They were killed in their hospital beds and buried in the hospital flower gardens, some with their arms still wrapped in bandages or IVs still connected.
And they were killed on long death marches in northern Iraq–Kurdish women and children, separated from their families and carrying the few household items they could drag with them.
Wherever they were killed, many were blindfolded and shot in the forehead. Saddam Hussein’s whole country became a killing field.
Mass graves “are everywhere,” said Sandy Hodgkinson, a U.S. State Department attorney who has been working with Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry, the agency in charge of investigating the mass graves. “You follow reports, and they turn up in places you would never suspect.”
Iraq is littered with bodies stuffed dozens at a time into cemetery plots, bodies shoved over cliffs, tossed in lakes or hidden in farm fields where vegetables still grow, said Saad Sultan, 32, a lawyer and detective with the Human Rights Ministry’s mass graves research team.
So far, 282 possible mass grave sites have been identified, 55 have been confirmed and 20 have been explored. But nine months after Hussein’s fall, the total number of graves is unknown. So, too, is the number buried, though the figure is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
Among Kurds alone, for example, there are at least 182,000 people missing, 8,000 of them from one clan, the Barzanis.
Count incomplete
The incomplete count of mass graves is partly a result of searchers’ putting a high priority on exploring the known sites that may aid in the prosecution of Hussein and other top officials. But it also is attributed to a shortage of Iraqis trained to do such work and the few resources available to them. Teams from the U.S. and several European nations are helping train Iraqis and search for graves.
Most of the graves have been found in the center of Iraq, leading experts to think that the dead are Shiites, victims of Hussein’s onslaught against those who rose up in 1991 at the end of the first Persian Gulf war.
But the regime apparently shipped bodies across the country, which would explain why those of Kurds killed in the north have shown up in the desert southwest.
Iraqi officials also tried to cover their tracks by forcibly moving neighbors so as to eliminate those who might identify mass graves. In many places, a deep hole was dug with heavy equipment; then bodies were dumped from trucks and the site was covered with earth.
Part of detective Sultan’s job is to help make information available to the thousands of Iraqis looking for loved ones, a duty that has a personal meaning. His brother Mohammad was seized by security forces in 1986 and never seen again.
Sultan only learned about his brother’s fate a few days after the regime’s collapse last spring, when thousands of execution orders were discovered. Along with 21 others, his brother was taken from a prison cell and shot in 1991.
“So when people come to me with their problems, I help them because I think about what happened to my brother,” he said.
Dr. Kasim Fahri Husseyni has a similarly personal interest in mass graves.
Iraqi security forces arrived in his small village in southern Iraq in 1991 amid the Shiite rebellion. Going from house to house, they quickly gathered 52 of the 1,000 residents of Hussein village, a poor and deeply religious farming community. They were never seen again.
“We are a small village, and so we consider all of those people as family,” he said.
Fear of punishment
Over the years, word had spread about a mass grave less than 10 miles away in Hila, but nobody had dared go there for fear of being punished.
But a few days after the regime’s collapse, Husseyni and his brother, Dr. Rafid al-Husseyni, and dozens of volunteers went to the site, where authorities think as many as 15,000 people may be buried.
The experience led the brothers to form The Society for the Preservation of Mass Graves, a small volunteer group that helps document mass graves across Iraq.
Within 30 minutes of digging on that first day in Hila, the volunteers from Hussein village came across dozens of bodies, some buried with their identification cards. Several were from their village. But it was impossible to identify many others.
The villagers sought the advice of religious scholars in nearby Najaf, who advised them to return the bodies of the unidentified to the grave site. That way, they explained, their relatives might also one day be able to find them.
