Exhumation of Iraq's Camp Speicher victim mass graves begins

Iraqi forensic teams began on April 6 excavating 12 suspected mass grave sites thought to hold the corpses of as many as 1,700 soldiers massacred last summer by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants as they swept across northern Iraq.
   
The mass killings last June of Shi'ite soldiers from Camp Speicher, a former U.S. base outside the Sunni city of Tikrit, has become a symbol of the brutality of ISIL fighters and their hatred for Iraq's Shi'ite majority.
   
The deaths showed Iraqis that the ISIL fighters, who have also attacked ethnic and religious minorites as well as fellow Sunni Muslims opposing them, were a threatening new kind of foe.
   
The images of Shi'ite soldiers being machine-gunned in their hundreds, posted online by the jihadists, could rank as the deadliest single act of bloodshed during a decade of periodic sectarian war in Iraq.
   
The exhumation of burial sites on the late dictator Saddam Hussein's presidential compound came days after ISIL militants were driven from the city by Iraqi forces and Shi'ite paramilitaries.
   
"We dug up the first mass grave site today. Until now we found at least 20 bodies. Initial indications show indisputably that they were from the Speicher victims," said Khalid al-Atbi, an Iraqi health official working with the forensic team sent to Tikrit.
   
"It was a heartbreaking scene. We couldn't prevent ourselves from breaking down in tears. What savage barbarian could kill 1,700 persons in cold blood?" he asked.
   
Survivors of Speicher have described to Reuters their ordeal last June as the Iraqi military chain of command unraveled and ISIL's Sunni fighters descended on Tikrit, rounding up Shi'ite soldiers for slaughter.