Mass graves found in southern Iraq

Published 9:00 pm Friday, April 15, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Two mass graves that appear to contain the remains of as many as 7,000 people killed by Saddam Hussein’s government have been discovered in southern Iraq, according to an Iraqi government minister.

The new Iraqi government may use some of the remains to build its case against alleged war criminals, including Saddam, Human Rights Minister Dr. Bakhtiar Amin said Friday.

Iraqi officials said they have been unable to excavate the burial grounds found earlier this year because of security concerns and because Iraq lacks enough forensic workers to perform the grisly task. Amin said that several of his investigators recently visited the sites and calculated the number of bodies by surveying the contours of the graves and interviewing witnesses of the burials.

The largest of the grave sites is in a deserted area near the southern port city of Basra, where Saddam’s Sunni-led Baathist government waged a brutal campaign against a Shiite Muslim uprising following the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Amin said that 5,000 bodies of people involved in the uprising might be buried there.

Amin said the rest of the bodies were found in Samawa, a less-inhabited area in south central Iraq.

“We have found about 2,000 remains in the Samawa area of the family of Massoud Barzani,” Amin said, referring to the current chief of the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two most powerful Kurdish organizations in Iraq, and a longtime leader of a guerrilla movement against Saddam.

Hussein’s army detained 8,000 of Barzani’s clansmen in their homeland in northern Iraq in 1983 and they were never heard from again.

If the ministry’s estimates are correct, the two mass graves would be among the largest of 290 secret burial sites reported to be found in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion. Iraqi human rights investigators estimate that between 600,000 to 1 million people disappeared during Hussein’s rule.

With only 20 trained forensic pathologists in Iraq, officials here have depended on help from neighboring countries including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait, which was invaded by Iraq in 1991 and has a special interest in finding the remains of its own citizens. Only 200 out of 605 Kuwaitis who disappeared during the first Gulf War have been accounted for, Amin said.