Attend Saddam's Trial in Baghdad, Iraq

SabaH-el-khayr, shlounek? (Good morning, how are you? – Arabic)

With the help of some networking, I was able to attend Saddam’s Anfal Trial yesterday!!!  I had to wear a civilian suit and let me tell you, after 6 weeks in combat boots, the high heels killed my feet!  J  I couldn’t take in any recording devices but I found a picture that accurately depicts what I saw—please see the attached (Saddam reading the Quran—totally disengaged from the witness testimonies and Chemical Ali sitting behind him.)  I also provided some background on Saddam and the trial I was able to attend at the end of the email. 

Here are the highlights from my “ultimate” adventure:

• I took a Rhino (armored bus) to the Iraqi High Tribunal—inside the International Zone (green zone)
• Went through multiple security screenings—met one of the judges in line
• Observed the trial in a tinted glass upper level room—if I had to calculate the distance from Saddam, he was 10-15 feet away
• I wore a headset with interpretation the whole time unless the witness asked for a closed statement
• The defendants proceeded in one-by-one (Saddam, Chemical Ali, and 5 other former commanders)
• Before the presiding judge could open the session, Chemical Ali went to his microphone and started complaining about the guards beating him
• As soon as Chemical Ali finished, Saddam went to his microphone and started complaining about his microphone being turned off and how it wasn’t fair (the previous day he starting reading inflammatory excerpts from the Quran) and the judge said the courtroom was for material within the law
• There were three witness testimonies (Kurds) that would make most Americans cry (explicit details of what they encountered in concentration camps or in their villages)

Temperature Update:  Still dropping--100 degrees

Deployment Countdown:  6 Weeks Done (23%) -- 20 Weeks To Go (77%)

Assalamu alaikum, (Peace be upon you – Arabic)

Tracie

History of Saddam and “Chemical Ali”

Saddam's rule lasted throughout the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) (in which the United States, Soviet Union, and France backed Saddam after 1982), a war that ended in stalemate. During this long conventional war, Iraq and Iranattacked each other with chemical weapons and killed many Iranian and Iraqi military personnel and civilians with such weapons. In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein's regime launched the al-Anfal campaign (Spoils of War), which led to the alleged gassing of tens of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq when the military razed thousands of villages, launched poison gas attacks and rounded up men, women and children before shooting them in mass graves in northernIraq. Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, and five other former commanders are currently on trial in Baghdad for the attacks although US intelligence report claims that the Iranian military was the first chemical weapon attacker. Saddam and his six co-accused face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait resulting in the Gulf War and United Nations economic sanctions imposed at the urging of the U.S. The economic sanctions were designed to compel Saddam to dispose of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).^[1] Critics estimate that between 400,000 and 800,000 Iraqi children died as a result of the sanctions.^[2] TheU.S. and the U.K. declared no-fly zones over Kurdish northern and Shiite southern Iraq to oversee the Kurds and southern Shiites.

History of Anfal Trial

The Anfal campaign, which began in 1986 and lasted until 1989, is said to have cost the lives of 182,000 civilians in the mostly rural areas of Kurdistan, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.  The campaign was headed by Ali Hasan al-Majid, a cousin of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The Anfal campaign included the use of ground offensives, aerial bombing, systematic destruction of settlements, mass deportation, concentration camps,firing squads, and the chemical warfare, which earned al-Majid the nickname of "Chemical Ali".  Genocide is defined by the 1948 Geneva Convention as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". Kurds have always referred to the al-Anfal as the genocide.  In December 2005 a court in The Hague ruled that the killing of thousands of Kurds in Iraq in the 1980s was indeed an act of genocide. [1] TheDutch court said it considered "legally and convincingly proven that the Kurdish population meets requirement under Genocide Conventions as an ethnic group. The court has no other conclusion than that these attacks were committed with the intent to destroy the Kurdish population of Iraq." 

During the Anfal campaign, the Iraqi government:

• destroyed about 4,000 villages in Iraqi Kurdistan [4]
• executed approximately 182,000 men, women, and children [5]
• destroyed 1,754 schools, 270 hospitals, 2,450 mosques, 27 churches[6]
• wiped out around 90% of Kurdish villages in targeted areas.[7]