Hussein palace may be grisly

Iraq says the complex could contain the remains of hundreds.

tikrit, iraq» Saddam Hussein’s former palace complex is seemingly idyllic, its gardens lined with lush palm trees and bursts of bougainvillea.

But at the heart of the verdant compound, diggers are turning over the earth in search of evidence from what could be one of Iraq’s worst atrocities in more than a decade.

Iraqi authorities say that the palace complex could contain the remains of hundreds of young soldiers slain by Islamic State terrorists in June. As many as 1,700 Shiite soldiers from nearby Camp Speicher were killed by jihadists, a massacre seared into the national consciousness.

Since Iraqi government teams started the excavation this month, they have uncovered more than 160 bodies of young men, most of whom had been bound, shot and then buried in mass graves.

For months, relatives have waited for news of their loved ones who went missing at Camp Speicher. Now the bodies exhumed in Tikrit, which are awaiting DNA testing at Baghdad’s central morgue, offer some of the first concrete evidence of one of the most grisly crimes committed by a group already known for its shocking brutality.

Officials say identification cards found on several of the bodies bear names that match reported victims from Camp Speicher.

“We gave our samples to the morgue, and now we are waiting to hear if they found my brother or not,” said Abdullah Mohammed, who saw his younger sibling, Saad, gunned down in a video posted by the Islamic State to social media sites after the massacre.

In a phone interview from his hometown in southern Iraq, Abdullah cried. “We’ve seen a lot of bodies,” he said. “But we don’t know if they are him. The government hasn’t told us anything.”

Iraqi forces backed by Shiite militias wrested Tikrit back from the Islamic State last month, after a weekslong offensive supported by U.S.-led airstrikes.

The jihadists had seized the city, which is Hussein’s hometown, in June. In the chaos of the assault, thousands of recruits from Camp Speicher donned civilian clothes and slipped away from the base in the hope they could escape.

They soon encountered well-armed Sunni terrorists from the Islamic State, who separated the recruits by sect and hauled the Shiite solders off to the vast complex of riverside villas built by Hussein before he was overthrown in the 2003 U.S. invasion.

The jihadist gunmen spent the next three days in an industrial-scale killing spree that the United Nations says probably amounts to a war crime. Now dozens of government workers are toiling 12-hour days in the heat to get justice for these Iraqis.

But with decrepit forensic equipment — and with gunfire and explosions echoing nearby — the workers say the recovery of the bodies is a painstaking task that could take weeks or months to complete.

“It’s not secure; it’s a war zone,” morgue director Zaid Ali said of Tikrit, where Iraqi security forces battle the jihadists in isolated areas. “So this makes the work much more difficult.”