THE eight members of the Iraqi execution squad were laughing and cursing as they lined up their 50 prisoners in front of the large, sandy pit. Their victims were made to squat down with their hands tied behind their backs.

Then, without ceremony, they were each dispatched with a burst of machinegun-fire, before their bodies were rolled into the mass grave.

The purges of Shia Muslims by Saddam Hussein’s security forces in the spring of 1991 rate as one of the bloodiest episodes of his brutal rule. But the crimes were supposed to remain undiscovered and had the killers not been so overworked, they should have noticed that Hussein Rabia was still alive and breathing, in spite of the terrible gunshot wound to his shoulder.

He returned to Iraq’s killing fields for the first time yesterday to recount his extraordinary story of survival and to pay respects to the thousands of men and women, including four of his relatives, who made their last prayers on this bleak desert landscape just north of this holy city.

When I approached him at a mass grave that was being excavated yesterday and asked him to describe his ordeal, his first instinct was to run. Clutching his five-year-old son, Ali, by the hand, he walked briskly away, muttering that Saddam might still return to power and finish him off for good. Eventually he was coaxed into recounting his story for The Times.

It began on March 26 at the height of the Iraqi campaign to crush the Shia uprising, which had spread to every big town in the south. “We had to flee our home because of fighting and we were returning in the car when we were stopped at an army checkpoint,” he said.

“They took five of us away and held us briefly at the Najaf hotel, which had been turned into a holding centre for about 60 prisoners.”

By then the city was full of Baath party loyalists, members of various intelligence agencies and soldiers of the Republican Guard, who between them co-ordinated the crackdown, which included the use of tanks and aircraft against the rebels.

“We were then packed on to trucks and taken to the Baath party headquarters in the industrial sector of the city. The place was full of soldiers and secret police and about 500 prisoners, who were being taken off in batches on the backs of trucks,” he said.

With only his hands bound, he was able to see and hear exactly what was going on. He recognised two senior members of the regime — Taha Yassin Ramadan, Iraq’s former Vice-President, and Hussein Kamal, a member of Saddam’s family who was sent to the south to put down the Shia revolt. After a short interval, Hussein Rabia was loaded on the back of a flatbed lorry with about 50 other prisoners, including his 80-year-old uncle, and driven about eight miles of out town to a military zone closed to the public.

“When we saw the hole, we knew what was coming. Some people were pleading and begging and asking why. Others were praying. The guards just laughed. They told us we were criminals and murderers,” he said.

The men were made to squat down and each one was shot in turn by the execution squad, which was made up of soldiers and intelligence officers armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles.

Midway through the shootings, they stopped when Hussein Kamal drove by in a car. The squad waited for his order. He lifted up his hand and, as though swatting a fly, gave the signal for the killings to resume. Later Kamal, Saddam’s son-in-law, defected to the West before returning to Iraq, where he, too, was killed.

“I was shot in the left shoulder, but they fired from about four metres (13ft) away and only wounded me. I was covered in blood, so they probably thought I was dead and pushed me into the pit, where I lay half-conscious.

“At one point I heard faint voices saying there were still some alive, but then a new load of prisoners arrived to be killed and they left us,” he said. When he heard the lorry drive off, he opened his eyes. As night fell, he and three other survivors, including one Saudi student, crawled out of the 5ft-deep mass grave. They reached a group of shepherds near by, who sheltered them for the night and gave them some milk.

The area was heavily patrolled by security forces, so the next day Hussein waited for nightfall before finding a family in a local village willing to take him in.

Throughout the account of his ordeal, Hussein remained clear and dispassionate, until he recalled that poor village family who nursed him to health. He broke down and wept at their kindness, at a time when humanity seemed to have abandoned Iraq.

Too afraid to return home, he eventually fled to Iran, re-entered Iraq in the northern Kurdish areas and, in 1992, went home to resume his life and to father five more children.

“I have never told anyone this story: I was always too afraid until now,” he said.

Although this area is nominally under the control of US Marines, there was still fear on his face. He said that there were many Baathists still walking freely in Iraq, who had to be stopped from ever returning to power.

Above all, he wanted those responsible for the mass killings to be brought to court. “In my case, I was never interrogated, tried or charged with anything. No one even asked me my name.

“They just wanted to kill as many of us as possible,” he said. “But I lived.”

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