Gregory Paw, who was one of Mr. Kehoe's deputies, said that in a hearing in December, Mr. Majid, now in American custody, "was gradually acknowledging more and more of what took place" in Kurdistan. Mr. Paw said Mr. Majid was "looking for others to cast blame upon."
Mr. Hussein's lawyers say that he and his former top associates are not guilty, and that they will counter any charges by attacking the tribunal as a "kangaroo court." Still, one of the lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said, "We know his chances are grim and very slim."
Bodies in the Sand
The trenches lie hidden in a dip in the sand that for centuries had been an oasis during spring rains. The ground was hard, and Mr. Kehoe's forensics team, sweltering in the 110-degree heat, had to dig eight feet to reach anything.
The dig began last September just outside Hatra, about 200 miles north of Baghdad. What investigators found in the first trench suggested a powerful link to the campaign to drive the Kurds from their lands. Mr. Kehoe said it was also the first step in piecing together evidence that Mr. Hussein's government turned the campaign, code-named "Anfal," or "the spoils," into a killing spree.
Iraqi officials have said their main goal was to root out Kurdish militias siding with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. But Human Rights Watch, the New York-based group, has estimated that up to 100,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, were killed, and 2,000 villages destroyed, including dozens bombed with chemical weapons.
Michael K. Trimble, an archaeologist who headed the forensics team, said the first surprise was that the trench held only women and children - about 300 in all. He said two-thirds were children, and most of the skeletons rested inside several layers of handmade clothing, with bags of pots, pans and toys strewn in the dirt. He said it quickly became clear that most of the victims had been carrying - or wearing - all their belongings, as if they had been told they would be resettled.
The bodies were stacked haphazardly in four or five layers. Nearly all had a single .22-caliber pistol shot behind one ear. Mr. Trimble said it looked as if the first people had been shot inside the trench, while the others had been killed at the lip and pushed in by a bulldozer.
A second trench held 150 men, each sprayed with fire from automatic weapons. Most had been blindfolded and tied together in a chain.
Mr. Kehoe said this suggested that the women and children had been killed by Iraqi security officers carrying small-caliber arms, while the men had been killed by a military unit. "This was a killing field," he said, adding that, "multiple entities knew it was there."
Mr. Kehoe said the rolling field held up to a dozen other trenches, with at least 2,000 more bodies. Mr. Nivala said a second grave site, at Samawa in southern Iraq, yielded similar results; in April, investigators excavated one trench and found bodies of 114 Kurds, all but 5 women and children. Mr. Nivala said that field had 18 trenches, and 10 were filled, with at least 1,500 bodies.
At the Hatra grave, there was a break: the investigators found identification cards tucked inside some of the women's clothes. A few cards turned out to be for children who escaped when their villages were destroyed. Those cards took the investigators back to remote mountain areas, where the now-grown children and others confirmed that the Hatra victims had indeed been seized by Iraqi forces during the Anfal.
Chemicals in the Air
The jets buzzed in low, Abdullah Abdulqadr Askary recalled, low enough to see that most people in the fields near Goktapa were women and children. They dropped balloons at first, to assess the wind direction. Then came bombs. Mr. Askary, a chemist, said he knew from the vapor and flowery smell that the bombs had spewed chemicals.
It was late one afternoon in May 1988, in the middle of the Anfal. Mr. Askary said nearly 50 of the 150 people who died were his relatives. As he rushed to help, he came across his mother's body lying by a stream.
"I want to kiss her - the last kiss," he told Mr. Kehoe and others who visited the town in March. But as he bent down, he said, "I thought that if I kiss her, perhaps I will die also." -- Michael Pugliese