FOXNews.com - Top Stories - Forensic Teams to Probe Iraqi Mass Graves
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. Fifty people were led to the edge of the hole and shot, one by one, in the head. The backhoes covered them with dirt.
Sometimes the gunmen couldn't keep up and people were simply pushed into the pit to be buried alive. Then the backhoes dug another hole and the next group was led to their deaths.
At 5 p.m., the killers officials of Saddam Hussein's Baath 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 Shiite Muslim uprising that followed the first 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 upward of 300,000 bodies; some Iraqi political parties estimate there are more than 1 million.
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. Fifty people were led to the edge of the hole and shot, one by one, in the head. The backhoes covered them with dirt.
Sometimes the gunmen couldn't keep up and people were simply pushed into the pit to be buried alive. Then the backhoes dug another hole and the next group was led to their deaths.
At 5 p.m., the killers officials of Saddam Hussein's Baath 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 Shiite Muslim uprising that followed the first 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 upward of 300,000 bodies; some Iraqi political parties estimate there are more than 1 million.
Comments