On May 3, the mayor of Hilla requested assistance from U.S. marines to guard the site. On May 5, investigators for the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid (ORHA) reported to authorities in Washington that the grave had been inadequately protected, and recommended the creation of mobile forensic teams that could visit the site. On May 7, ORHA reported to Washington that the mass grave might contain several thousand bodies.
“The U.S. government has not acted on important information about mass graves in Iraq,” said Peter Bouckaert, senior emergencies researcher for Human Rights Watch. “The result is desperate families trying to dig up the site themselves - disturbing the evidence for forensic experts who could professionally establish the identities of the victims.”
Human Rights Watch today also confirmed the existence of a secret burial ground containing the numbered graves of more than 1,000 prisoners executed by the Iraqi government, located about 40 kilometers north of Baghdad in the village of Muhammad Sakran.
“This discovery could be a significant step in the effort to find the missing in Iraq, provided that evidence isn’t damaged or destroyed,” said Bouckaert. “Crucial evidence will quickly be lost if the site isn’t secured and forensic experts don’t arrive soon.”
The gravesite, located at the edge of a civilian graveyard, contains the remains of more than one thousand prisoners executed between 1979 and 1999, according to a preliminary investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch. The bodies of the executed were buried in shallow individual graves with numbered metal markers.
Human Rights Watch called on the U.S.-led coalition to take immediate steps to secure the gravesite in Muhammad Sakran, and to provide the necessary forensic assistance to identify the remains and secure evidence for criminal investigations into the executions.
“By conservative estimates, at least 290,000 people are missing in Iraq, and the answer to their whereabouts likely lies in these graves,” said Bouckaert. “The U.S.-led coalition must take the lead, not only in securing gravesites, but quickly communicating its commitment to exhume and identify the remains.”
Many of the victims in the Muhammad Sakran grave were civilians arrested and executed in the early 1980s on suspicion of membership in the outlawed Iraqi Communist Party and the Islamic Da’wa Party. Among the identified victims are many Iraqi Shi’a and Kurds, as well as some women. Some of the graves apparently contain more than one body, according to the gravediggers unearthing the remains.
According to the caretaker of the municipal graveyard in Muhammad Sakran, the graves were dug by members of the Iraqi security services, who would regularly come to the village with human remains. The villagers were ordered to stay clear of the area, and were told that the remains were those of people who had died without known relatives, or corpses from medical facilities. The caretaker later found out that three of his own cousins were among the victims.
Information from the files of Iraqi intelligence agencies has allowed relatives to match at least 80 of the victims buried in Muhammad Sakran to the numbered plots, and in some graves the plastic armbands of the victims were buried with them. Some families of the victims have begun unearthing the remains from identified graves, and at least 16 bodies have been unearthed so far and taken away for reburial.
However, most of the numbered grave markers at the site have eroded so badly that identification of the individuals has been impossible until now. Hadi ‘Ashur, a 66 year-old Feyli (Shi’a Muslim) Kurd, arrived at the site today to look for 12 of his relatives who were all arrested in 1980 and accused of membership in the Islamic Dawa’a Party. After visiting places around Baghdad where former security archives were being reviewed for information about missing persons, he found a file confirming that all of the men had been executed on June 28, 1983, together with 12 other Feyli Kurds, and had been buried at Mohammad Sakran. Despite this knowledge, he was unable to locate a single one of the graves of his relatives.
Riad Sakran Hussein, aged 30, came to the site looking for his father, Sakran Hussein al-Shummari, who was arrested on September 3, 1980, on accusation of being a member of the Iraqi Communist Party. A few days earlier, he had found his father’s name on a list of executed persons at the Musayyib General Security building in the south of Baghdad, and discovered that his late father was buried in the Muhammad Sakran graveyard. However, he was unable to locate his father’s grave.
Fa’iq ‘Abbud, a 41 year-old businessman from Baghdad, came to Muhammad Sakran gravesite looking for his brother Faris, who was arrested and disappeared in 1983. “There was no news about his fate from 1983 until two days ago,” he told Human Rights Watch. “We found a list of names in one of the new newspapers in Baghdad, and his name was among them.” He was also unable to locate his brother’s grave.
