‘Mass grave’ found in Iraq
The bodies of 15,000 Iraqis have allegedly been found in a mass grave to the north of Baghdad.
The reports come from an opposition group, which claims that the remains belong to Shia Muslims who were killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The group Human Rights Watch has claimed that the figure is nearer 1,000 graves at that particular site, although other mass graves have been found in the country.
The news of the suspected atrocity adds to the political support for the coalition defeat of the Ba’athist regime. However there are still concerns about the reconstruction of the Iraq following the month-long war.
United Nations relief agencies have stressed the need to re-establish security throughout Iraq to enable them to carry out humanitarian functions ranging from providing healthcare to supplying food.
The World Health Organisation has 25 teams in the country trying to assess what are the most urgent needs of the local population.
But more encouragingly the executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme, James Morris, suggested that food distribution would be operation lay again by June 1st.
Prior to the war 16 million Iraqis were reliant on state handouts of food and water through the oil-for-food programme, which was abandoned during the war, leaving people to survive on the rations that they already had.
And in southern Iraq more than two million litres of water per day is being driven into the region by UNICEF.
But despite the slow but steady progress of the humanitarian effort, Iraq is still no closer to establishing an interim government, and there are concerns about the dominant role that is being played in the reconstruction of the country by the occupying powers.
Indeed former international development secretary Clare Short resigned yesterday because of her concerns about the role of the US and the UK, and the relative exclusion of the United Nations from the process.
And politically there could be even greater problems ahead for the coalition forces in trying to justify the recent war.
A leading think tank today stated that it is surprised at the failure of US and British forces to find chemical weapons in Iraq.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies issued a report in September last year about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, saying that Iraq probably had “a few hundred tonnes” of mustard gas, and other agents.
However, it insisted that the search for weapons of mass destruction still has a long way to go.
