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Iraq: 15 bodies exhumed in new Saddam Hussein-era mass grave

2022-05-14T14:13:10.991Z


The country has been working for years to identify the remains of victims of the various violent episodes in its history.


The remains of 15 victims were exhumed in a mass grave dating from the 1990s and unearthed in southern Iraq, an official said on Saturday, estimating that the site could contain around 100 bodies.

The mass grave, near the Shia holy city of Najaf, was discovered in April during the construction of a building complex.

It would date from the era of dictator Saddam Hussein, who in 1991 repressed in blood an uprising of the Shiite community, the majority in the South, killing nearly 100,000 people.

In front of concrete buildings awaiting completion, an AFP correspondent saw numbered human skulls and bones in a delimited perimeter on Saturday.

There could be 100 victims in this mass grave.

It's an estimate, the figure could be higher, given the extent of the crime scene

," Abdul Ilah al-Naïli, director of the Martyrs' Foundation, the government body responsible for opening the scene, told AFP. mass graves and the identification process.

Succession of conflicts in Iraq since 1980

"

The mass grave dates back to the popular uprising of 1991

," he added, adding that "

dozens

" of mass graves may not yet have been discovered.

He was speaking on the sidelines of a ceremony organized on the site to mark in advance the national day of mass graves (May 16).

Since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, conflicts have followed one another in Iraq.

According to the authorities, during the 1980s and 1990s, the regime of Saddam Hussein, overthrown in 2003 by the American invasion, caused the disappearance of more than a million people, whose relatives still do not know the fate of a large number .

Read alsoThe UN investigates 12 mass graves discovered in Iraq (report)

In addition, the Islamic State (IS) group, defeated in Iraq at the end of 2017 after having controlled a large part of the territory, left behind more than 200 mass graves which could contain up to 12,000 bodies, according to the UN.

In December, the Peshmerga - army in the autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq - discovered a mass grave containing at least 11 bodies belonging to police officers who were allegedly killed by IS.

Last March, the Iraqi authorities exhumed in a mass grave in Mosul, the former "

capital

" of IS in Iraq, the remains of 85 jihadist fighters and their relatives killed during the reconquest of the great northern metropolis.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-05-14

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