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BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Thursday, April 17, 2003

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Kurdish officials say they have found a series of mostly unmarked graves that contain about 2,000 bodies outside the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

They say the area was used by the Iraqi army to bury the Kurds they killed in the late 1980s.

During that period at least 100,000 Kurds were killed in Saddam Hussein's policy of ethnic cleansing in Iraq.

The site of the graves lies close to an old Iraqi base, but so far there has been no independent verification or extensive excavation of the site.

Iraqis say the graves are those of their war victims, killed in battle.

Bodies recovered

BBC correspondent Dumeetha Luthra says some of the graves are marked, the rest lie in unmarked mounds.

Kurds did dig up two graves on Wednesday and say they found a woman wrapped in plastic and covered in dried blood.

The other grave, they say, held a man with remnants of a Kurdish soldier's uniform.

The correspondent says people have been told not to tamper with the site.

She added the fact that no one was allowed to see the bodies being buried is suspicious.

In 1988 Saddam ordered a massive operation known as the Anfal Campaign against the Kurdish population in northern Iraq.

In one incident, Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin who was also known as "Chemical Ali", directed a poison gas attack on the town of Halabja.

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Direct Link:
--http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2956129.stm

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