With a red paint brush, a female forensic specialist carefully brushed dirt away from a human skull covered with sandy soil, one of 1,500 believed to be buried in seven mass graves uncovered in this desolate stretch of Iraqi desert. In a nearby trench dug by investigators, a mass of black, tangled hair gave a second skull an almost life-like appearance. A third skull appeared to be screaming, mouth wide open. Skulls and bones, clothing and other belongings found in shallow graves here offer up valuable clues to investigators gathering evidence against Saddam Hussein and others from the former regime, said Gregg Nivala, a regime crimes liaison officer working from the US Embassy in Baghdad. "This allows us to prove the crimes," he said.
A shiny gold and purple dress and a blue bead necklace laying next to a fourth skull in another trench is distinctive enough to indicate that people buried there were Kurds from northern Iraq, according to Nivala. Dates on medicine found in the graves indicate the people were killed around the time of the 1987-1988 "Anfal campaign" that saw Kurdish villages razed and hundreds of people relocated south, said Sonny Trimble, archaeologist in charge of the excavation. "Blister packs of pills have expiration dates, wristwatches have the day, and dates go back to that year," Trimble said. "We're finding them very effective." |