BABYLON has no river beside which to weep any more, but, just a few miles from Nebuchadnezzar’s ancient capital, mourners and seekers of the disappeared are gathering in their hundreds on farm-land that is rapidly delivering up a necropolis of Saddam Hussein’s victims.

In the largest mass grave uncovered so far, Iraqis claim to have found 3,000 bodies of people thought to have been murdered during the Baathist regime’s brutal suppression of the 1991 post-Gulf War uprising.

Yesterday, I counted more than 1,000 piles of desiccated remains, some in plastic bags, scattered in half a dozen clusters around the football-sized field 50 miles south of Baghdad and just north of al-Hillah.

Locals say that they have identified 1,200 victims from identity cards or personal belongings and believe that as many as 10,000 more may still lie in the earth.

Seven days into the dig, the scene resembles a battlefield of the dead, the loose sandy soil carved into trenches, ditches and foxholes by a bulldozer. All around lie piles of remains: pelvic bones, ribs, femurs and skulls — one still wearing its weave-pattern prayercap, another the blindfold affixed by his killers shortly before death.

From many protrude the identity cards, amber necklaces, front-door keys and watches used by relatives to identify their brothers, cousins and sons. A plastic artificial leg sticks out of one pile, two crutches from another.

The bulldozer operator is himself a volunteer, seeking his own relatives. Others are dredging the site with their fingers, moving along a ploughed ditch unearthing piles of remains in a line, akin to reaping a crop of cadavers.

Some remains have been dug up and put back into plastic bags and covered with loose earth for inspection by others yet to arrive. There were no signs of bullet casings and most of the bodies are too decomposed to bear obvious signs of binding, torture or summary execution.

Rafid Ali Husseini, from al-Hillah, said that families learnt of the site from a local farmer who knew that Saddam’s forces had used it as a mass grave but had been unable to tell anyone for more than a decade. “When we started a week ago, we expected to find a small number, but as we dug we found graves of about 100 to 200 people,” Dr Husseini, whose brother and father are missing, said.

“We are finding skulls without bodies, bodies without skulls. It is a miserable and disastrous situation and we want to tell all the world, the United Nations and Arab countries, the US Army and President Bush that these families want the people responsible for these crimes to be brought to justice.”

Over 20 years, Amnesty International, the human rights organisation, has collated information on around 17,000 disappearances in Iraq, but it fears that the final figure could be much higher.

On an exhumed mound beside the most westerly row of desiccated corpses, Ali Abdul Hassan Mekki, 50, sat with a plastic bag between his feet. Thirteen years ago, his brother, Jaffar, disappeared during Saddam’s post-rebellion slaughter. It was, for him, the worst possible outcome — misery without certainty.

“I think this is my brother,” he said. “This is my pullover, which he always borrowed from me to wear, but it is not enough to identify him.

“The problem is that I don’t recognise this wallet and the identity card does not have any writing on it.”

He paused as the sun went down, casting grotesque shadows over the mounds of dust and ashes, while latecomers on the outskirts still scratch away at the topsoil.

“My brother was never involved in any political activity,” he said as an afterthought. “Nor was he in the army.”

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch has criticised coalition forces for failing to protect such sites, saying that uncontrolled digs contaminate evidence for future war crimes tribunals.

But, standing on top of a hill, Major Al Schmidt, part of a US Marines investigation team, sighed when asked how many sites were surfacing. “I can’t remember, I have seen so many in the last two days they are running together,” he said. “We are getting more by the day. But this is the biggest I have seen by a long way in terms of exhumed bodies.

“It’s like a cycle: you turn up to one and people tell you about two more; you go there and they tell you about a couple of others. I haven’t slept for 30 hours.”

Near the centre of the field, Badriya Hassan Ali wandered, trying to find traces of her missing son, Akil Abbas Ali, whose photograph she was holding.

She has been searching for him at different sites for two weeks, to no avail. She will return tomorrow.

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