Saddam's Revenge

By Brian Bennett

Baghdad

When Ahmed Hassan Mohammed al-Dujaili took the stand as witness No. 1 in the trial of Saddam Hussein last December, he might have thought his worst nightmares were behind him. On a summer afternoon in 1982, two days after gunmen in his town opened fire on a presidential motorcade, Ahmed and all the other males in his family were rounded up by Saddam's Special Republican Guard. Ahmed and three of his 11 brothers were eventually released; the rest disappeared. Two years later, Saddam signed execution orders for six of Ahmed's brothers; a seventh died during interrogation. They were among the 148 men and boys Saddam is accused of ordering killed in retaliation for the assassination attempt. Ahmed says that when he recounted those horrors in court, he looked over at Saddam. The deposed dictator stroked his beard, looked Ahmed dead in the eye and ran his forefinger across his throat.

Since then, the nightmare has returned to Dujail. Ahmed believes that Saddam's throat-slitting gesture, made while television cameras were rolling, was a message to loyalists to kill Ahmed's family. Two of his cousins were kidnapped in July and haven't been heard from since. On Aug. 6, his brother Ali Hassan Mohammed al-Dujaili, another witness, was attacked in the middle of Dujail. Ahmed's nephew Husam was killed while protecting Ali. When Ahmed's younger brother Jaafer came to collect Husam's body, a sniper lying in wait put several bullets in Jaafer's legs. Jaafer lived but will always walk with a severe limp. He is among the lucky ones. The town's mayor, Haji Mohammed Hassan al-Zubeidy, says some 180 people have been murdered in Dujail since Saddam's trial began in October 2005. Basam Ridha, adviser to the Prime Minister for the Saddam trial, puts the number closer to 200. About 80 more have vanished while traveling on the road between Dujail and Baghdad. "Have you ever heard of the Bermuda Triangle?" asks Mahmoud Hussein al-Hesreji, chief of the Dujail city council. "It's just like that."

On Oct. 16, a five-judge panel will deliver a verdict on whether Saddam and his regime carried out the original 148 killings in Dujail. If convicted, he will face the death penalty. That trial, as well as a second one focused on the massacre of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, has been taking place inside the heavily secured Green Zone, where a succession of judges have given the former dictator the kind of hearing he never afforded his victims. But for many others associated with the trials, there has been no refuge from assassins who take justice--and revenge--into their own hands. Shi'ite death squads have murdered defense lawyers, while ex-Baathists have targeted the families of prosecutors and judges. The brother-in-law of Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa, the second trial's presiding judge, was gunned down last week in Baghdad. If putting Saddam on trial is intended to help Iraqis bury the demons of his murderous rule, the spate of vendetta killings has served as a reminder of the unchecked mayhem that has followed it.

Nowhere has the trial brought more misery than in Dujail, a town of 84,000, most of them Shi'ites, in the middle of the Sunni triangle. Since the start of Saddam's trial, Dujail has been infiltrated by ex-Baathist hit squads. Residents believe they have been ordered by Saddam's former henchmen to take out the families of witnesses. A number of insurgent cells operating around Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, a mere 45-minute drive north of Dujail, have targeted relatives of witnesses, most of whom rarely leave the Green Zone. Abu Hamid, commander of a nationalist cell based north of Dujail, says if any of the witnesses in the Saddam trial leave the Green Zone to return home, "we will destroy all of Dujail. If the people of Dujail allow these villains to live in the town, they will get the same treatment."

The plight of the town reflects the broader collapse of order in the center of Iraq. Insurgents have destroyed the town's water and electricity facilities. Mayor al-Zubeidy says he needs at least 200 more people from the police or Iraqi National Guard to secure the entrances and exits of Dujail. He says he has been unable to persuade the Iraqi government to send reinforcements to the town. "We haven't gotten any support from any of the governments," he says. "There is almost a siege of Dujail, and we can't move out. If they catch you on the way to Baghdad and they find out you are from Dujail, you will be killed at once." The town has provided Ali with three police bodyguards, but he still feels vulnerable. "I'm hunted," he says. "The government is ignoring Dujail."

The killings in Dujail speak to a larger battle being waged in the Iraqi psyche. In Saddam's police state, there were navigable boundaries that made it possible to live. True, the executions by Saddam's regime in Dujail showed that those boundaries were a mirage: they could close in on you in less time than it takes a bullet to fly from the barrel of a gun. But life in Iraq has become so bloody and death so ever present, random and unpredictable that some Iraqis are nostalgic for Saddam's tyranny. When I told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad about the killings of witnesses' families in Dujail, he shook his head but said the current loss of life is "different than a government carrying on violence against its own citizens." Iraqis, he says, "have paid and are paying a high price to potentially head in a great direction that was not available under Saddam."

It is indicative of the scale of Saddam's brutality that there are some in Dujail who believe the current bloodshed is preferable to what preceded it. "Of course, now it is much better," says Ali, speaking by phone from Dujail. "Saddam's terrorism would go on forever if he were still in power." Ali's brother Ahmed, witness No. 1 in the Saddam trial, doesn't know when he will leave the Green Zone or what awaits him if he does. But after spending his high school years in prison and losing most of his brothers, he says he is willing to pay the ultimate price to see Saddam answer for his crimes: "I'll give up my own life and the lives of my family if it means I have helped send Saddam to the gallows." The sobering reality is that both may come true.