The killers kept bankers' hours.
They showed up for work at the barley field at 9am, trailed by backhoes and three buses filled with blindfolded men, women and children as young as 1.
Every day, witnesses say, the routine was the same: The backhoes dug a trench. Fifty people were led to the edge of the hole and shot, one by one, in the head. The backhoes covered them with dirt, then dug another hole for the next group.
At 5pm, the killers -- officials of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party -- went home to rest up for another day of slaughter.
In this wind-swept field in the central town of Mahaweel, witnesses say, this went on without a break for 35 days in March and April of 1991, during a crackdown on a Shiite Muslim uprising that followed the first Gulf War.
"I watched this with my own eyes," said Sayed Abbas Muhsen, 35, whose family farm was appropriated by Saddam's government for use as a killing field. "But we couldn't tell anyone. We didn't dare."
The mass grave at Mahaweel, with more than 3,100 sets of remains, is the largest of some 270 such sites across Iraq. They hold upward of 300,000 bodies; some Iraqi political parties estimate there are more than 1 million.
"It's as easy to find mass graves in Iraq as it once was to find oil," said Adnan Jabbar al-Saadi, a lawyer with Iraq's new Human Rights Ministry.
In the days following Saddam's fall on April 9, family members rushed to grave sites, digging for ID cards and clothing that confirmed their worst fears: The bones in the ground belonged to a son, a wife, a grandfather.
The US-led occupation authority desperately tried to halt the digging, telling people that if they waited, forensic teams would unearth the remains and use the evidence to punish those responsible.
Now, an Associated Press investigation has discovered, forensic teams will begin digging in January to preserve the first physical evidence at four grave sites, their desert locations kept secret to prevent relatives from disturbing them first.
Grave database
In a tiny back room of the deposed Iraqi president's sprawling brick-and-marble Republican Palace in Baghdad, American and British experts are using the latest technology to reach out to the dead.
They work from a growing database of 270 suspected grave sites, matching witness accounts with geological evidence, preparing for field trips by four-wheel-drive vehicle and helicopter to confirm their high-tech data with the most low-tech of methods: a shovel.
"This is not a case of `X marks the spot,'" said archaeologist Barrie Simpson. "It's not like driving down Route 66 with signposts that say, `Stop here.'"
Gypsum is one key tool. The Iraqi desert has a hard crust 30cm below the surface, which is broken when a hole is dug. Minerals then mix to form gypsum, a kind of salt whose glistening white crystals are visible decades later from a satellite or from the ground.
Imagery in six spectral bands comes from a commercial satellite in orbit since 1983, which can take images of any spot on Earth every 16 days. The classified computers -- which the experts switch off before a reporter enters the room -- hold two decades of imagery.
If witnesses report a mass grave was dug in a certain desert location, say, in March 1991, Burch can analyze data from images taken in February 1991 and June 1991, and determine whether a pit was dug in that area during that time period.
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