Iraqi security forces on Monday found the remains of 18 Kurdish men, women and children whom they believe were buried alive in a mass grave during the former regime of Saddam Hussein.
Colonel Sarhad Kadar of the Iraqi police said the mass grave had been found in Tarkalan, 25km south-east of the northern city of Kirkuk in the grounds of an abandoned military camp dating from the 1980s and 1990s.
“They were alive when they were buried,” he said.
During the late 1980s, Saddam’s forces carried out a brutal scorched-earth campaign against northern Iraq’s Kurdish minority in a bid to stamp out separatism and secure Kirkuk’s oil fields.
The former strongman was overthrown in 2003 in a United States-led invasion and is now on trial in Baghdad accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in an operation that prosecutors say killed 182 000 Kurds. — AFP