Shepherd tells his long-hidden tale of desert murder
Our correspondent meets a man who saw 'Chemical Ali' oversee the slaughter of 120

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TIMES ONLINE UK
April 15, 2003
By Daniel McGrory in southern Rumaila

FOR five years Satar al- Khalidy had kept his silence about how he witnessed one of Saddam Hussein’s favourite relatives kill 120 men, women and children and bury them in a desert grave.

Running across the parched earth yesterday on the edge of one of Iraq’s oil fields, the 27-year-old shepherd stops and points to a bunker gouged out of the sand.

He speaks quickly, relieved to be able to unburden himself of this secret now that the man responsible for the killings can no longer hurt him.

A small, wiry figure with huge hands, he is desperate for the British troops who control the vast oilfields of Rumaila to excavate this site.

It remains to be seen how vigorously the allies will pursue those accused of atrocities against their own people, or encourage war crimes investigators to move swiftly into Iraq, but the stories you hear from local people in areas such as this suggest that there is no shortage of evidence.

Mr al-Khalidy re-enacts his every move on that April day in 1998, when, at about 9am, he saw three blue Nissan buses come bouncing across the desert, followed by a white Land Cruiser carrying Ali Hassan al-Majid, infamously known as “Chemical Ali”.

“I was sitting against a sand berm, so they couldn’t see me,” he whispers, “But I saw the people ordered off the bus were blindfolded. They were made to sit on the edge of a pit, which was shaped like a horseshoe.” He describes how soldiers in the khaki uniforms of the Baath party climbed out of three Toyota pick-up trucks and walked behind the crowd sitting in the dirt. Some were crying, Mr al-Khalidy said, others trying to comfort the eight children he counted.

One child got up and tried to hide behind her mother. Another reached out and held his father’s hand tightly.

“Then there was shooting,” he says. “Lots of shooting and an earthmover shovelled dirt and sand over the people in the pit without anyone looking to see if they were alive or not.

“All the time Ali Hassan al-Majid was walking up and down, three bodyguards following him. I had seen him many times on television.

“Everyone knew al-Majid,” he says, his entire body tensing at the mention of the name. “The whole thing, from the time the buses arrived to filling in the grave, took no more than 20 minutes. I was scared they would see me. Soldiers saw my sheep and some began to search the area, but I shrank down into the ground and hid.”

He is the only witness to these alleged murders, so without digging up this site there is no way of verifying his story, but his account was consistent in the detail he provided.

In April 1998 a prominent Shia cleric, Mohamad al- Sader, had been murdered — on Saddam’s orders, it is said — and the rebellion that followed spread quickly across southern Iraq. President Clinton refused to allow the use of the US aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone to attack the Iraqi tanks commanded by “Chemical Ali” which were sent to crush the uprising.

Human rights groups have compiled the names of the thousands who disappeared during this purge, but nobody could be certain what happened to them, or where their bodies were hidden.

With Chemical Ali now dead and Saddam on the run, Iraqis are safe to make all the allegations they like, although in Rumaila people tell you that there have been stories for years about what they call “the secret deaths”. So far only Mr al-Khalidy has come forward to admit that he saw it happen.

The regime did not go to the lengths the Serbs did to cover up their killings. They refused to believe that the day would come when their power would end. The murder squad could only be bothered to drive 150 yards, to where thousands of acres of unoccupied desert lay.

Mr al-Khalidy was grazing his sheep there having the previous day noticed an army bulldozer clawing out a pit; he had wondered why. The only effort the authorities made to deter the curious was to dump tons of unexploded ordnance on the surface.

It is not clear whose responsibility it is to investigate such claims. The British armoured battle groups are too busy hunting Fedayin gunmen and trying to stop looters.

Some in Washington and London will argue that the likes of Chemical Ali committed so many crimes that it is pointless to investigate every one, But Mr al-Khalidy says: “Please, bring the British soldiers now, and in half an hour I will dig up a body and show you I am not lying.”