An Interview with the Anfal survivor, Taimour
Preamble: Kanan Makiya’s Account of His Meeting With Taimour.
As far as anyone knows, Taimour ‘Abdallah, from the village
of Qulatcho, is the only human being to have experienced firsthand the
innermost workings of the Anfal campaign and to have lived to tell of it. This
much I already knew in London,
although I did not really know what the Anfal campaign was about, or if the
boy’s account could be believed; it had been such a wooden and stilted
interview. The Anfal was at that point just a name for me, one that kept on
cropping up in the copies of the secret police documents which I had been given
and which maybe had something to do with large numbers of Kurds disappearing in
1988. Many survivors had witnessed the attacks on their villages or other
rounding up operations inside northern Iraq. But only one person
‘disappeared’ and by a miracle ‘reappeared’ to tell us what had happened to him.
Our meeting took place in an abandoned army barracks a half-hours’
drive into the mountains that surround Sulaimaniyya. Bombed out buildings with
blackened windows perched on a mountain with unobstructed visibility in every
direction. The setting was as remarkable as the base was awful–surrounded by
walls, barbed wire and security checkpoints. Taimour’s life since the March
uprising had been organized around the fact that he was and still is a prime
target for assassination by Saddam’s agents. It became obvious the boy had been
turned into a symbol, the servant of a cause, a living monument to the
suffering of the Kurdish people.
Taimour was very quiet and passive throughout. In the
sixteen hours that I spent in his company, he never spoke unless he was spoken
to; he always answered politely, but in monosyllables, showing no emotion
whatsoever. Was he suppressing them because of the trauma? Or was he expected to
behave like a hero and heroes don’t cry? Maybe the setup of being interviewed
in these unfamiliar surroundings by a foreigner was not conducive to the
expression of emotion by someone who was after all still a child. He had been
dressed up to look like a miniature version of a Kurdish peshmerga. Each
Kurdish organization has its distinctive sash around the waist, its own
favorite tailors and clothing styles.
The privacy that I desperately needed could not be arranged
here. So I had to head back with Taimour and a big escort of armed men to
Sulaimaniyya. We arrived at a house in the city center, and after the customary
hospitalities and endless cups of tea, late in the evening, a private room was
arranged and the interview finally started. But the electricity went off all
over Sulaimaniyya. It went off and on again for the rest of the evening. Everything
that could go wrong did that day.
As a result, I was nervous and upset. Who could have
foreseen so many people hanging around? The idea had simply been to sit down
with Taimour and a tape recorder. I had not anticipated such complications. I
mention this because the build-up of tension inside me might have affected the
interview. I expected too much from him, wanting every little detail of what
had happened. Perhaps I came down too hard on the boy.
The interview began with my telling him that I was born in Baghdad but lived abroad
and had come thousands of miles to talk to him. I said that I wanted to hear
everything, including the memories he still lived with. “Don’t feel that there
is any detail which is not worth talking about,” I remember saying more than
once. I said all this just before the interview began, as though he wanted
nothing other than to relive in infinitesimal detail everything that he had gone
through. All this must have contributed to frightening the boy. ‘Who is this
man? What does he want of me? What am I going to get out of this? Why should my
story be of interest to him? What is he going to get out of it?’ All through
dinner and breakfast the following morning, I saw him stealing glances in my
direction. Whenever I turned to smile back, or acknowledge his look, he would
turn his face away as though he hadn’t been looking in the first place. Taimour
had good reason not to trust another human being ever again.
I think the boy did not want to talk to me. Circumstances
had thrust him into a nightmarish, cruel world. Maybe he had never even known a
real childhood. But the boy had been told he has to speak to this stranger who
had come from far way and is useful to his people’s cause. He had been fitted
up for the occasion and probably given a dress rehearsal or two in what to say
or not to say. He didn’t want to talk, but he was expected to, and this is a
culture where everyone does what is expected of them. Such lessons are drilled
into children from very early on.
Taimour began by spitting out his story in one short spurt, adding
nothing to what I didn’t already know from that first videotape that I had seen
in August. I had not come all this way to hear a canned speech. Feeling the
tension build up in myself, I started all over again, digging for the detail
myself with short, pointed simple questions, no longer relying on the boy. After
a while, a rhythm began to be picked up and I felt I was getting somewhere. How
did he feel? I don’t know. Taimour, I think, was not expecting anything
remotely like this. Did his eyes glisten? Once or twice I think he said things
he didn’t want to say. The thought still preoccupies me. I remember pressing on
relentlessly, stopping only because of the damn lights which kept on going out
all over Sulaimaniyya.
What follows is a transcript of the interview, eliminating
repetition and that initial spurt along with a few digressions. I have changed
the odd word, and the location of small sequences of questions here or there, only
for purposes of making what Taimour was saying clearer to the reader.
The Interview
The day the army took you from the village, do you remember
it well?
Yes.
What were you doing?
Before the arrival of the army?
Yes, before the arrival of the army. What were you doing?
The army didn’t come to our village.
(Kurdish units employed by the Iraqi army, the Jahsh, came
to Taimour’s village and not the Iraqi army.)
Who did they take?
Everyone. Men, women, and children.
Did any fighting take place?
No.
(The Jahsh took Taimour and his father, mother and three
sisters, along with everyone else in the village, to the Fort of Qoratu passing
through the village
of Melasoura. My line of
questioning was intended to find out what a normal day in Taimour’s life was
like before the Anfal operations came into his life. He either didn’t
understand me, or he didn’t want to answer the question. At this point in the
interview we were speaking in Arabic. A bit later on we shifted to Kurdish at
his request, via an interpreter, because he said it was easier for him. His
answers have been retranslated from his own words, not as screened through the
interpreter.)
What happened?
The Jahsh said they would escort us to [the village of] Kalar,
but they lied, and they took us to [the Fort of] Qoratu instead. We stayed
there ten days until they sent us to the prison of Topzawa in Kirkuk.
How did they send you there?
By big military cars. The ones called IVA
(‘IVA’ is the locally used acronym for lorries of East
German manufacture which are widely used in the Iraqi army.)
How many lorries?
A lot.
Ten?
No, no, a lot. Around 30 or 40.
Were there tanks?
No.
How did they take you?
They threw us in the lorries and they took us.
Were there any orders? An officer, for instance, who shouted
something, who called the people to come and enter the car? Something like that.
Do you remember anything that was said?
No.
They said nothing!
No.
How did you know what to do?
The only thing they said was: ‘Enter the lorry.’
Did they say why you had to enter the lorry?
No.
Didn’t they give any reason for what was going on?
No.
All right. They told you, “Come on, get in the lorry.” Then
what happened?
We got into the lorry.
How? Family by family?
Yes, family by family.
Did they break up families?
No.
How many people were loaded into each lorry?
I don’t know.
How many were you in a lorry?
Well, it was full.
Were you seated or standing?
We were sitting.
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