In Iraq, authorities are working to exhume about a hundred Kurdish women and children believed to have been murdered in the 1980s under the rule of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Now the bodies are being exhumed.
Special teams this month began excavating the mass grave discovered in 2019 in the south of the country, the head of Iraq’s Mass Graves Authority, Diaa Karim, said.
Victims wore ‘Kurdish spring clothes’
The site is about 15 to 20 kilometers from the main road in Tal al-Shaikhia in Muthanna province, an AFP journalist reported. It was the second grave of its kind discovered at this site, Karim said on Wednesday. “After the first layer of soil was removed and the remains surfaced, it was determined that they were women and children in Kurdish spring clothing,” he continued.
The dead were believed to have come from Kalar in the northern province of Sulaymaniyah, which is now part of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region. He estimated that “as many as 100” people were buried there. However, the number may change during the excavations.
Saddam Hussein’s bloody campaign against the Iraqi Kurds
Between 1987 and 1988, Saddam Hussein killed nearly 180,000 Iraqi Kurds and destroyed 3,000 of their villages during the ‘Anfal’ campaign. Saddam was accused of genocide after his overthrow in 2003 for the bloody massacres in 1987 and 1988. In 2006, he was hanged for other crimes after the US invasion of Iraq that caused his downfall.
Victims may have been ‘buried alive’.
A large number of victims in the mass grave were killed at close range with a shot to the head, Karim continued. Some could therefore have been ‘buried alive’. Meanwhile, the head of Iraq’s mass grave excavation team, Ahmed Kusai, cited “problems” with the excavations – the remains were “entangled because some mothers were holding their babies” when they were killed.
Another mass grave was found when excavations at Tal al-Shaikhia began, another official said. This is located close to the infamous Nugrat al-Salman prison, where dissidents were imprisoned under Saddam. The Iraqi government estimates that approximately 1.3 people disappeared as a result of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities between 1980 and 1990.
Source: Krone
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