''These were not combatants," he said. ''They were women and children."
During the campaign known as Anfal, which means ''spoils of war" in Arabic, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were killed or expelled from northern Iraq. The campaign included the gruesome 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. The Hussein regime was carrying out a program of removing Kurds from the northern homeland and replacing them with Arabs. Many of the Kurdish victims were buried in Iraq's central and southern desert.
The Samawa site contained a skull of an old woman with pink-and-white dentures, investigators said. Nearby, there was a skeleton of a teenage girl clutching a bag of possessions. The trenches were full of the skeletons of Iraqi Kurds, still in distinctive, colorful garb, buried where they fell after being shot dead nearly 20 years ago.
Outgoing Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, himself a Kurd, said half a million people perished and 182,000 are missing.
''We must know what happened [and deal with] collective memory, so we can do justice, rather than revenge," Amin said.
The first 100 remains of the estimated 1,500 at the site would be used to certify cause of death, the identity of the victims, and their origins, the investigators said.
Identification cards found on as many as 15 percent of the victims link them to Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. The clothing reinforces that those found in the graves were Kurds, Nivala said.
Investigators said that at least 63 percent of the victims were children or teens under 18.
Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as ''Chemical Ali," are the main defendants facing charges for the Anfal campaign.
