She was among the first Kuwaitis to enter Kuwait post liberation and became a witness to some of the horrors of invasion. Dr Najat Husain recounts in her interview to the Arab Times sights she saw and stories she heard during her unsavory mission as a war-crimes investigator for the US army. The Kuwait that welcomed her was a ghost country, roads deserted and fractured, earth bleeding oil, smoke blotting out the sun, creating never-ending eerie nights, rain drops that were oily films of green and pink. She spent the next couple of months gathering evidences of the gruesome atrocities of the invading army. Stories of barbarism, torture and killing spilled out from all quarters. Among them the story of a boy who was offered by a leering soldier two severed heads as souvenirs of his captivity, and that of a woman who after being tortured was shot until her body almost split into two halves for the crime of giving out news to the international media.

Question: Tell us your experience during invasion. Where were you when Iraq marched into Kuwait?
Answer: I heard about the invasion on CNN news while I was a student in the US. I immediately called my mother and brother in Kuwait. They told me not to worry and that they could handle the situation. They told me not to come to Kuwait. When I hung up the telephone, I was feeling very down. The next day I went to the International Office in my university to get in touch with other Kuwaiti students. That’s when I met another student called Mohammed. We had contact with the Kuwait embassy in the US. We attended a conference and were inspired from there to start a newsletter. It was called the Voice of Kuwait. That kept us busy, and helped me get over my depression. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to continue the rest of my life without my family or my country.

At the conference in the embassy, I signed a paper saying that I was willing to join the armed forces to serve in Kuwait. Initially, they recruited Kuwaiti men, and my new friend Mohammed enrolled for the army. Two weeks later, they were open to recruit ladies too, and my call came. I jumped with joy. I was so happy to be going to my home country. We underwent combat training in New Jersey, US, following which we went to Saudi Arabia. We were divided into two teams. I was part of the war-crime investigation team. We went to Khubar in Saudi Arabia, from where we set out into Kuwait, which had just been liberated.

Q: What was your feeling upon entering Kuwait?
A: It’s very hard to explain. It was a very touchy moment for me. When I reached my home, the sun was setting. The streets were dark because there was no electricity. Near my house, I saw a man who was emaciated, skin and bones. That was my brother, and we broke into tears upon recognizing each other. I was in military gear and he couldn’t recognize me initially.
When I entered my house, my mother was washing her hands and screamed thinking I was an Iraqi soldier. When she knew it was me, we fell into an embrace and started crying. We spent a long time exchanging our stories in the past seven months.
There were chickens and lambs in my house pens and coops. This was the situation in all houses in Kuwait then. These animals were our only source of food. People walked because gas stations were not working. I was fortunate because the army provided gas to me and I could drive. Kuwait had virtually turned into a village with livestock everywhere and no cars on the streets. When there was sound of a car, people used to peep out of their homes to check who it was. When doors opened, goats and hens flocked out of houses.
The air was always gloomy. The sky was perpetually dark. When it rained, it rained oil. The raindrops were oily, and stained your clothes with pink and green stains.

Q: What sort of war crimes were you focusing on and what were your findings?
A: I was focused on prison torture, and I stumbled upon very grueling incidents. I had made a file of all the victims. Their names, nationality, where and when they were caught by the Iraqi soldiers and so on. How many people were taken and what sort of torture they underwent, I made records of all these details.
Some prisoners were simply killed. I remember an incident in Rumaithiya from where more than 10 people were taken prisoners at night. The next morning their bodies were found near a mosque with needles stuck in them. When I researched, I found that this was done to draw their bloods before killing them.

Q: They were killed by draining their blood, is it?
A: Yes. This was one torture technique. That’s one horrible thing that has stuck to my memory. Another incident was in Rowdha. Three brothers were taken prisoners along with others. A few days later the bodies of the brothers were found abandoned on the road stacked one above the other. I saw photos of their bodies.

Q: What were some of the common torture techniques the invading army used against the civilian prisoners in Kuwait?
A: They beat the prisoners on their feet with bludgeons. They stuffed the mouths of prisoners with their shoes, and strangled them with electricity cables. These were very common.

Q: Where was the torture carried out from? Did the invaders have a prison camp or something like that?
A: It depends on the area. For example, in Nuzha the police stations were used for torture. In Rumaithiya, the houses were used. It causes me much pain when I go through these case files.

