Iraqi authorities work to identify bodies in mass graves
As Iraq works to identify bodies found in the many mass graves spread across the country, its people are reminded of the successive bloody battles Iraq has gone through and continues to fight.
BABIL, Iraq — As the body count continues to rise in Iraq's battle against the Islamic State (IS), it appears Iraqi authorities are finally interested in documenting the corpses being found in mass graves from previous wars.
Iraq has been hit by several successive wars: the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003. These wars resulted in hundreds of thousands of unidentified victims.
Nikolay Mladenov, who represented the United Nations in Iraq, had said in 2014, "The number of missing persons in Iraq ranges from 300,000 to 1 million buried in mass graves in different parts of the country." Those figures apply to all victims of the many wars fought by Iraqis, including the unidentified corpses of those who died during the civil war after 2003.
The recorded and unrecorded victims of sectarian wars and infighting who have been lost in the dust with no names are a bleak and bloody stain in the modern history of Iraq.
