Iraqi citizens have led US troops to a suspected mass grave in northern Iraq containing an estimated 50 bodies. A US military spokesman Master Sergeant Robert Cowens said Iraqis brought a US combat patrol to a possible mass grave site near Kirkuk. "They cordoned off the area. They expect approximately 50 human remains are in the area," Master Sergeant Cowens said. Estimates of the number of those killed or who disappeared during Saddam Hussein's rule range from 300,000 to over a million. There are about 40 known mass graves in Iraq. The Kirkuk area was subjected to Saddam's policy of Arabisation that saw thousands of Kurds forcibly expelled from their homes in the oil-rich region after Saddam's Baath party came to power in 1968.
Saddam, currently in a US detention centre, faces seven charges of crimes against humanity including a 1987-1988 offensive that saw Kurdish villages razed and the gassing of the village of Halabja that left 5,000 people dead. In October, forensic experts digging for evidence against Saddam near Mosul carried out their first full exhumation of a mass grave filled with the skeletons of scores of women and children, many shot in the back of the head. The bodies were believed to be those of hundreds of Kurds killed by the regime in the late 1980s. |