Q: What is the goriest incident you can remember from those days?
A: There was this boy who was very young. He was taken from his house somewhere in Kuwait City. He was taken to Naif Palace. I had interviewed him personally. He told me that he was put in a basement in the palace for a very long time. He was not beaten or tortured, but simply kept under custody for a long time. And then they let him go. An Iraqi soldier called the boy’s attention just when he was about to leave the palace and held up two severed heads, and grinning asked him: “Do you want to take these souvenirs from here?” The boy was hardly 17, and he told me that a chill runs down his spine whenever he recollects that incident. It was a sort of emotional torture. He was so scared when he saw the lifeless heads dangling from the soldier’s hands.

Q: Why did the soldiers let the boy go?
A: I don’t know, probably they thought he was just a child. He was captured along with men and they later realized he was too young to be killed. At least they had that much of humanity... or may be there were other reasons that we don’t know.
Some prisoners were tortured with electric rods. I have records of prisoners who were made to wear metal collars around their necks with sharp inward pointing spikes sticking into their skin. Then I interviewed a Kuwaiti who had witnessed a man being burnt alive at a nursery in Shuwaikh.

Q: Do you have any rough figures on how many people were killed during invasion?
A: No, I don’t have those figures. I was concentrating more on torture victims.

Q: How did your findings help in the actual war-crime trials?
A: I didn’t follow up the trials. I went back to finish my studies as soon as I handed over my report to the war crimes committee. There is a sort of a form in which we record our findings and testimonies of eye witnesses for formal submission to the committee. It also carried the details such as the date, location and kind of atrocity perpetrated. One of the heads of the committee was a judge and the other were lawyers, so they were professionals who knew how to take a trial of this nature forward.

Q: Were you also recording damage to properties?
A: No, I was only reporting the damage the invasion caused to humans. Initially, there was no team that was accorded the task of assessing property losses. Human losses were the priority.

Q: There were stories of Iraqi soldiers throwing children out of incubators in hospitals. Do you have any findings on that?
A: Yes. There was a report I gained from an eye witness at a graveyard. We had been to the graveyards in Riqqa and Sulaibikhat. A lady who gives the ritual bath to dead bodies at one of these graveyards told us that an Iraqi soldier once drove down to the graveyard in a car filled with dead babies. We don’t have clear information on the number of babies or how they were killed. When I was collecting this information, there was an American lady too with me who was interested in the case. I don’t know if these were babies taken out of incubators.
Then there was a lady, Wafa’a Al Aamer, who was killed 11 days after the air strikes. They killed her by strangulating her using a rope. They dumped her body in front of her house. Her uncle who was in the house fetched her body and found that she had actually been strangulated with a wire, because it had cut into her neck. There were injuries on her body, signs of physical torture. There were also telltale signs of her body having been subjected to electrocution. She was dead a long time when her uncle found her because her body was stiff with rigor mortis. That’s the story of Wafa’a Al Aamer.
Then there is the house in Al Qurain, which is now famous. Several people from different families were butchered in that house. I have a list of the people who died there: Hadi, Amr, Yusuf, Ibrahim, Khaleej, Amal, Mishel, Ahmed, Talal, Badr... the list goes on.

Q: Were all these people shot dead?
A: All these people were in this house... but not all of them were killed right there. Some were killed there... three of them. And nine were taken as prisoners and killed later. A boy who told me this story was one of the survivors from that house. He was a young boy and was hiding in an overhead shelf in the bathroom. His father was shot dead in the house. The boy recounted this story to me. The shattered house has been left in that state till today as a memorial of the horrible days of invasion.
In another incident, a girl was taken away by the Iraqi soldiers. This story was recounted to us by the mother of this girl. She gave us a blow by blow account of that incident. Initially, both the mother and the daughter were taken captives, and the mother was let off after a while. The daughter was found dead a few days later. The body of the girl was abandoned near the Amiri hospital and the exact time of her death has not been ascertained. She was strangled too.

Another story that moved me was that of Asrar Al Gabandi. She was taken by the invading soldiers to the Fisheries Department office in Rabiya. There were other captives there with her. It is through the testimonies of witnesses there that I came to know about Asrar’s story. I knew Asrar, because while I was in the US watching the first coverage of the invasion on CNN, Asrar was the first person to contact the outside world from Kuwait. She was a very brave and talented woman. The Iraqis had cut off all communication facilities and there was no way anybody could communicate. Asrar however had the technological expertise to surmount these barriers and talk to the world. She sort of acted as a special correspondent reporting on a daily basis.
She was smart enough to evade the Iraqis and report to the international media, until she was finally captured by the soldiers. Under captivity, she was tortured brutally. The lady in the graveyard whom I spoke to also told me about Asrar, whose body was cremated there. She told me that Asrar’s body was full of bruises and marks of torture. Her body was riddled with bullets, shot diagonally. The body was almost split into two halves. The body was so mutilated that the lady at the graveyard could not even give it the ritual bath. The body was simply covered in shroud and buried.

