From the BBC:
Experts have examined a mass grave containing what are believed to be the bodies of some 1,500 Kurds, mostly women and children, in southern Iraq.
It is thought they were lined up and then gunned down into the 18 shallow trenches found near the town of Samawa.
The victims are believed to have been killed in the late 1980s after being forcibly moved from northern Iraq.
The evidence uncovered is expected to be used in the trials of Saddam Hussein and his senior aides.
Of 113 bodies taken out of the ground so far, all but five are women and children.
More from the Washington Post (via Michael J. Totten):
Investigators said that women and children were forced to stand at the edge of the pits, then shot with AK-47 assault rifles. Casings were found near the site, they said.
“They sprayed people with bullets so they fell back” into the graves, Iraq’s human rights minister, Bakhtyar Amin, told reporters.
From 1987 to 1988, Hussein initiated a wave of violence, called the Anfal campaign, to punish the Kurds for siding with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Hussein’s forces forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their lands in northern Iraq. Amin said as many as half a million people died or were killed outright and thousands of villages were destroyed.
Hussein’s forces carried out similar campaigns against the Shiite majority. More than 300 mass graves have been found across Iraq since U.S.-led forces overthrew Hussein in March 2003, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. The grave near Samawah would be one of the largest.
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