From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Thu May 06 2004 - 16:54:12 MDT
[Joe Dees]
As to 'just a few thousand killed", well...
http://www.detnews.com/2003/nation/0312/07/a04-343731.htm
300,000 feared buried in mass graves in Iraq
Forensic teams to begin dig in January
By Niko Price / Associated Press
MAHAWEEL, Iraq -- The killers kept bankers' hours.
They showed up for work at the barley field at 9 a.m., trailed by backhoes and three buses filled with blindfolded men, women and children as young as 1.
<snip>
The mass grave at Mahaweel, with more than 3,100 sets of remains, is the largest of 270 such sites across Iraq. They hold upward of 300,000 bodies; some Iraqi political parties estimate there are more than 1 million.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]
The above AP report appeared in all the mainstream press. And I think that the last I heard about Mahaweel is that they expected to find 15,000 bodies there.
Now, since all these news are coming from the occupation troops, who are a bit too eager to pin the victims of wars in which they were involved or which they facilitated on Saddam's brutality (see also JD's arithmetic), and since they have been keeping the mass graves secured or secret to avoid disturbance of evidence by the relatives, also keep an eye on this view just to be safe:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1021466,00.html
Mass graves to reveal Iraq war toll
Jamie Wilson in Baghdad
Tuesday August 19, 2003
The task of identifying thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians who died during this year's war has begun with the exhumation of a mass grave at one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces in Baghdad.
The Iraqi Red Crescent, the Islamic version of the Red Cross, which is coordinating the exhumations, said 45 bodies had been recovered since vthe palace beside the Tigris river, now used as the coalition headquarters.
Nobody knows exactly how many Iraqis died in the war, but an Anglo-American research group, the Iraq Body Count, has estimated the number of civilian fatalities at between 6,000 and 7,800. The number of military casualties is between 10,000 and 45,000.
<snip>
Many places where retreating Iraqi troops or arriving Americans buried the dead are known to locals, but the Red Crescent has urged people not to disturb the graves in order to avoid the destruction of identification evidence.
Ali Ismael Ahmed, the Red Crescent official in charge of exhuming bodies at the presidential palace and other sites in Baghdad, thought that the biggest mass graves in Baghdad were likely to be at the airport. But the Red Crescent had not been told when, or even if, it would be allowed to start exhuming bodies from the site.
<snip>
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