Frankly, This Surprises Me

I honestly would not have believed the New York Times would publish a story about the mass graves being unearthed in Iraq where victims of Saddam Hussein were disposed of.

Together, in the late winter of 1991, at least 28 men were executed here, crowded together in a pit their killers scraped with a backhoe from the desert floor. Rounded up along the alleyways of their native city, they were forced aboard a bus or truck and driven out along an isolated highway.

After barely half an hour's journey, the grim caravan turned down a bumpy track, halting just far enough into the desert for gunfire to be muffled from passing traffic.

The end would have come quickly, the forensic experts said, victims stumbling out of the vehicle, herded into the pit, then pushed forward into a shallow cut not much wider or longer than a stretch limousine. At the last moment, judging by the pile of bodies, the victims surged backward, perhaps in terror at the sound of rifles being readied for fire.

Among the bodies, the experts have located at least 80 spent cartridges from Kalashnikov rifles, which were the weapon of choice among the killers of Mr. Hussein's secret police.

Michael Trimble, who is called Sonny, the leader of the mass-graves team that set up camp beside an escarpment in Iraq's western desert last month, is a 53-year-old forensic archaeologist from St. Louis. He is a veteran of other sites of mass killings around the world, on assignment from a civilian post with the Army Corps of Engineers.

Standing above the pit where the desert victims died, he said the 120-member team here, now in their third week of excavation and examination of two mass-grave sites, were sustained through days of punishing 130-degree heat by an urge to bring justice for the victims.

The Times reports that estimates of the number of people buried in mass graves range from 100,000 to 180,000. Not exactly the happy, kite-flying place Michael Moore likes to talk about, was it?

Other Links to this Post

1. Outside The Beltway | OTB — Monday, 5 June , 2006 @ 7:27 am

2. Flopping Aces » Blog Archive » The Graves Made By Saddam — Monday, 5 June , 2006 @ 9:59 am