‘You can’t leave bodies in drains’: Something evil has visited Kuwait City

February 1991: ‘They twisted my son on a pole and broke his legs with pieces of wood’ – The Iraqi army leaves wreckage in its wake, writes Robert Fisk

A US Humvee and a Saudi tank pass under a sign directing them to Kuwait City in February 1991 during the Desert Storm offensive (AFP via Getty)

What kind of people would do this? That’s what we kept asking ourselves in Kuwait City yesterday. Day had been turned into night, so thick was the canopy of smoke, the nation’s oil wells burning gold and orange along the black-fringed horizon, Hieronymus Bosch courtesy of the Iraqi army.

They had even used the modern equivalent of a torture wheel. All day, Kuwaiti men, young and old, approached our car with their terrible stories. “They twisted my son on a pole and broke his legs with pieces of wood,” a stooped old man said. “They thought he was in the resistance. Now they have taken him away, with all the others, as a human shield.”

Then there was Heather Rennison, an English woman married to a Kuwaiti. “A cousin of my mother-in-law was arrested. She was only 19 and they had found two-way radios in her bedroom. Three days later they came to her home to ask her parents for clothes and blankets. So her parents thought she would be all right. Then the Iraqis hanged her and dumped her body outside her home. There were burns from electricity on her arms and legs. Of course, the Iraqis kept the clothes and blankets.”

Perhaps one needed to walk the pavements of Kuwait City yesterday to understand the extent of what the Iraqis did, that it really does amount to a war crime. “I will show you the mosque where they shot 11 men on Friday,” a bearded man shouted from his car.

The Abdullah Othman mosque stands in the Palestinian Hawali quarter. The bearded man pointed to a yellow wall. “The Iraqis said that all those at prayer would be taken away – kidnapped – and 11 men stayed in the mosque and refused to go. So they brought them here, blindfolded them, made them stand with their backs to the wall and shot them in the face.” The bullets that had hit the worshippers’ heads were embedded in the yellow wall. “Don’t be surprised,” the man said. “I had two neighbours who the Iraqis thought were in the resistance. So they pushed them into drains, closed the grille, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. Their families buried them later – you can’t leave bodies in drains.”

The figure of 5,000 Kuwaiti men abducted in the last hours before Iraq’s retreat seems fantastic until you find – as I did yesterday – that the first three families who offered lifts to various locations in Kuwait City had all lost sons as hostages. The young men had simply been ordered into Iraqi army buses as they walked to work. Three thousand men and women murdered here, the Kuwaitis also tell you. Who could do this?

What was he thinking, this soldier, when he opened fire at a museum?

It is comforting, in trying to come to terms with a reign of terror, to search for some logical reason, historical hatred perhaps, or some aberrant unit of the Iraqi secret police. But this would be fanciful. What is one to think when one walks, as I did, through the smoking embers of the National Museum, fired by the Iraqis on Tuesday? Or the gutted interior of the parliament? Or the still burning library in the Seif Reception Palace – its golden clock tower smashed by a tank shell – where I found, lying on a chair, the remains of a book entitled The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi? What kind of people burn museums and libraries?

Outside the museum, Kuwait’s collection of historic wooden boats had been burned to cinders. The “Islamic house” lay in ruins. The walls of the Emir of Kuwait’s Dasman Palace had been torn down with explosions and bulldozers. The Iraqis had used tanks to shoot at the parliament. The great hotels had been systematically fired. The Iraqis had even planted explosives in the bedrooms of the Meridian Hotel. It was like a medieval army which conquered, looted and then burned even on an individual level.

Boat owners found their yachts stolen or deliberately sunk in the marinas. Shopkeepers found their stores burned if they could not be looted. At an abandoned anti-aircraft gun on the coast – where the Iraqis mined the lovely beaches against a non-existent American amphibious landing – I came across piles of brand new women’s shoes, made in France, none of them matching, all wrapped inside Iraqi army blankets along with body-building magazines. Why did they do this, these soldiers? Why had they stolen, too, an exhibition display of women’s eye shadow? There were cartridge cases across the forecourt of the great museum, bullet-holes in the cracked walls of the building that once contained Kuwait’s finest national treasures. What was he thinking, this soldier, when he opened fire at a museum?

The seafront restaurants have been torn down, the high, glass-covered landmark water towers machine-gunned. At al-Ahmadi, the Iraqis set off explosives every hour at the two oil farms, each containing 20 tanks. The fine old British “White House” there was burned down along with the control room that operates the oil pipelines.

I suppose one sensed in Kuwait yesterday that something very wicked, at times evil, had visited this city. Not just an occupation army, not even the Iraqi Ba’ath Party apparatus, but something which intrinsically links dictatorship and corruption. “Down with the dirty Fahd, Sabah and Hosni Mubarak,” said a blood-red graffito on the wall of one of the burned palaces. “Long live Saddam Hussein.” In the little, looted museum of Kuwaiti peasant art, I found a poster of Saddam stapled to the wall. “Most victorious of all Arabs, the great leader Saddam Hussein – God bless him,” the caption said.

Whoever uttered such prayers? Colonel Mustapha Awadi, of the Kuwaiti resistance movement, offered to show me. In a bleak housing estate in the suburb of Quwain, he took me to a school – the Iraqis used schools as interrogation centres – and in a classroom I found 16 young Iraqi soldiers. They sat on the floor, legs crossed, moustachioed, miserable, ordinary men with tired, dirty faces and grimy uniforms. “They were happy to surrender,” the colonel said. “See? We even give them food and tea. I promise they will be handed over unharmed to the Kuwaiti Army.”

Two of the men had been wounded in the face – their bandages were fresh – and they all smiled when I greeted them and when they heard me tell the colonel in Arabic that I would mention their presence to the Red Cross. One could not help but feel sorry for these defeated teenagers with their sad smiles. So what kind of men had raped Kuwait?