Regards, Ivan
Posted on 10/14/2004 1:00:46 AM PDT by MadIvan
The bodies of the women and children seem to tumbling downhill toward the dry river bed that bounds this dusty, remote killing field.
About 300 Kurdish women and children, dressed in the traditional colourful dresses of the Dukan Lake area, were murdered by pistol shots to the head and then bulldozed into a trench the size of a small suburban drive.
Sixteen years later, the top layer of dirt removed, the grave seems startlingly fresh. Time has done little to neutralise the smell of rotting flesh.
Seasonal flooding from the wadi enveloped the bodies at the bottom of this mass grave, preserving at least some of them until the American forensic team began removing bodies on Sept 1.
The 150-odd corpses still left in the grave - labelled Trench Number Two by investigators - lie in a jumble. The clothes and blindfolds have barely decayed at all. A woman's purple dress streams down the side on the grave's embankment. A blindfold is still tightly knotted around her skull.
Barely visible until the archaeologist exhuming the grave points it out are the bones of children and babies. The small T-shirts and baggy trousers of the children are easily confused with the women's scarves stuffed into the grave.
The ruts left by the bulldozer's teeth are still visible at the top of the trench.
Mixed with the clothes and bodies are the personal belongings the women brought with them, not knowing they were being taken into the desert to be murdered: pots, pans, purses, drinking glasses.
Just up the hill, over the ridge and out of view of the wadi, is Trench Nine. This grave is different: 156 men were led alive to the bottom of the trench and murdered with machine guns. Their bodies are trapped in suspended animation, like people killed fleeing a fire.
They are grouped near one wall, where they apparently ran to escape a hail of bullets. There is more dust at the top of the hill, and the grave is far enough from the wadi that it has remained dry - removing the smell of decomposition, and leaving only the horrifying spectacle of the men frozen in a final attempt to survive.
Broken bones jut from the men's baggy trousers, still preserved along with the ropes that bind their skeletons together at the wrist.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Nice find Ivan. I hope this story gets the airtime it deserves in the US and the UK.
I have a few liberal friends. I'm sending every link I find of these stories to them. Many of them tell me you can't trust the so called right-wing US media not to distort the truth. Well, I sent them the link to this story, and the version in Al-Jazeera and not a single one had a comment. The horrors uncovered in the desert won't go away. They speak louder than any WMD.
What do Kurds matter to socialists and isolationists? "Wrong war at the wrong time," is all they can say.
An old friend of mine has been working periodically as a forensic archaeologist in Bosnia for 5-6 yrs doing these exhumations & identifications...morbid gross & fascinating work...
What a tragic duty. Important, but tragic.
bttt
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