HRW:
It is difficult to contemplate, after the many horrors of the last century, that a government could get away with murdering a quarter of a million people. A quarter of a million Iraqis taken from their homes, driven to remote sites, and executed. A quarter of a million Iraqis who simply “disappeared,” without even the courtesy of notice to their families, let alone a trial and judgment. An average of 10,000 people a year for the two-and-a-half decades of the dictator's rule. That unthinkable tally is Saddam Hussein's legacy.
The mass graves being unearthed today in Iraq bespeak the horrors of his rule. Among the occupants of these graves are 100,000 Kurdish men and boys machine-gunned to death during the 1988 Anfal genocide; 30,000 Shiites and Kurds slaughtered after the 1991 uprising; other Shiites killed during the 1980s because of their perceived sympathy for Iran; so-called Marsh Arabs, killed as the Iraqi government drained the marshes and destroyed a culture that had thrived for centuries; and many individual Iraqis of all faiths and ethnicities who were singled out, their lives ended, for real or perceived opposition to the regime.