NEAR SAMAWA, Iraq, 1 May 2005 — With a red paint brush, a female forensic specialist carefully brushed dirt away from a human skull covered with sandy soil, one of 1,500 believed to be buried in seven mass graves uncovered in this desolate stretch of Iraqi desert. In a nearby trench dug by investigators, a mass of black, tangled hair gave a second skull an almost life-like appearance. A third skull appeared to be screaming, mouth wide open.
Skulls and bones, clothing and other belongings found in shallow graves here offer up valuable clues to investigators gathering evidence against Saddam Hussein and others from the former regime, said Gregg Nivala, a regime crimes liaison officer working from the US Embassy in Baghdad. “This allows us to prove the crimes,” he said.
A shiny gold and purple dress and a blue bead necklace laying next to a fourth skull in another trench is distinctive enough to indicate that people buried there were Kurds from northern Iraq, according to Nivala.
Dates on medicine found in the graves indicate the people were killed around the time of the 1987-1988 “Anfal campaign” that saw Kurdish villages razed and hundreds of people relocated south, said Sonny Trimble, archaeologist in charge of the excavation. “Blister packs of pills have expiration dates, wristwatches have the day, and dates go back to that year,” Trimble said. “We’re finding them very effective.”
Saddam Hussein, currently in a US detention center in Iraq, faces seven charges of crimes against humanity for his alleged role in the Anfal campaign, including the 1988 gassing of the village of Halabja that left 5,000 dead. Based on the AK-47 bullet casings and bullet holes left in bones, gunmen opened fire on civilians — mostly women and children — killing them as they stood in open trenches, said Baktiar Amin, former minister of human rights. “It was terrifying,” Amin said. “They came and basically sprayed them with bullets.”
The gruesome search is part of a painstaking effort costing the United States eight to $10 million per site to gather forensic evidence, Nivala said. Investigators plan to concentrate on gathering evidence from seven main sites around the country, Nivala said. This will then be passed on to the Iraq Special Tribunal, made up of 30 Iraqi judges and American advisers.
More than 290 mass graves sites found since Saddam’s downfall in April 2003 contain the bodies of at least 300,000 people believed to have been killed under his regime, Amin said. The total number of those missing in Iraq could be close to one million, he believes. “Iraq turned into a museum of crimes under Saddam, a land of mass graves,” Amin said.
“There’s a collective memory. Nobody can forget what happened to their loved ones, so to avoid revenge and vendetta, this will help bring those responsible for regime crimes to justice,” Amin said. But Amin says that Iraqis need more training to complete their search for justice. “We would like the international community to help us in forensics training, in how to operate the (forensic) machines,” Amin said. “This is a major humanitarian issue.”
“Wouldn’t you, God forbid, if your father or brother was killed, wouldn’t you want to know it was your loved one?” Amin asked. “You would want to know how they were killed and to see who killed them brought to justice,” he added. Lawyers have interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses in connection with the Anfal campaign, said Judge Raid Jubi, chief investigator in the case.
