Iraq to resume excavations at southern mass graves in 2024: Official

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Iraqi government has announced that it will resume excavation works in 2024 for the first time in five years at mass grave sites in the deserts of Samawah in the southern Muthanna province. 

Mass graves in the deserts of southern Iraq contain the remains of countless Kurdish civilians, including women and children, killed during former dictator Saddam Hussein’s campaign of extermination in the late 1980s known as the Anfal, launched to punish the Kurds for rebelling against his regime.

"Whenever we are informed by the government, eyewitnesses or survivors of the existence of a mass grave, we immediately form a technical team to search," Dhargham Kamil, in charge of the mass graves department at the Iraqi Martyrs Institute, told Rudaw.

"Our plan for the year 2024 is to excavate mass graves dating back to the Baath regime era,” he added.  

One of the notorious locations where the graves are located is in Shaikiya, around 80 km southwest of Samawah, the capital of Muthanna province near the Saudi Arabian border.

Fahd Nasir al-Zeyadi is a villager in the Shaikiya deserts. He is an eyewitness and says there are many mass graves in their region that have not been discovered by the government of Iraq.

"The mass graves date back to the 80s. During Saddam's rule, no one dared to get close to them. After the collapse of Saddam, people started to learn that they were mass graves," al-Zeyadi said.

"In the past, this region used to be a prohibited zone. Some people used to have farms there. They would not dare even visit their farms or cultivate them,” he added. 

The eyewitness explained that there are mass graves that have not yet been discovered.

"In the Saibiya area, there are mass graves. There are mass graves in the Nugra Salman area also. They are not yet discovered. But there are," he said.

The Anfal campaign took place over eight phases – beginning in 1986 and reaching its peak in 1988 with the Halabja genocide that killed 5,000 people and injured another 10,000. It culminated in the closing weeks of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88).

More than 182,000 people are thought to have died.

Political dissent was not tolerated under the Baathists. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shiites were disappeared, trucked to Iraq’s southern deserts, and murdered.