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1631-HQO-1462938 men. We were sitting in [family] groups, me with my relatives and the others with their relatives. No one dared to speak to the other groups. Toward the end of the second day, the evening of March 18, 1991, the detainees in the big hall were taken outside and lined up in the yard of the compound. “They brought some blankets which they ripped and they tied our hands and blindfolded us with those,” recalled. “They covered our eyes and put us inside some TATA buses looted from Kuwait. We were between 45 and 50 people on each bus. It was very crowded, ther ch chair.” [HRW interview After the detainees were loaded on the buses, they were told that there were some checkpoints on the road, and th i asked, they should say they were going to Baghdad. who could see a bit through the blanket covering his eyes, recounted the route taken by the bus: There was an asphalt road from the door of the military camp. Then we turned off into a remote, dusty dirt road, an agricultural road. We turned off the main road, and I didn’t know where we were going. I was sitting on the bus at the chair near the window. There was an abandoned canal, I was sitting on that side of the bus....I couldn’t see clearly, but there was a building—later, when I looked [after the executions], it was a brick factory. Almost as soon as the buses stopped, the executions began. People were pulled off the buses, thrown in a pre-dug pit, machine-gunned, and then buried with a bulldozer. AL- HUSSEINI told HRW how he survived: When they started taking us off the bus, some of us began reciting the shahada [Muslim declaration of faith]. My mother told me, “Repeat the shahada, because we are about to die.” I heard the shouting of the children. We grabbed each other's hands, me, my mother, my cousin, and my uncle. They pulled us, we were all together. They threw us into the dug-out grave. When I fell down, there were 87 md OF toe