Grave found of 18 Kurds 'buried alive' during Saddam rule

0 Comments | AFP, September, 2006

KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) — Iraqi security forces have 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 Monday the mass grave had been found in Tarkalan 25 kilometres (16 miles) southeast 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 US-led invasion and is now on trial in Baghdad accused of...