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I. Summary

On March 4, 1991, thirteen-year-old Khalid Khudair and his thirty-three-year-old cousin Fuad Kadhim, a former Iraqi soldier, left their village of Albu `Alwan to walk to the southern Iraqi city of al-Hilla looking to buy food. They were never seen alive again: like tens of thousands of other Iraqis in the predominantly Shi`a South, they were arrested and “disappeared” in Iraqi government custody.

More than twelve years later, on May 16, 2003, their families’ search finally ended when their identification documents were found on decomposed remains at an exhumation of a mass grave located in an open field. Two significant mass graves have been discovered near the al-Mahawil military base, located some twenty kilometers north of al-Hilla—one located in an open field and containing the bodies of more than two thousand persons (“the al-Mahawil mass grave”) and a second located some five kilometers away behind an abandoned brick factory containing the bodies of several hundred persons (“the al-Mahawil brick factory mass grave”). A third mass grave is suspected to exist on the premises of the military base itself. At least one other mass grave, just south of al-Hilla in the village of Imam Bakr, contained an additional forty bodies from the same period. In all these sites the bodies were buried en masse, in contact with one another, rather than in individual plots. Mass graves in this sense are unusual, and almost always signify that the deaths were the result of mass atrocities or natural disasters.

The chaotic and unprofessional manner in which the mass graves around al-Hilla and al-Mahawil were unearthed made it impossible for many of the relatives of missing persons to identify positively many of the remains, or even to keep the human remains intact and separate. In the absence of international assistance, Iraqis used a backhoe to dig up the mass grave, literally slicing through countless bodies and mixing up remains in the process. At the end of the process, more than one thousand remains at the al-Mahawil grave sites were again reburied without being identified. In addition, because no forensic presence existed at the site, crucial evidence necessary for future trials of the persons responsible for the mass executions was never collected, and indeed may have been irreparably destroyed.

This report attempts to tell the story of the mass graves around al-Hilla. It identifies the victims, the circumstances of their arrest, and their ultimate execution and mass burial. The conclusion is inescapable: those whose bodies were recovered from these mass graves were the victims of a coordinated campaign of repression, arrests, and executions carried out by the Iraqi government in the aftermath of the failed Shi`a uprising in 1991. The report demonstrates the importance of the evidence that can be gathered from the mass graves that are being discovered all around Iraq—all of which have their own individual history, but which together testify to decades of mass murder by the Iraqi government.

Human Rights Watch researchers spent five days at the three mass grave sites near al-Mahawil and al-Hilla, collecting as much testimony as possible before the relatives of the missing returned to their homes. By interviewing the relatives who said they had identified victims in the mass graves through identity documents, items of clothing, medications, and the like, Human Rights Watch was able to establish who many of the persons in the grave were, and when and how they disappeared. Farmers living in the proximity of the mass grave were able to speak out for the first time about the daily executions and burials they had witnessed in 1991. A survivor of the executions at the al-Mahawil brick factory—he was dumped in the mass grave with his mother and two relatives, but miraculously was not shot and managed to escape alive—told his remarkable story to Human Rights Watch, thereby making the crucial link between the arrests of thousands in the al-Hilla area in March 1991, their detention at the nearby al-Mahawil base, and their ultimate execution and burial in the mass graves discovered around al-Hilla and al-Mahawil in May 2003.

This report also documents the failure of the occupying powers to assist Iraqis at this time of great need. Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been “disappeared” by the Iraqi government over the past two decades. Many of these “disappeared” are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves all over Iraq. For the moment, the Iraqi people are being left to their own very limited resources in attempting to exhume and identify those remains. Iraqis are in desperate need of expert assistance, and there is an urgent need for the occupying powers, with the assistance of the international community, to put in place a process of assistance for the recognition of the “disappeared,” the exhumation of mass graves, the identification of those buried in them, and the collection of important forensic evidence.

U.S. forces have explained this failure by asserting that any efforts to halt diggings at mass graves of victims of massacres would thwart the understandable determination of desperate relatives to confirm the fate of missing loved ones, and would thereby risk causing serious disturbances. Yet, despite the fact that U.S. authorities had every reason to anticipate that this would be a pressing matter, based on what was known about Iraqi repression and the experience in other post-conflict situations, they made no serious effort to enlist local authorities to undertake jointly an effective public information campaign that would stress the value of professional exhumation as a way of positively identifying the victims as well as preserving evidence of crimes. The overwhelming emotional need of Iraqis to recover and restore dignity to their dead can be met by means more satisfactory than plowing through killing fields with backhoes.

The occupying powers in Iraq should, in cooperation with Iraqi officials and community leaders as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), establish as an urgent matter a sensitive and efficient mechanism to register the cases of the “disappeared” and collect ante-mortem information that will aid in the identification and recovery of remains. Such a mechanism can better provide the recognition and commemoration of these victims, whether or not remains are ever positively identified and recovered. It will also contribute to an official process that will give families legal recognition of the deaths. Finally, in this context the occupying powers should identify specific sites to protect for scientific exhumation under international standards for the purpose of preserving evidence of crimes for eventual trials, truth commissions, historical accounts, and other mechanisms of accountability.

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May 2003