesses had sworn that he did not attend the funeral.
“But we have never seen them again,” whispered Kasim, almost in tears.
Jamila said her surviving brother had been traumatised and deeply depressed for years after his release. “He was closed up within himself for a long, long time. We all suffered – our parents have never recovered.”
The family could not even complete the usual Shi’ite funeral rituals for Abu Mohammed, which call for a second round of ceremonies a few weeks after the first funeral.
“People were too scared to come to our house because the secret police were sitting outside. For a long time nobody would even think of knocking on our door,” she said.
The search of the prison was complicated by the distrust and suspicion which flourished under Saddam. As we had seen with the various species of minders at the Palestine Hotel, regime operatives tended to keep details of their work secret from their colleagues and nobody had openly confirmed the location of the prison cells.
When Stewart took this photograph of the pair in July 2003, after tracking them down to their home in Shu'la suburb of Baghdad, the family had had seen documents which were found in police files.
On May 12, Kasim was checking a list when he saw his own name and those of his brothers near the bottom of the sheet. "Next to my name it said ‘still available’. Next to my brothers' names it said ‘executed 8/5/1992’."
That meant his brothers had been kept alive and no doubt tortured for 14 months. Kasim showed me a tattered photocopy of the list, which carried 18 names, 14 of which were marked "executed".
There was no indicaton if/where they were buried.
Knowing their brothers are dead, the family was able to mourn them with a proclamation of their martyrdom - the black banner behind them. Their bothers' names are written in gold. Amer was a 21-year-old hotel waiter and Jassim a 26-year-old student when they were arrested.
For months after they discovered their brothers had been executed, the family searched other prisons and mass graves for remains of their brothers.
When we met them, mass graves were still being excavated across Iraq but Kasim said his family had stopped searching. He knew his brothers were stripped of their identification papers because he was still with them in jail when that happened, and he believed there would be no way to identify their bodies.
(Copyright © 2003 Stewart Innes. All rights reserved)