Chamchamal, Iraq — Hadaw Saleh Hassan was a smuggler. The Kurdish mother of 10 lived here on the front line between the Iraqi army and the autonomous Kurdish zone. A week ago Sunday, she got up at dawn to make her daily trip to the Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk, 40 kilometres on the other side of the line.
Mrs. Hassan told her family she was going to bring back a two-litre tin of vegetable oil, much cheaper on the Iraqi side, to resell — plus whatever parcels people in Kirkuk asked her to transport.
She never returned — and may prove to be one of the last people executed by the Baathist regime that has ruled Iraq for the past 40 years.
On the best days, she earned the equivalent of $2 from these smuggling sorties. It was taxing, nerve-racking work, but her husband wasn't well enough to work, and Dilshar, the eldest son at home, makes only a little installing satellite television dishes. She has 10 children.
Related Articles
In Kirkuk that day, Mrs. Hassan was finishing her trading when a Kurdish shop owner asked her to transport a package back to Chamchamal. He told her it contained military buttons, and so she stashed the small box, the size of a brick of butter, between the round pieces of bread she was carrying home, according to the driver who transported her that day.
It is illegal for Iraqis to take military equipment, insignias or uniforms into the Kurdish self-rule area.
At the checkpoint out of Kirkuk, the Iraqi soldiers searched Mrs. Hassan's bags. They found the box in with the bread, and opened it. Inside there was a metal eagle of the kind Iraqi soldiers wear on their berets, and several stars for officers' epaulets. Mrs. Hassan, who is in her early fifties, was arrested.
The soldiers held Mrs. Hassan all afternoon — routine procedure for people stopped for smuggling, so that word can reach their families, who then come and pay a bribe. The driver told Mrs. Hassan's neighbours that she had been arrested, and a relative rushed to the checkpoint with 250,000 dinar ($160) to try to have her set free. But he was stopped by an officer who accused him of trying to bribe the soldiers, and he was obliged to deny it and leave.
After dark, Mrs. Hassan was taken back into Kirkuk, to Branch No. 2 of the military intelligence service. The next day, a family friend saw her being taken before a judge. Afterward, she was allowed to speak to him briefly.
"She was very afraid," her son Dilshar said yesterday. "She told him [the family friend], 'I told the judge someone gave me this thing and told me to bring it back and I didn't know it was illegal — I told him I am just a worker earning a living. They made me say who had given me the package, or else they would take me to Baghdad."
Mrs. Hassan said the court had told her that if the man could not be found, "your life will be very dark." The friend heard later that when intelligence officers went to find the man who had shipped the buttons, his shop was locked up and he was gone — news of Mrs. Hassan's arrest apparently having preceded the security officers who came looking for him.
Mrs. Hassan's husband and six of her seven unmarried children have fled Chamchamal to wait out the war in her home village of Kanikawa. Only Dilshar, the eldest at 25, remains in their two-room house, fretfully waiting for news.
The Kurdish government told reporters yesterday they believe Mrs. Hassan was among 32 Kurds thought to have been executed in Kirkuk on the eve of the war, at Khalid garrison, a notorious army camp at the edge of town. Officials say most of the 30 (originally reported as 60) were Kurdish men found with guns in their houses.
"They tell me they don't know anything about her," Dilshar said. Ostensibly, he is waiting for the war to end, so he can get to Kirkuk and find his mother. But the crack in his voice when he talks about her suggests he has heard the rumours, that he knows his mother was among those lined up and shot in what may be the regime's last days in Kirkuk.
Asked to describe his mother, Dilshar shrugs.
"What shall I say? She hasn't seen a lot of happiness in her life. She was always in distress, going into government territory and bringing this stuff, in very bad conditions."
Kanikawa, her village, was destroyed by Saddam Hussein's troops in 1988, in the Anfal, his campaign of persecution against the Kurds. The family was forced to move into this tiny house in Chamchamal, where the only sign of cheer is Mrs. Hassan's rudely healthy houseplants in the window.
Dilshar said his mother knew war was coming, and that the situation on the Iraqi side was extremely tense when she set out for Kirkuk last week. But there was no food in the house, so she made the trip one last time. "She did all this for two tins of vegetable oil," he said.
And she may have been executed, all for a box of buttons.
