Iraqis learn to dig up grisly past in search of justice

BAGHDAD (AFP) — A few dozen Iraqis being trained in forensics carry on their shoulders the hopes of millions of their countrymen hoping to discover the fate of relatives who disappeared under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Estimates of the number of those killed or who disappeared during 24 years of Saddam's rule range from 300,000 to over a million. The country is littered with mass graves containing possibly tens of thousands of bodies dumped by the regime.

In October, forensic experts digging for evidence against Saddam carried out their first full exhumation of a mass grave filled with the skeletons of scores of women and children, many shot in the back of the head.

The bodies were believed to be those of hundreds of Kurds killed by the regime in the late 1980s.

But Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin recently said it will take more than 30 ...