The watches that kept ticking

SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region - I was one year old the last time my father held me. I do not remember his arms, his voice, or the morning in May 1987 when he kissed me and walked out of our home in the Hawraman region near Halabja province. I would not learn what happened to him for years. And when I did, it was not in Kurdish - his language, my inheritance - because by then, I had lost that too.

That month, residents in Halabja protested the Baath Regime’s forced deportation of nearby Kurdish villages. Iraqi security forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing and injuring civilians. Tensions escalated, and the government set up impromptu checkpoints, arbitrarily arresting tens of men.

What I know now is this: on May 13, 1987, my father was among 26 civilian men intercepted near Zalm Bridge on the Halabja-Sulaimani road. They were not taken to a prison or brought before a court. They were taken to a pre-dug trench in Shanadari village, near Said Sadiq district, and buried alive. He was 50 years old. I was one. My mother gathered my brothers, my sister, and me, and crossed the border into Iran before the soil had fully settled over him.

A massacre the state tried to erase

The Zalm Bridge killings remain one of the least-documented atrocities of the Baathist campaign against the Kurdish people. While the 1988 chemical attack on Halabja stands as the defining international symbol of that genocide, the events at Zalm Bridge preceded it by more than a year - a brutal rehearsal for the Anfal campaign to come.

The regime’s methodology was not merely to kill. It was to eliminate all evidence of the killing. The 26 men were never registered as detainees. No death certificates were issued. No families were notified. Their disappearance was total and deliberate - the men, the act, and any record that either had ever existed.

Dr. Razwan Helanpeii, a university teacher who has spent years documenting survivor testimonies from this period, described to me the scale of that cruelty. “When I listened to the families of those victims,” he said. “I couldn’t stop my tears. It is a level of cruelty that the human mind struggles to process.” His words capture something that official records - had they existed - never could: the intimate, compounding devastation visited not only on those who were killed, but on the families left behind to grieve without confirmation, without a body, without a date.

Eleven years in exile

My mother fled with me into Iran within days of my father’s death, though we did not know then that he was dead. For the next eleven years, we lived in Baramawa refugee camp, near Mariwan District in Iran’s Kurdistan Province - suspended in a kind of permanent present tense, unable to return home and unable to fully leave it behind.

I grew up speaking Farsi. It was not a choice. It was the language of the space I occupied, the language of survival. Kurdish faded the way a child’s language does when it is not spoken to, not sung over bedtime, not passed down at the dinner table. It is a quiet disappearance, almost imperceptible until you reach for the words and find only silence.

When I reflect on those years, I count three losses that arrived together: my father, my homeland, and my mother tongue. The absence of a body or a grave made grief an abstraction. There was nothing to stand over, no confirmed date, no acknowledgment from the state that had taken him. The regime had disappeared him - and in doing so, had tried to disappear us too. We were meant to become people without origin, without story, without claim.

The earth relents

In the spring of 1995, a farmer named Hamanajib Haji Ahmed was digging for water in Shanadari, near Said Sadiq. His crane did not strike an aquifer. It broke open a mass grave. Inside lay the remains of 26 men. Among them were clothing, identity cards, and wristwatches. Several of the watches were still running.

Their mechanisms had continued turning through eight years of burial, keeping time in the darkness long after the men wearing them were gone.

When the news reached refugee communities in Iran over the radio, it triggered a complicated mixture of dread and relief. Relief, because the unbearable uncertainty was finally ending. Dread, because confirmation meant finality. All those years of not knowing had contained, buried within them, a small and terrible form of hope. The discovery extinguished it - and replaced it with something harder and more solid: truth.

Identification was conducted without DNA technology. Families recognized their dead through material culture: the pattern on a shirt, the shape of a shoe, a folded identity card. The watches - still ticking after eight years underground - became both identification tools and the most haunting symbol of what had been done. They were proof that for all the regime’s machinery of erasure, it had not managed to stop time itself. The state had tried to make these men disappear from history. Their watches disagreed.

Return

I have spent years piecing together the story of a morning I cannot remember. What survives are fragments - testimonies from those who knew him, the careful research of scholars, the physical evidence recovered from the grave. And one detail that has outlasted everything else: that he kissed me before he left. The most ordinary of gestures, rendered unbearable by everything that followed.

The Kurdish I never learned from him, I have since worked to reclaim. It is slow, imperfect work - a language rebuilt word by word, without the voice that should have taught it to me. But it is a form of return the regime did not anticipate when it set out to bury not just a generation of men, but the culture those men carried within them.

Justice in stone

On the Mustafa Zalmi road in Halabja’s Khurmal district, a monument now stands to the 26 victims. It is more than a memorial. For those of us whose fathers are named on it, it is a counter-archive - evidence raised against a state that produced no records, notified no families, and sought no witnesses. Stone where there should have been paperwork. Names where there were meant to be only silence.

Whether full legal accountability will follow remains unresolved. Many of those responsible for operations in the Hawraman region have never been prosecuted. The monument is a beginning, not a conclusion.

I am no longer the child who was kissed goodbye. I am a man who has spent much of his life assembling the story of a single morning - in a language I had to relearn, in a homeland I had to rediscover, through an absence I was never meant to understand.

The watches kept ticking through eight years underground. So, in the ways that were available to us, did we.


Dr. Momen Zellmi is a political analyst, researcher, and diplomatic consultant, professing language education policy. He has numerous publications on politics, language and education policy, gender, and culture.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.

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