Work to identify victims of historic massacres has been slow in the chaos and conflict engulfing the country over the past 20 years.
When he first heard that US troops had toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraqi engineer Hazem Mohammed thought he would finally be able to find his brother, who had been shot dead and dumped in a mass grave after a failed uprising against Saddam’s rule in 1991.Relatives of tens of thousands of people who were killed or disappeared under the dictator believed they would soon find out the fate of lost loved ones.
Today, Iraq has one of the highest numbers of missing persons in the world, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which says estimates of the total range up to hundreds of thousands of people. But resources are limited for such a huge task. In a section of the ministry of health in Baghdad, a team of about 100 people processes remains from mass graves, one site at a time.
Mehdi Ibrahim, an official at the Martyrs Foundation, says that each week his team identifies about 200 new victims. The names are published on social media.So far the foundation has processed about half of the 1 million documents in its possession, just a fraction of Iraq’s scattered archive. Most Baath Party-era documents are held by the government, while others were destroyed after the invasion.
Shiite militiamen seeking vengeance against Islamic State rounded up Sunnis from the town of Saqlawiya, according to witnesses interviewed by Reuters in 2016, UN workers, Iraqi officials and Human Rights Watch.
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