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As
more mass graves are unearthed in the Kurdish
region, families face the devastating task of
identifying loved ones.
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.
www.iwpr.net
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