Iraq’s Mass Graves: A Warning Sign

The story I repeatedly heard about mass graves when I first started coming to Iraq in 2006 was as follows. At the edge of Sadr City there was a dumpsite. In that dumpsite lived a local drunk. And gunmen from the Mahdi Army would bring him bodies of the Sunnis they had killed for burial, plying him with booze to do the ugly work of putting them in the ground. The rumored gravesite even had a nickname, Happiness Hotel. The drunk, I took it, was supposed to be the innkeeper.

I never had the nerve to properly investigate the rumor. Doing so would have likely put me and my Iraqi colleagues at risk of death threats or worse from Shi’ite militiamen. But the story always disturbed me, because it struck me as plausible.

The newest U.N. human rights report on Iraq points to six recently uncovered mass graves, including one containing 17 bodies at the edge of Sadr City. More mass graves are sure to be uncovered in Iraq in the months and years to come. Whether Happiness Hotel is ever found remains to be seen. But every corpse unearthed in or near Shi’ite militia havens raises the question of culpability in mass murder by the Iraqi government, which abetted the Mahdi Army during the height of the sectarian violence. That same government is still in power now, as U.S. forces prepare to hand over control of the streets across the country to Iraqi security forces whose future human rights practices remain an open question.