Forensic Experts Probe Kurdish Mass Grave
Saturday April 30, 2005 5:46 AM
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A skull with pink and white dentures belongs to an old woman, investigators said. A skeleton nearby was that of a teenage girl, still clutching a brightly colored bag of possessions.
The trenches full of the skeletons of Iraqi Kurds, still in their distinctive, colorful garb, buried where they fell after being shot dead nearly 20 years ago, bear witness to the brutality of the regime of Saddam Hussein.
International forensic experts this week examined a mass grave site in Samawa, on the Euphrates River, about 230 miles southeast of Baghdad, collecting evidence to prosecute Saddam and his top lieutenants for the mass killings of ethnic Kurds and Shiites during his more than 30 years in power.
Many of those buried in the 18 trenches were believed to be Kurds killed in 1987 and 1988 during the Anfal campaign, said Gregg Nivala, from the U.S. government's Regime Crimes Liaison Office.
``These were not combatants,'' he said. ``They were women and children.''
During Anfal, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were killed or expelled from northern Iraq. The campaign included the gruesome 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. The Saddam regime was carrying out a program of removing Kurds from the northern homeland and replacing them with Arabs. Many of the Kurdish victims were buried in Iraq's central and southern desert.
Outgoing Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, himself a Kurd, said half a million people perished and 182,000 are missing...
...Amin said the ongoing insurgency, fueled largely by disenchanted Sunni Arabs and ex-Baathists, was hampering investigations.
``The same people that did this are the same people that want to stop me doing this (investigation),'' he told reporters...
guardian.co.uk |
