VI. Consequences of the Failure to Provide Forensic Assistance

The U.S.-led coalition forces, based on credible reports of tens of thousands of Iraqis “disappeared” by the authorities over the past two decades, had every reason to anticipate that mass graves would likely surface as a pressing matter. The main questions were when and where, not if. What was needed—and what is still lacking today, weeks after the first mass graves were uncovered¾is a comprehensive strategy that must include identification and assessment of grave sites, liaison with local and religious officials as well as the families of victims to explain the options available to them, the collection of ante mortem information that would help identify the dead, and the provision of security to and forensic exhumation of the sites. The failure of U.S. authorities to devise and implement such a strategy has left local volunteers to their own limited resources, with the result that they have inadvertently destroyed much of the evidence needed to identify the missing as they sought to exhume the remains of thousands in the al-Mahawil mass graves.

Both al-Mahawil mass grave sites were exhumed with a large backhoe, which sliced through the remains in the graves and mixed up the bodies. Many of the corpses became separated into different parts, identity documents were lost, and many of the corpses recovered from the mass grave became unidentifiable. Human Rights Watch found a set of identity documents that had blown away from one corpse, and found many sets of remains that had duplicate bones, including multiple skulls.

The greatest tragedy of the flawed exhumation in al-Mahawil is that about half of the bodies may have been rendered unidentifiable. The main exception was a large number of military personnel among the executed, whose remains were accompanied by good quality, military identity documents encased in plastic. However, shortly before a reburial ceremony was conducted for unidentified remains from the large al-Mahawil site, Human Rights Watch counted the remains of some 1,200 persons still unidentified.

The impact of flawed exhumations was even clearer at the al-Mahawil brick factory site, where some six hundred bodies were uncovered, according to local officials. Human Rights Watch researchers walked alone for more than an hour among the unidentified remains of more than one hundred persons left behind by the diggers in the rush to uncover the larger al-Mahawil site. Human remains were scattered everywhere, still deprived of a proper burial.⁹

Crucial evidence of the crimes that led to the creation of these mass grave sites is also being lost in the absence of forensic assistance. Mass graves are usually crime scenes, and the forensic evidence gathered at the sites of mass graves can form an important component of future prosecutions—although other types of evidence such as eyewitness accounts and Iraqi state documents documenting the atrocities are equally important. A proper forensic investigation could have determined how the people in the mass grave had been killed and came to be buried, and could have assisted in the identification of the missing—establishing a crucial evidentiary link between the “disappeared” last seen alive in government custody and the manner of their death.