◆ SpookStack

1631 -HQ-1462938 eyes were bound. They would bring them here in Kuwaiti buses that carried about 45 passengers and a Toyota Coaster bus that carried about 21 passengers....They brought a full army division and surrounded the area. Most [non-military at the site] were Ba'ath party members, the others were from pro- government tribes. The military were in uniform, the Ba'ath and the tribal people were in civilian clothes with red kaffiyas....I heard the sound of the shooting and heard the executed people shout. I would hear this several times each day. They used a bulldozer shovel to bury the graves—after they finished their work, they took it with them.... would go to the roof and watch the executions—when they shot them and buried them in the holes. They used to take them from the cars and push them inside the holes. Their hands were tied and their eyes covered, sometimes two people were bound together. They put them inside the holes. They used to hit them, they had no mercy. The victims were unable to do anything-they would just start to shoot at them. After they were killed, they buried them using the bulldozer shovels. Every day, they used to dig three holes. Those were the holes they w for that iew with Peo] Shortly after the executions at Al-Mahawil, the authorities appropriated the land of local farmer the mass grave was located and gave it to , a member of the pro-government Albu Alwan tribe—according to many witnesses, members of the Albu Alwan tribe were directly involved in the arrest and execution campaign. a od C2 The farmers who had witnessed the killings were regularly harassed, threatened, and arrested by Iraqi officials who accused them of trying to leak information about the mass grave to the international community. On June 6, 1993, Iraqi officials arrested the entire farming community in the area, and took them to the police station in Iskandriyya city. There,[7 | accused the farmers of digging up the mass faves and photographing the sites and smuggling the information to foreign journalists, but the men were ultimately released. 92