Atrocity Exhibition

Michael Totten: The Red Building.

... The Kurds left the first shattered building in the compound intact as a memorial. The insides are blackened and strewn with rubble. Only pigeons live in there now.

The second building in the compound was a torture chamber and prison. It has since been turned into a genocide museum. Soviet-built tanks and anti-aircraft guns captured from Saddam’s defeated army are lined up outside.

The entrance to the genocide museum is in the back of the building. To get there from the front you have to walk past one of the rape rooms. Women’s underwear and contraceptives were found in that room when the prison was liberated by the Peshmerga.

When you enter the museum you will walk through a long and winding hallway. The walls are covered with mirror shards. Each represents one of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds murdered in the genocidal Anfal campaign. A river of twinkling lights lines the ceiling. Each represents one of the five thousand villages destroyed by Saddam Hussein. ...

Then the museum begins in earnest. Pictures of Kurdish dead line the walls of the hallways and the old torture chambers and prison cells. I do not believe in ghosts or in lingering negative energy. But if I have ever been in a place that is haunted, this is it. ...

Some rooms in the museum don’t have pictures at all. Instead they show the instruments and the methods of torture. In one room, the so-called “Washington Room,” men and women had hot electric irons pressed into their skin.

The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall.

“I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution.”

Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.”

10,725 people were killed in this one building alone. All died during torture.