NOGRA SALMAN, Iraq - The road to Nogra Salman is long and hard, offering plenty of time to rethink the carnage that took place in the township decades earlier. Leaving the comfort of the Kurdistan Region and travelling southwards, one feels more restless the closer one comes to Nogra Salman, close to the Saudi border and home to Iraq’s most notorious prison camp.
The first stop from Kurdistan is Sileman Bag, some 180 kilometers south of Kirkuk, and the first thing that that catches the eyes are the town’s barricaded gates, with piles of tunneled mud. Earlier this year, reports said Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had taken complete control of the town, leaving the police and army no other choice than besieging the city.
At the last Kurdish checkpoint which separates Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq, I looked for the road sign that was put there in honor of the fallen Kurdish soldier, Farhad, who people said had fought al-Qaida gunmen to the bitter end. Eventually, I found the sign, but without Farhad’s name. Perhaps it was erased when Kurds lost control over this barrier to the Iraqi army.
Hadi Mahdi, a truck driver carrying loads of cement in the back of his vehicle, seemed angry. “I’ve been waiting here for three hours,” he said, looking exhausted and with his Arab dishdasha outfit covered in dirt. “Rumors say al-Qaida are coming.”
Here, time’s passage seems slow. Long lines of waiting cars add to the mind-numbing scene, with drivers standing restlessly next to their cars in groups large and small.
“So what if a military commander is coming?” Qasim, a driver, spits condescendingly, referring to the frequent blocking of road aheads whenever high-profile officials are passing through.
“What’s in it for us?”
At least five checkpoints mark the roads between Baghdad and every other city that surrounds the capital. These checkpoints have made the security situation recover considerably. But the price has been high. The impoverished infrastructure, deficient housing system and high unemployment rates do not provide Iraq with the robust image it needs as the rising oil star of the Middle East.
With Iraq’s April 30 elections approaching, posters and banners are seen on the back of trucks, promoting one or more candidate for the Iraqi parliament.
“We are paid to do this,” said Sahar, 23, referring to the election banners on the back of his vehicle. “They don’t change our lives if they win. They only change their own.”
Police at checkpoints treat us with heartfelt respect, when they find we are from Kurdistan. “You’re very hospitable, my friend,” a policeman said. “My brother has been living in Sulaimani for the past three years.”
Our guide, Ahmad Kamil, has been a journalist at the Iraqiya TV. In a twist of irony, Kurds were mass executed in the Anfal campaigns of the late 1980s right in the heart of these deserts, and yet it is exactly here that Kurds now are met with genuine affection.
At the peak of the forceful displacements of the early 1980s, many Kurdish families moved here against their longing. Yet, they lived here for more than two decades, and after Saddam Hussein’s demise they gradually found their way back to their hometowns in the north of the country, in Kurdistan.
“Where did they go?” Ahmad, our journalist guide, sighs. “Why did they leave us with no reason?”
He was saved when thousands of others were executed and buried in mass graves. A family from the deserts of Samawa adopted him. This was done at the height of Saddam’s terror campaign. The incident is something of local pride for the Samawa residents.
He is called Taimour, the adopted son of Anfal. Not surprisingly, whenever the genocidal Anfal is mentioned around here, Taimour’s story comes up almost immediately. Maybe this is a way for the Arab residents here to redeem themselves on behalf of Saddam’s absolute mass killing of Kurds.
Habib Nasar, a retired teacher, said: “This is the nature of the people of Samawa, to help their fellow countrymen. But when the genocide of the Kurds began here, no one really knew about it. It was dangerous to stand against the Baathists.”
One is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the atrocities perpetrated in Nogra Salman. Gathering old men and women into military vehicles, and separating men from women and children and putting them all in prison camps, gave a chilling image of the place.
Nogra Salman neighbors the Saudi border. The weather is as sandy as it could be on the other side of the border. The township of Salman is the home not only to the infamous tower of Nogra Salman, but also the largest prison in the region.
“The tower building was constructed in the 80s,” Ansari said. “Kurdish Faylis were the first prisoners of this gruesome place. Soon after, the Anfal Kurds and then the Dujaili Shiites and after them many prominent Iraqi dissidents have filled the prison cells here.”
“This was a prison without a jailer,” Habib Nasari said. “No one could escape from here, anyway. The desert was so vast nobody thought of fleeing.
In fact, the only person attempting to flee was an officer who later was found dead in the desert, according to local residents.
A line in large letters, on one of the walls surrounding the prison camp, says it all: “No one can escapes!”
