Local Iraqi Boy at Mass Gravsite, Karbala (Photo: CPT)

by Will Van Wagenen
Christian Peacemaker Teams

Recently we visited Karbala, the holiest city in Iraq for Shiite Muslims and the site of the shrine of the Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, who was martyred in Karbala in 680 CE. While there we visited Human Rights Watch of Karbala (HRWK), an Iraqi human rights organization founded on April 5, 2003, immediately after the fall of Saddam’s regime. It was the first organization to discover mass graves in the region, and has been involved in opening them, documenting the identities of the victims, and notifying the families of the victims’ whereabouts. Forty-one of the forty-three mass graves near Karbala date back to 1991, when Saddam crushed a Shiite uprising seeking to depose him shortly after the first Gulf War. Estimates of the total number of victims in mass graves throughout the country range as high as 300,000.