‘A Great Will to Live’: how one man survived an Islamic State massacre

Ali Hussein Kadhim, an Iraqi soldier and a Shia, was captured with hundreds of his comrades by Sunni militants in June and taken to the grounds of a palace complex in Tikrit where Saddam Hussein once lived.

The militants, from Islamic State (IS), formerly known as Isis, separated the men by sect. The Sunnis were allowed to repent for their service to the government. The Shias were marked for death, and lined up in groups. Kadhim was number four in his line. As the firing squad shot the first man, blood spurted over Kadhim’s face.

He remembered seeing a video camera in the hands of another militant. “I saw my daughter in my mind, saying, ‘Father, father,’” he said.

He felt a bullet pass by his head, and fell forward into the freshly dug trench.

“I just pretended to be shot,” he said.

A few moments later, Kadhim said, one of the killers walked among the bodies and saw that one man who had been shot was still breathing.

“Just let him suffer,” another militant said. “He’s an infidel Shia. Let him suffer. Let him bleed.”

“At that point,” Kadhim said, “I had a great will to live.”

He waited about four hours, he said, until it was dark and there was only silence. About 200 yards away was the edge of the Tigris river. He made it to the riverbank, where the reeds gave him some cover.

There he met an injured man named Abbas, a driver at Camp Speicher who had been shot by militants and shoved into the river. Kadhim stayed there three days with Abbas, who was so badly wounded he could barely move. Kadhim ate insects and plants, but Abbas was in too much pain to eat much of anything.

“It was three days of hell,” Kadhim said. As Kadhim planned his escape, Abbas begged him to come back for him, and, if he could not, to at least tell the story. “Let everyone know what happened here,” Abbas told him.

Massacre of Iraqi soldiers

Back now at his family home in southern Iraq, Kadhim (23) recounted his story on a recent afternoon while taking a break from harvesting dates in his uncle’s orchard.

His is one of a very few witness accounts, and perhaps the most detailed, to emerge after the June massacre of Iraqi soldiers stationed at Camp Speicher, a former US army base in Tikrit, Saddam’s home town.

Kadhim spoke plainly and evenly about his experience, and how he set off from the riverbank on a nearly three-week, underground railroad-style journey through insurgent badlands, relying on sympathetic Sunnis to deliver him to safety.

In an earlier interview with a video journalist, Kadhim still had marks on his wrists from handcuffs. Elements of his story were corroborated by a Sunni tribal sheikh who protected him on his journey, and by Abbas’s father, who reached out to Kadhim after he saw an interview he gave in the local news media.

The suspected scale of the massacre – IS claimed it killed 1,700 Shia soldiers, a figure that some Iraqi officials and Kadhim believe is accurate – would make it the deadliest sectarian atrocity in Iraq’s recent history, more reminiscent of the mass killings carried out by Saddam’s government than anything the country faced during the sectarian civil war in 2006 and 2007.

The militants are also believed to still be holding perhaps hundreds of other soldiers from the base in Tikrit as hostages, according to Kadhim. An adviser to the departing prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said the government believed the hostages were being held in Anbar province.

The story of the massacre tells as much about the woeful state of the Iraqi military, a force created and trained by the US at a cost of billions of dollars, as it does about the cruelty of IS. After militants stormed Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, on June 10th, they continued their successful offensive southwards toward Tikrit.

In Tikrit, chaos and fear enveloped Camp Speicher, where Kadhim, a trainee who had joined the army just 10 days before Mosul fell, was posted. The US-trained army officers fled, as they had in Mosul, Kadhim said.

“We were alone,” he said. “So we decided to flee, because there were no officers.”

He and his comrades took off their uniforms, put on civilian clothes – track suits and sandals for many of them – and, in a large group that Kadhim said amounted to about 3,000 soldiers, started walking out the front gates. It was a terrible decision and a cruel fate: to this day, Camp Speicher has not fallen to the militants.

Had Kadhim and his friends stayed where they were, they would almost certainly have been safe. They thought they would walk to Baghdad, almost 120 miles south.

But just a few miles on, near Tikrit University, the men ran in to a group of about 50 Islamic State fighters in armoured vehicles, he said. "They told us, 'Don't worry, we will take you to Baghdad,'" Kadhim said. "They tried to make us feel safe. "They tricked us."

Packed into trucks, the men were taken to the Tikrit palace grounds. Over the next three days, the militants carried out wave after wave of killings around the palace and elsewhere in Tikrit.

Human Rights Watch, which analysed satellite imagery and examined photographs released by IS, says it has confirmed that between 560 and 770 men, at a minimum, were killed during that stretch. The group acknowledged that the total number could be higher still, and IS itself put the number of men it killed there at 1,700.

