The bodies of 41 Kuwaitis believed killed during the first Gulf War were found in southern Iraq, among 295 mass graves uncovered around the country in the two years since US-led forces invaded and ousted Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Human Rights Minister said Saturday.
In a phone interview with reporters, Bakhtiar Amin said he informed the Kuwaiti government three days ago about the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave in the city of Amarah, 290km southeast of Baghdad.
The discovery was another step in documenting what happened to 605 Kuwaitis who have been missing since the 1991 Gulf War. The bodies of only 190 other Kuwaitis have been identified.
More and more mass graves are being uncovered across the country, but the fragile security situation is hampering investigators' work, he said.
The graves will be used in war crimes cases being built against Saddam and his top ministers. The Iraqi Special Tribunal is still in the process of gathering evidence.
Some of those already up for trial are Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, one of Saddam's half brothers, former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, and Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as "Chemical Ali."
"The list of crimes that these people committed is long, and the trials will start as soon as possible," Amin said, adding it was difficult to give a time as to when the trials would begin.
Amin said that since January, two mass graves were discovered in Kirkuk, two were found in Sulaymaniyah, and one in Halabja -- all Kurdish victims who were systematically killed during Saddam's rule.
Investigators also traveled to Nasiriyah, 320km southeast of Baghdad, this week to inspect a site that locals had begun digging up after a farmer plowing in his field discovered about 20 bodies. It was unclear where the bodies came from.
"We're calling on our citizens. No one should open the mass graves. They should inform the authorities and the human rights people. It needs to be done properly, scientifically, respectfully," Amin said.
He said some graves contained the remains of dozens of people, while other had thousands.
"Iraq is a land of mass graves due to the genocide policy of Saddam Hussein," he said. "We have hundreds of thousands of people missing."
It was difficult to estimate how many people were buried in the different sites, since some graves had several layers that have yet to be uncovered, Amin said, recalling one particular location in Hatra in northern Iraq.
"In Hatra, we went looking for one and we found 11. It's difficult to say. It could be more, it could be less. The number of missing is calculated to be about 1 million in Iraq," he said.
Some 2,000 bodies were found recently in the area of Samawah in northern Iraq. The entire site is believed to hold members of Massoud Barzani's clan. Some 8,000 relatives of Barzani, who heads the Kurdish Democratic Party, were taken from a camp in the northern city of Irbil in the summer of 1983 and never heard from again.
Amin said hundreds of thousands of Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south were killed and remained missing after rising up against Saddam's regime during the first Gulf War.
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