Desperate Iraqis searched today for remains of their loved ones at one of the largest mass graves yet found in Iraq, piled with thousands of victims of Saddam Hussein's regime.
The dead, which some said could number as many as 15,000 spread over several neighbouring sites, were believed to be mostly Shiite Muslims killed after an uprising against Saddam in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.
Hundreds of distraught men and women scavenged through one of the recently discovered graves in the town of Mahawil, south of Baghdad, where locals and US troops said around 3,000 people may be buried.
Volunteers had in recent days put some of the remains in bags along with ID cards and personal effects but as Iraqis ripped through the site, rights experts said valuable evidence against the regime was being lost forever.
"There is not a single forensic expert here brought by the United States," said Mr Peter Bouckaert from Human Rights Watch.
"The failure is on the part of US and coalition forces. The majority of people leave without answers. It's a setback in the effort to bring criminals to court," he said.
But MR Rafid al-Hussein, a local resident helping with the search, said: "The evidence is here. Everybody knows Saddam Hussein was a criminal."
Many Iraqis found their worst fears confirmed at the site, which was heaped with human skulls, pieces of bone and scraps of faded, filthy clothing. One woman wept unconsolably after finding her brother's ID card.
"We've been told that around 2,600 bodies have been exhumed but we've also been told that in the area there are maybe 10,000 bodies," said US Marine Captain David Romley.
"Everybody wants to know what happened here. Everybody wants to identify the bodies," he said.
The identification process was further complicated because many who found remains of their loved ones quickly carried them off to give them a proper funeral before sundown, in keeping with Muslim tradition.
Most were being taken to the nearby city of Najaf, one of the holiest cities for Shiite Muslims.
As the crowd watched, a bulldozer churned up more grisly testimony to the brutality of Saddam's 24-year reign, well known to the Iraqi population but unseen by most of the rest of the world until his fall last month.
Several mass graves have been discovered across Iraq since the end of the US-led war, including one on Sunday that held 33 bodies outside the southern city of Basra.
AFP