Murdered under Hussein
100 women and children discovered in mass grave
In Iraq, the authorities are working on the exhumation of around 100 Kurdish women and children who were presumably killed under the rule of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. The bodies are now being exhumed.
This month, special teams began excavating the mass grave discovered in 2019 in the south of the country, said the head of the Iraqi authority for mass graves, Diaa Karim.
Victims wore "Kurdish spring clothes"
The site is located about 15 to 20 kilometers from the main road in Tal al-Shaikhia in the province of Muthanna, an AFP journalist reported. It was the second grave of its kind to be discovered at the site, Karim said on Wednesday. "After the first layer of soil was removed and the remains were revealed, it was found that they were women and children dressed in Kurdish spring clothes," he continued.
The dead were probably from Kalar in the northern province of Sulaymaniyah, which is now part of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq. He estimated that "no fewer than 100" people had been buried there. However, the number could still change during the exhumations.
Saddam Hussein's bloody campaign against Iraqi Kurds
Between 1987 and 1988, Saddam Hussein had almost 180,000 Iraqi Kurds killed and 3,000 of their villages destroyed as part of the "Anfal" campaign. After his overthrow in 2003, Saddam was charged with genocide for the bloody massacres in 1987 and 1988. In 2006, he was hanged for other crimes after the US invasion of Iraq that brought about his overthrow.
Victims may have been "buried alive"
A large number of the victims in the mass grave had been shot in the head at close range, Karim added. Some could also have been "buried alive". Meanwhile, the head of the excavation team for mass graves in Iraq, Ahmed Kusai, referred to "difficulties" during the exhumations - the remains had become "entangled, as some mothers were holding their babies" when they were killed.
According to another official, another mass grave was found at the beginning of the exhumations in Tal al-Shaikhia. This was located near the notorious Nugrat al-Salman prison, where dissidents were imprisoned under Saddam. The Iraqi government estimates that around 1.3 million people disappeared as a result of Saddam Hussein's atrocities between 1980 and 1990.
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