Q: Was this the graveyard in Sulaibikhat?
A: Yes, I think so.

Q: What other kinds of torture did people suffer at the hands of Iraqi soldiers?
A: Here in my personal file, I have recorded the story of a man who was killed on Jan 19. His body was found with his fingernails and toenails missing. They had been pulled out. He was eventually shot dead.
Sometimes you don’t get the full picture. You just get fragments of the story from the marks on the body. We don’t know exactly what happened in the case of this man. We know for sure that he had undergone much suffering and pain at the hands of the invaders. But for how long, we don’t know.
In another incident two brothers were taken, one 24 and the other 29. There were five people altogether, including a 60 year old man. All five were killed.

Q: Have you tried to understand why an invading army always indulges in such atrocities? Any population that has been invaded by a foreign army will have similar tales to tell. What is the psychology behind this barbarism?
A: There is a book called, Republic of Fear, authored by an Iraqi. In it, he explains why invading armies commit such savagery. This is to inflict terror in the hearts of people and make them submit to the new regime. They want to terrorize people using examples and make them discard any ideas of challenging the new regime in any manner. Such a population will not even dare utter a word against the new regime. They will fear their own shadows... they will not know who is a spy and who is a friend. They will not trust their own brothers. There is so much fear planted in the hearts of people, nobody talks. Everybody submits. This is the strategy of invading armies. This is the strategy of all authoritarian despotic regimes.
In that book, the author says that people of Iraq under the Baathist regime couldn’t even voice their opinion. You would be picked up by Saddam’s police one day and tortured in a prison cell or killed for no reason. It could be for something you said to one of your friends casually. You will not even know why you are being tortured or killed.

Usually, a despotic regime employs this strategy in a gradual and protracted method on its own people. However, an invading army wants to establish this fear in one stroke, and convert the invaded population into obedient subjects. So they come down very heavily on the people, and commit excesses at an unimaginable scale. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein had established total control through such tactics over a long period of time. Here he wanted to do it in quick time. Saddam declared Kuwait to be the 19th province of Iraq.
That’s why I never thought that I would one day be returning to my home country when I first heard of the news of invasion. I was desperately wanting to come back. I never thought I would see my family again.
I was so happy when I was recruited by the army. I am proud that I was one of the first Kuwaitis to enter Kuwait post liberation. Nobody was allowed to enter Kuwait for fear of mines and unexploded bombs. Because I joined the army, I had the privilege to enter Kuwait and see the state of my beloved country.

Q: Staying in the US, unable to come home, what did you do to keep your balance?
A: We couldn’t’ concentrate on our studies and we were feeling totally lost. But we pulled up our socks and thought we must do something constructive. And so my husband, who was my friend then, and I published newsletters about Kuwait. Following invasion, there was an interest in the US to know more about Kuwait. So we had articles about the history of Kuwait, our culture, our food and so on. We printed stories coming from Kuwait related to the invasion.

Q: Did you have a good readership?
A: Of course. We were surprised by the response. We used to get many letters from the people requesting us to add new features to our newsletter. The response from Americans was very warm and encouraging. We were getting sponsors and our budget grew, and the quality of the newsletter went up. We printed more pages per edition. I was responsible for the visual content, and my Mohammed took care of the copy. He was the editor. But let me also add that sometimes we used to get very disheartening comments... responses that were deeply hurting.

Q: What sort of comments were they?
A: Some people said that Kuwait deserves to be invaded and we were paying for our sins. Maybe these people had bad experiences in Kuwait, but they cannot label an entire nation based on the deeds of a few. These were not Americans, but Arabs. It was very upsetting. It was all the more hurtful because some of those passing such comments belonged to places that are currently under occupation; people who should have been with us because they appreciate the horrors and pains of occupation more than anybody else. I am not being judgmental... just that some words really hurt and sink in deep. But then everyone has opinions, and probably they had some experiences that made them form such opinions. We are all humans, and no one is free of prejudice.

Q: Was it a weekly?
A: Yes, it was a weekly. When my friend, Mohammed, was recruited in the army, we closed the newsletter. In our last edition, we bid farewell to our readers. The last edition was on Jan 21, 1991.

biography

Dr Najat Husain did her Bachelors Degree in Economics and Accounting at Kuwait University in 1983. She finished her Masters in Economics in 1986, and PhD in 1992, from the University of Colorado, Boulder USA, She specialized in International Economics. Dr Najat was part of the war-crimes investigation committee in post liberation Kuwait, and had undergone combat training in the US army prior to her posting. She has been honored by the US and Saudi army for her services in the investigation of war crimes by the former Iraqi army.