Mass Graves Found in Sulaimaniyah

At the site of a newly unearthed mass grave, 65-year-old Muhammed Hasan stands wondering about the fate of his teenage son, who has been missing since 1991.

Tears roll down his cheeks as he sighs and says, "When his corpse was not found in this mass grave, I felt that my son had just been lost again."

His firstborn went missing when he was aged fourteen, and Hasan says the former regime's Republican Guards fabricated accusations that he had cooperated with Kurdish pro-independence fighters, the peshmerga.

When graves holding 32 bodies were found in Dabashan, north of Sulaimaniyah, in December last year, Hasan thought he might find the remains of the son he'd lost. To this father, closure would have been better than the torment of not knowing.

Dler Abdul-Qadir, an official in charge of mass graves with the human rights ministry in Sulaimaniyah, said this week that the remains contained within the six graves were those of two children, 10 women and 16 men. The sex of four of the corpses could not be identified because the bones were mixed together. One woman was seven or eight months pregnant.

One of the children was a newborn baby found beside her mother. "Some experts think the child may have been born in jail," said Abdul-Qadir.

Evidence shows that the victims were brutally killed. Most were handcuffed, and their legs bound. Many were in Kurdish clothing.

"Not all the corpses are Kurds - four of them were in military uniforms and chemical protection gear," said Abdul-Qadir. “Why they ended up there is unknown.”

None of the bodies have been identified so far, as there is no DNA laboratory in Kurdistan, and they have since been interred in Sulaimaniyah's Grdi Saiwan Cemetery.

"They can only be identified by the clothes they were wearing," said the ministry official.

Since the fall of the former regime, mass graves have been discovered throughout Iraq, and the grim task of exhumation is revealing the fate of some of the almost 300,000 people who disappeared during Saddam Hussein's reign.

Last week, a mass grave discovered in Halabja in February was found to contain 28 corpses - victims of the 1988 chemical bombings carried out by Saddam’s military in which more than 5,000 people died.

These bodies will be laid to rest on March 16, the anniversary of the attack.

Amanj Khahil is an IWPR trainee journalist in Sulaimaniyah.