The Times of India
written by Staff
Friday April 15, 2011
BAGHDAD: A mass grave containing the remains of over 800 people, including women and children, has been found in western Iraq.
The 812 bodies belong to victims executed in late 2006 by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, according to Iraqi human rights ministry head Khudier Hamdan.
The victims were political opponents of Hussein, officials said.
They were executed and then disposed of in a trench in the desert in Anbar province.
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Sky News Australis
written by Staff
Friday April 15, 2011
A mass grave of more than 800 people has been discovered in western Iraq.
According to Reuters, the head of the Human Rights Ministry says they were the remains of former opponents of Saddam Hussein
They had been executed and dumped in one of 25 trenches in the vast desert in Western Iraq's Anbar Province.
Some of the remains were identified as being of women and children.
'This location is a mass grave and it is one of the mass graves of the former regime. It dates back to the 1980's - the period between 1982 and 1987. The area of the mass grave is five acres and contains twenty-five trenches where a lot of victims were killed by security forces of the former regime,' said Khudier Hamdan, head of Iraq's Human Rights Ministry.
The remains were thought to be mostly of Shi'ites and Kurds, who were marginalised under Saddam.
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[source: wikipedia]
Secret police, torture, murders, deportations, forced disappearances, assassinations, chemical weapons, and the destruction of wetlands (more specifically, the destruction of the food sources of rival groups) were some of the methods Saddam Hussein used to maintain control. The total number of deaths related to torture and murder during this period are unknown, as are the reports of human rights violations. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment and torture.
According to The New York Times, "he [Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule". Others have estimated 800,000 deaths caused by Saddam not counting the Iran-Iraq war. Estimates as to the number of Iraqis executed by Saddam's regime vary from 300-500,000 to over 600,000, estimates as to the number of Kurds he massacred vary from 70,000 to 300,000, and estimates as to the number killed in the put-down of the 1991 rebellion vary from 60,000 to 200,000. Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.
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