The Ghosts
of Safwan:
A Report
from the Iraq/Kuwait Border
by
Jeremy Scahill
Dissident Voice
February 27, 2003
SAFWAN,
Iraq—A pack of wild dogs howl atop the sprawling manmade sand columns that
separate Iraq and Kuwait. The mutts run freely between the small Iraqi and
Kuwaiti border posts. On the Iraqi side, a border guard smiles and says, “They
are Iraqi dogs, but they don’t need visas to go over there.”
The dogs undoubtedly see it
all. They roam freely around the demilitarized zone between Iraq and Kuwait—the
two borders separated by UNIKOM, the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observation
Mission. The DMZ extends 6 miles into Iraq and 3 into Kuwait. Beyond that lie
the forces that will seek to conquer Iraq—the US military. If the chase of the
dogs takes them much beyond the 3-mile point inside Kuwait, they will see the
war games of Washington’s forces—the tanks, the Apache helicopters, the
thousands of US soldiers.
“We watch the Americans and
see everything that happens,” says an Iraqi soldier high atop Sinam Mountain,
the highest point in the area, where Iraq has a small observation post. “We
watch their maneuvers all the time.”
“It’s a clear thing,” says
Iraqi Air Force Colonel Sabri Gaib. “We expect an attack from the Americans at
any moment.” Sabri acknowledges that the Americans have a much more powerful
arsenal of troops, weapons and technology than Iraq. But still, he repeats what
most military men in Iraq say when confronted with this reality:
“The Iraqis will fight. In
the 1920s, the British had more manpower, equipment, even technology you could
say. We fought them with sticks and we kicked them out of Iraq. We are
confident we can do the same to the Americans.”
A white UNIKOM land rover
speeds along the road leading into Kuwait. It stops at the Iraqi border post.
French Colonel Bernard Salabelle, the Chief Operations Officer of the UN
Mission emerges, wearing desert camouflage fatigues and the blue beret of the
UN forces. He has come from the main UNIKOM base to Safwan because a group of
American activists with the Iraq Peace Team has set up a temporary camp there
for 4 days to protest the massive US military build-up in Kuwait. “You
shouldn’t stay too long,” he says. “It might not be safe here much longer.”
The bespectacled Col.
Salabelle jokes with the Iraqis that he hasn’t had French wine or cheese in
more than a month because he can’t get alcohol from the Kuwaiti side. He asks
the Iraqis if they could bring him the wine from Baghdad. “In Shah Allah,” says
an Iraqi official. If God wills it.
Col. Salabelle has headed up
the military wing of UNIKOM for 5 months. These have perhaps been the 5 tensest
months in the DMZ in almost a decade. He emphasizes that it is an unarmed
mission, save for one, armed battalion for “self defense.” There are 200 UN
observers in the DMZ from 32 nations, including 11 from the US. But “the
British and American observers stay on the Kuwaiti side,” Salabelle says with a
grin.
Regarding his mission in the
DMZ, Col. Salabelle told Iraqjournal.org it is difficult “not to know your
future. We don’t know if we will be evacuated next week or in one month. We
don’t know. We hope to stay here but we don’t know in which kind of situation.
I am just waiting for orders from my headquarters.”
Col. Salabelle says that if
US forces begin an invasion “perhaps we will not be here. If the Security
Council decides [to participate in an attack], it will withdraw its mission
first. Without the Security Council, it’s a different thing.”
If you listen close enough
you can hear the helicopters in the distance. You can hear a rooster crow. You
can hear the children in the nearby Iraqi village laughing and playing. But
mostly you hear the eerie silence of the horrors past and future. Safwan is a
desolated area—the carcass of a former border crossing, now barely a skeleton
of its past. The image left is of a Wild West ghost town waiting for the
showdown at high noon. You can imagine the typical bustle of the small
restaurant that once serviced travelers between Iraq and Kuwait, now a
bullet-riddled shell of its former self. You can imagine the “Duty Free Shop,”
the post office, the customs station. The traders and travelers, businessmen
and tourists, they are no more. Just steel, concrete, bullet holes and history.
More than 12 years ago,
Iraqi tanks, trucks and soldiers moved through the night on the road heading
from Safwan into Kuwait. The rest, as they say, is history. But the ghosts of
Safwan live on.
At the 6 mile point on the
Iraqi side, is a sign that reads: “Attention all UN Personnel, You are now
leaving the DMZ.” The next left turn takes you to what is simply known as “the
graveyard”—a stretch of the Iraqi desert full of mangled, twisted vehicles,
contaminated from direct hits from Washington’s depleted uranium munitions used
during the 1991 Gulf War.
Over the last decade, Iraq
has moved the tanks, cars, trucks and other undistinguishable vehicles to the
Safwan desert to keep them away from populated areas. The tanks in particular
tell the story of the power of the DU munitions—clean holes ripped in tanks
like a big needle through fabric. After 10 minutes at the graveyard, the
government minder gets uneasy and wants to go. There is a sandstorm and dust
and sand are blowing everywhere.
But for the people less than
a mile away, there is no van to get in and speed away. They live downwind from
the DU-contaminated vehicles. Despite the remoteness of the location, locals
occasionally take metal from the site. Perhaps they are unaware of the dangers
of exposure; perhaps they are desperate. At the fork in the road near the
graveyard, a small child plays with a stick, hitting a stone along the dirt and
dust. An older man, perhaps his father or grandfather, sits smoking a cigarette
in front of a small guard post. One is left simply to wonder what lies in their
future or why they must sit there.
Statistics are hard to come
by in Iraq, but over the last decade southern Iraq undoubtedly has seen a
cancer epidemic. The hospitals are full of dying children, horrifying birth
defects and misery. Ask any doctor or scientist and they’ll go into meticulous
detail about the relationship between the cancer and birth defects and DU. In
Basra’s hospitals, you meet many Iraqi Gulf War vets, sitting at the bedsides of
their sick or deformed children. And you meet many people from Safwan. The
uranium particles in the air and soil are part of it. But there is also the
more hidden danger.
As you pass along the
highway heading from Kuwait to Basra, there are dozens of fields covered with
plastic tarps. They are protecting the harvest. Safwan was once famous for its
tomatoes, but nowadays it is notorious. Foreigners visiting the south are
customarily warned against eating the tomatoes, because they are grown at the
epicenter of where the DU munitions were used.
After seeing the graveyard
and its proximity to the tomato groves, the vegetable markets in Basra start to
look like a series of tables with rat poison and grenades for sale.
Back at the DMZ, the sun
begins to set over Safwan. A plane thunders in the distance; the dogs are again
howling. A pack of them are chasing a small black and white mutt. Perhaps the
mutt is a Kuwaiti dog that moved too close to the pack. Maybe it’s a dog that
survives off of scraps from US soldiers. After a while, the dogs disappear over
the mounds of sand separating Iraq from Kuwait. That eerie silence returns and
the Iraqi border guards stand at their posts staring into the desert, knowing
that someday soon the ghosts of Safwan will rise again.
Jeremy Scahill is an independent journalist, who reports for the nationally syndicated Radio and TV show Democracy Now! He and filmmaker Jacquie Soohen are coordinating Iraqjournal.org, the only website providing regular independent reporting from the ground in Baghdad.