The larger of the grave sites is in a deserted area near the southern port city of Basra, where Hussein's Sunni-led Baathist government waged a brutal campaign against a Shiite uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Amin said 5,000 bodies of people involved in the uprising might be buried there. Amin said the rest of the bodies were found in Samawa, a less-inhabited area in south-central Iraq. "We have found about 2,000 remains in the Samawa area of the family of Massoud Barzani," Amin said, referring to the current chief of the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two most powerful Kurdish organizations in Iraq and a longtime leader of a guerrilla movement against Hussein. Hussein's army detained 8,000 of Barzani's clansmen in their homeland in northern Iraq in 1983, and they were never heard from again. If the ministry's estimates are correct, the two mass graves would be among the largest of 290 secret burial sites reported found in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion. Iraqi human rights investigators estimate that 600,000 to 1 million people disappeared during Hussein's rule.