Chronicler of Saddam’s Crimes Lives Surrounded With Pictures

[Aslan]

SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – Through his camera, Fayaq Hama Salih has captured scenes that perhaps no one in Iraq has photographed: The aftermath of sexual attacks on women in one of Saddam Hussein’s prisons; a Kurd publicly hanged for loyalty to the dictator; the sad atrocities of Kurds against one another.

“People used to ask me ‘what is the point of taking these photos?’” Salih recalls, surrounded by walls of photographs and a collection of antique cameras that give the upper floor of his Sulaimani home, in Iraqi Kurdistan, the appearance of a small museum.

“I always believed the events would become a part of history, and pictures are the best way to capture the moments accurately,” says this chronicler of history who was not trained as a professional photographer, but who felt compelled to record Saddam’s many crimes, especially against the Kurds.

When he went to prison under the dictator, Salih smuggled in his constant companion, a camera. The result: Documentary proof of the rape of female inmates.

“The clothes of these women, who had been raped by Iraqi soldiers, were still scattered on the prison floors,” he recalls. “I took pictures of the beds and their clothes,” he said.

In the midst of the Kurdish uprising in 1991, which Saddam crushed with brutal force, Salih remembers wandering the streets of Sulaimani with his camera.

“In the center of the city I saw angry protesters beating a man, who they then hanged,” Salih remembers. “I took several photos of him. People told me he was a Kurd who was loyal to Saddam, and that he got what he deserved because he was involved in killing many Kurds,” he says.

“I used to tell people, ‘stop looting or I will take your pictures,’ but their response was ‘who cares,’” he says, pointing to some of his pictures on a wall.

“The value of the 1991 uprising shouldn’t be ridiculed,” he cautions, referring to the sown seeds that bloomed into Kurdish autonomy after the 2003 fall of Saddam, following the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Oftentimes, foreign reporters and photographers who visited Iraq were referred to Salih, and he remembers once when Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader who is now ailing but still Iraq’s president, talk him into giving some of his photographs to a foreign journalist.

Salih recalls being arrested several times trying to photograph events in 1995, when the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which were supposed to be fighting Saddam’s Baath regime, had turned their guns against each other.

“One time when I was in the frontline to interview a PUK commander, I asked him, ‘are you sure your artillery guns are pointed in the right direction?’ He answered, ‘of course.’”

When Salih told him that his guns were pointing in the direction of the KDP forces, and that the Baathists were on the other side, the commander got upset, and cut short the interview.

Salih says that his pictures are meant to educate the next generation about Saddam’s atrocities against the Kurds.

He recalls that, immediately after Saddam’s fall, he had taken down a statue of the ousted dictator in Kirkuk with the help of American soldiers. An arm and a leg broke in the process, but Salih still took home the statue, which the Kanan foundation that collects such relics has asked to buy.

“I will only give the statue to a museum that is located in Kurdistan,” Salih vows.

He wants it placed upside down at the entrance of Halabja, the Kurdish town that Saddam decimated with poison gas in the closing weeks of the 1980-88 war with Iran, killing 5,000 innocent Kurds, many of them women, children and even infants.

Under the statue Salih wants this plaque: “We will never forget your crimes.”