IRAQ: Iraqi families wailed with grief as they picked through piles of bones at a vast mass grave, their relatives among up to 15,000 people reported missing in the area during Saddam Hussein's rule.
People searched for faded identity cards or other clues among the skeletons yesterday trying to identify brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters and even children who disappeared when Saddam's government cracked down on a Shia uprising in 1991.
Some locals reported hearing gunfire from the site near the farming community of Mahawil, about 90km south of Baghdad, that year.
"We saw buses bringing people here daily during May and April, 1991, and at night we heard the gunfire," said Mr Said Jaber, who lives in the area.
Others residents said they saw trucks full of corpses drawing up at the site, which may be one of the largest of a string of remote mass graves uncovered since US-led forces ousted Saddam last month.
Desperate for a conclusion to more than 10 years of worry about the fate of their loved ones, some people claimed remains on the basis of scraps of evidence: hair, a sandal, even a packet of cigarettes. Ms Bushra Jabbar (43), was so overcome by grief that she threw the dirt from which her mother and sisters were dug up over her own head, as if to bury herself with them.
"Here they are. These are the bodies of my mother and my two sisters," Ms Jabbar said, sitting in the dirt and wailing as she saw the workers dig up the remains of the bodies.
"I recognised my mother from her long plait and her golden jewellery." She said she identified her two sisters by their clothes and the shape of their jaws as well as their jewellery.
"They came and took my mother in March 1991 to question her about her husband, my stepfather, who was an army deserter.
"She never returned," she said. "We hoped that they were in prison and we hoped that America would come and free them."
Ms Araya Hussein carried the remains of her husband away in a bag. "He went missing in 1991 when we had 10 children," said the weeping woman.
"I thought he was a prisoner and would one day come home. I never imagined I would be carrying his bones home." Others silently studied scraps of clothing or items such as wallets, glasses and even an artificial leg among the bones.
As an earthmover scraped heaps of rich brown earth from the site, bones protruded from the dirt.
Once extricated, skulls and what looked like the bones from the rest of the bodies were heaped into crumbled piles or stuffed into plastic bags.
Clothing hung from the bones. Some skulls were cracked. Some of the remains were clearly those of children.
"I believe my brother and father have been buried in this place," said one aggrieved man who did not give his name.
"Saddam's security forces came to the house to get them one day in 1991."
Dr Rafid al-Husseini, a local Iraqi doctor trying to organise the retrieval, said more than 3,000 bodies already had been unearthed in seven days of digging and many more could be found.
Dr Husseini estimated between 10,000 to 15,000 Iraqis had been reported missing in a large swathe of the region south of Baghdad, but, with the gruesome search still under way, it was not clear if all those unaccounted for were at Mahawil. "The most important matter for Iraqi people now is searching for missing relatives," Dr Husseini said. He said some 1,500 bodies had been retrieved by families and unidentified bodies would be buried in a separate cemetery.
Meanwhile, nine Iraqi children were killed and seven wounded in the south of the country when a rocket they were playing with exploded, a UN spokesman said yesterday.
"Nine children were killed and seven injured in Missan governorate on Monday when they were playing with unexploded ordnance," UN spokesman in Basra, Mr David Wimhurst told a press conference in Iraq's main southern city. "This tragedy highlights the terrible danger that unexploded ordnance represents all around Iraq," Mr Wimhurst said.
Ms Kathryn Irwin, a spokeswoman for UNICEF, said the ordnance that exploded was an Iraqi rocket. "There are thousands of stockpiles of weapons in Iraq," she said. The British army has identified 350 unexploded ordnance sites in the governorate of Missan and has cleared 230, according to Maj Cameron Day.
- (Reuters, AFP)