Word: dujail
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...security courtroom in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. The eight men were tried for an incident that, until the trial began, most Iraqis had long forgotten. On July 8, 1982, at the height of the Iraq-Iran war, Saddam's motorcade was attacked by gunmen in the village of Dujail, an hour's drive north of Baghdad. During the trial, Saddam recollected the attempted assassination, saying, "Bullets were in front of me and here and there. [But] God wanted to save...
...dictator's retribution was ferocious. Although the then outlawed Dawa Party claimed responsibility for the attack, it was the residents of Dujail who bore the brunt of Saddam's revenge. In al-Bander's "revolutionary" court, 148 townspeople were tried and sentenced to death. Many died from torture before the sentences could be carried out. Hundreds of others were forced to a desert camp. Large portions of the village were razed to the ground...
...There was a memo dated June 16, 1984, with Hussein's signature approving the death sentences of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites from Dujail, where gunmen tried to kill Hussein in 1982 with an attack on his motorcade.? There were the death certificates of some 100 Dujail villagers whose families were sent to a desert prison.? Some of the documents were hand written, like the lists showing vehicles that carried 399 detainees from a Baghdad jail to what amounted to a concentration camp in southern Iraq in 1984. Some of the prisoners sent to the camp were children below...
...killings in Dujail speak to a larger battle being waged in the Iraqi psyche. In Saddam's police state, there were navigable boundaries that made it possible to live. True, the executions by Saddam's regime in Dujail showed that those boundaries were a mirage: they could close in on you in less time than it takes a bullet to fly from the barrel of a gun. But life in Iraq has become so bloody and death so ever present, random and unpredictable that some Iraqis are nostalgic for Saddam's tyranny. When I told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad about...
...indicative of the scale of Saddam's brutality that there are some in Dujail who believe the current bloodshed is preferable to what preceded it. "Of course, now it is much better," says Ali, speaking by phone from Dujail. "Saddam's terrorism would go on forever if he were still in power." Ali's brother Ahmed, witness No. 1 in the Saddam trial, doesn't know when he will leave the Green Zone or what awaits him if he does. But after spending his high school years in prison and losing most of his brothers, he says he is willing...