Teams to unearth the countrymen Saddam silenced

MAHAWEEL, Iraq — The killers kept bankers’ hours.

They showed up for work at the barley field at 9 a.m., trailed by backhoes and three buses filled with blindfolded men, women and children as young as 1.

Every day, witnesses say, the routine was the same: The backhoes dug a trench. About 50 people were led to the edge of the hole and shot, one by one, in the head. The backhoes covered them with dirt, then dug another hole for the next group.

At 5 p.m., the killers — members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party — went home to rest up for another day of slaughter.

In this wind-swept field in the central town of Mahaweel, witnesses say, this went on without a break for 35 days in March and April of 1991, during a crackdown on a Shi’ite Muslim uprising that followed the Gulf war.

“I watched this with my own eyes,” said Sayed Abbas Muhsen, 35, whose family farm was appropriated by Saddam’s government for use as a killing field. “But we couldn’t tell anyone. We didn’t dare.”

The mass grave at Mahaweel, with more than 3,100 sets of remains, is the largest of some 270 such sites across Iraq. They hold upwards of 300,000 bodies — some Iraqi political parties estimate there are more than 1 million.

“It’s as easy to find mass graves in Iraq as it once was to find oil,” said Adnan Jabbar al-Saadi, a lawyer with Iraq’s new Human Rights Ministry.

In the days after Saddam’s fall on April 9, family members rushed to grave sites, digging for ID cards and clothing that could confirm their worst fears: The bones in the ground belonged to a son, a wife, a grandfather.

The U.S.-led occupation authority desperately tried to halt the digging, telling people that if they waited, forensic teams would unearth the remains and use the evidence to punish those responsible.

Forensic teams will begin digging in January to preserve the first physical evidence at four grave sites, their desert locations kept secret to prevent relatives from disturbing them first.

Satellite imagery key

In a tiny backroom of the deposed Iraqi president’s sprawling brick-and-marble palace in Baghdad, American and British researchers are using the latest technology to reach out to the dead.

They work from a growing database of 270 suspected grave sites, matching witness accounts with geological evidence, preparing for field trips by four-wheel-drive vehicle and helicopter to confirm their high-tech data with the most low-tech of methods: a shovel.

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