Perceived threat to Sunnis’ existence

In its campaign of blatantly sectarian or ethnically motivated massacres like the one in Tikrit, IS has been tearing open Iraq’s wounds, creating a new wave of factionalism that has sent US officials scrambling to call for more thorough measures for political inclusion and reconciliation. But many here say those efforts already seem irrelevant.

Kadhim and some other witnesses say that Sunni Arabs in Tikrit, including some from Saddam’s own tribe, assisted the militants in the mass killing, a charge that the families of the victims have made in the local news media.

Parliament has said it will appoint a committee to investigate, but few feel confident that justice will emerge from this process. Dozens of angry family members of missing soldiers stormed into parliament on Tuesday, destroying furniture and demanding to speak to deputies, most of whom quickly left the building.

The conquests of Islamic State have reawakened a sense among Iraq’s Shia majority that Sunnis pose a threat to their very existence – and nothing highlights this in as dramatic a fashion as images of industrial-scale killings of Shias in Saddam’s home town, with the participation of the dead dictator’s tribesmen.

In recent days the images and stories emerging from this massacre have begun receiving wide play on Iraqi state television, whose programming has also long included documentaries detailing the abuses of Saddam.

Many here wonder how long the Shias will restrain themselves from taking widespread revenge against Sunnis, and plunging the country again into the sort of neighbour-killing-neighbour conflict that it saw a few years ago.

In many other countries that have had to confront a brutal past history of conflict, like South Africa and Bosnia, reconciliation has meant a painful process of apology and forgiveness that Iraq has never seriously pursued.

Amer al-Khuzaie, al-Maliki’s adviser on reconciliation, visited South Africa last year to see if he could learn about how that country’s experience might apply to Iraq. As he visited the prison on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela had been incarcerated, he asked the tour guide how many prisoners were executed during Mandela’s imprisonment.

“He told me 125,” al-Khuzaie recalled. “This is an incomparable situation between us and South Africa,” he said, referring to the trauma under Saddam. “We would have a thousand in one day.” He added: “The culture of Iraqis does not go for forgiveness. We come from the desert; our culture is for revenge.”

Here in Diwaniyah, in a region of fertile farmland where several of the soldiers killed in Tikrit were from, the collective memory is still scarred by the trauma of a Shia uprising against Saddam’s rule in 1991 that was encouraged by US officials. But the United States then stood by as Saddam’s security forces slaughtered tens of thousands of people.That explains why Shias in the Iraqi south never trusted the Americans when they invaded in 2003, even though the invasion upended the political order of Sunni domination and placed the Shias in power.

It explains, too, why many Shias have greeted the recent US military intervention in Iraq with suspicion. It was not massacres of Shias, like the one that occurred in Tikrit, that prompted US action, they say, but the fact that the Kurds in the north, and the Yazidis, an ancient Iraqi religious minority, came under threat.

“They might want the scenario in 1991 to happen again, when they let the Iraqi people die under the injustice of Saddam’s regime,” says Ali al-Rubaie, a representative of the Shia religious establishment in the holy city of Najaf.

Unexpected kindness

Back on the riverbank, around 11 pm, Kadhim said goodbye to Abbas and entered the water. It was cold and the current was strong, but after drifting downriver he managed to reach the other side.

In darkness, hearing faint gunshots in the distance, he walked about a half-mile north, he said, until he found an empty reed hut and fell deeply asleep.

On the following morning he approached a cluster of houses in the distance, and a Sunni family took him in and gave him his first proper meal in days: eggs and yogurt.

The family, worried about what might happen to them if Islamic State found them sheltering a Shia, drove him to the home of friends in another village, where he was kept safe for three more days.

His next stop on the journey was the town of Al Alam, at the home of a Sunni tribal sheikh, Khamis al-Jubouri, who had been operating a protection and escape system for Shia soldiers on the run from the militants.

“We also helped 40 Iraqi soldiers from Anbar, Diyala, Mosul and Baghdad get home safely with fake IDs we made for them,” al-Jubouri said.

Kadhim stayed with the sheikh for almost two weeks before they judged it safe enough to try to travel to Irbil, in the autonomous Kurdish region, a trip in which they passed through several Islamic State checkpoints, Kadhim said. In Irbil, he met his uncle, who had flown up from Najaf.

He finally arrived home here the next night, after a long, circuitous drive. “It was beyond happiness,” he said, of seeing his family again. “They were crying, and I was laughing.”

He had a thick beard, and he had lost weight. “My daughter didn’t recognise me, and she ran away,” he said. Kadhim has told his story in the local news media, and ever since his phone has been ringing with calls from family members of missing soldiers.

A military intelligence officer visited him, took his testimony, and gave him $430, a little less than half the monthly salary he earned as a soldier - a job he said he would never go back to. "For now, I am jobless," he said. "I'm just trying to take care of my orchard." – (New York Times service)