"When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child screaming..."
That's the final line of this gut-wrenching BBC story on Iraq's Tortured Children (via LGF.) It's based on an interview with Ali, an exiled former "employee" of Saddam's psychotic son Uday. Ali's own daughter was crippled by torture by Saddam's secret police after he had fallen from favor. He's not the only one, of course:
In northern Iraq - the only part of the country where people can speak freely - we met six other witnesses who had direct experience of child torture, including another of Saddam's enforcers - now in a Kurdish prison - who told us that an interrogator could do anything:"We could make a kebab out of the child if we wanted to." And then he chuckled.
Ali talked about the paranoid frenzy that rules Baghdad - the tortures, the killings, the corruption, the crazy gangster violence of Saddam and his two sons.Posted by Dr. Frank at June 22, 2002 10:18 AM | TrackBackAnd the faking of the mass baby funerals.
You may have seen them on TV. Small white coffins parading through the streets of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, an angry crowd of mourners, condemning Western sanctions for killing the children of Iraq.
Usefully, the ages of the dead babies - "three days old", "four days old" - are written in English on the coffins. I wonder who did that.
Ali gave us the inside track on the racket. There aren't enough dead babies around. So the regime stores them for a mass funeral... They used to collect children's bodies and put them in freezers for two, three or even six or seven months - God knows - until the smell got unbearable.
Then, they arrange the mass funerals. The logic being, the more dead babies, the better for Saddam. That way, he can weaken public support in the West for sanctions.
That means that parents who have lost a baby can't bury it until the regime says so.