Mass Graves in the city of Diwaniyah (Central Iraq) - The Iraqi government found a mass grave with 900 bodies near the city of Diwaniyah in central Iraq on Wednesday. The graveyard, believed to contain bodies of Kurdish people killed during the reign of President Saddam Hussein.
The bodies were found in the area Shanafiya, about 70 kilometers west of the city of Diwaniyah. The bones in the grave in a trench. "There were 900 bodies," said Dakhil Sailhoud, Chairman of the Court and Accountability Commission, which investigated the problems related to Saddam's regime.
"Early indications show that the bones are the Kurds. The bones were submitted to a laboratory in the city of Najaf for the identification process," said Sailhoud. He added that the bodies were apparently derived from the 1980's.
Last April, the government said they had found a mass grave the other in Anbar Province in western Iraq, which includes more than 800 people dead, including women and children, who were executed during Saddam's regime. In Iraq 1980-1988 war with Iran, the defectors were executed and Sunni Muslim dictator's action has improved its crackdown against Shiite people who allegedly sympathetic to Iraq's neighboring countries are majority Shiite.
Kurds are persecuted because they are the main opponents of Saddam. The number of people missing as a result of persecution by Saddam loyalists, who came to power in 1979, estimated at between 300,000 to 1.3 million people.
Groups of human rights'm sure there are hundreds of mass graves in Iraq for the people who died during the reign of Saddam Hussein. Shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2003, US-led coalition said there were 263 mass graves of people executed in Iraq during Saddam, including 40 graves that contain evidence of systematic killings.
