Mass Grave in Iraq May Contain 400 Kurds

In the latest in a series of grisly discoveries, the U.S. military said Thursday that it had found another mass grave in Iraq, this one in the country’s north and thought to contain the bodies of up to 400 Kurdish women and children slain by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Soldiers of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division found the grave on the side of a dry riverbed in Hatra, 200 miles northwest of Baghdad. An assessment team was sent to the site.

About 25 sets of remains -- all women and children -- have been pulled from the grave, each with a bullet hole in the skull. The military said the size of the area led them to believe the site contained between 200 and 400 bodies.

Since the end of the Iraq war, at least 60 mass graves, some with hundreds of corpses, have been discovered. The United Nations is investigating the killing or disappearance of at least 300,000 Iraqis believed slain during Hussein’s dictatorship.

With the finding of the mass graves, the U.S. and British militaries, the Red Cross and some small humanitarian groups specializing in battlefield pathology have been involved in a behind-the-scenes dispute: Should the dead be used as evidence for war crimes trials, or should they be identified and returned to their families?

Either task would be costly. Doing one might damage the prospects for performing the other, and accomplishing both might be too expensive and logistically impossible. Another option is to do little or nothing -- the current status quo.

The United States has deployed a British humanitarian group called Inforce, which specializes in collecting war crimes evidence from massacre sites, to look at about 15 of the graves. If Iraqis request it, they are allowed to search for loved ones.