Mass Graves Found In Iraq
Several mass graves have been recently discovered in Iraq, including one site holding an estimated 5,000 soldiers massacred after a failed uprising against Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Iraqi officials say.
Another is believed to contain 2,000 members of a Kurdish clan, the officials tell the New York Times.
The graves, discovered over the last three months, have not been dug up because of a lack of qualified forensic workers and the risk of insurgent attacks, Iraq's interim human rights minister Bakhtiar Amin tells Times.
At least 290 grave sites containing some 300,000 bodies have been found since the American invasion two years ago, Iraqi officials tell the Times. The most recent sites, if the estimates are accurate, are among the largest.
In other developments:
On Thursday, twin car bombs killed 18 people in Baghdad, the highest death toll from an explosion in Iraq in over a month. More than 30 people, including five policemen, were injured in Thursday's blast, police said.
Al Qaeda in Iraq said two suicide bombers carried out the attack, targeting a police patrol; the claim couldn't be independently verified.
Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib, in charge of the nation's police, was in his office at the time of the attack, but left afterward to announce that he was fine and to examine the scorched road and blackened rubble left behind. Built by Saddam Hussein's government to survive major attacks, the building containing his office was not damaged.
Reports of daily gunbattles and explosions had died down in mid-March, and the Iraqi and U.S. governments declared that the lull was a sign that their fighters were winning the battle against the insurgency. However, militants have stepped up assaults this month.