US forces probe 'mass graves' near Kirkuk

US military officials investigated nearly 1,500 unmarked graves near the Kurdish-controlled northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, and a half-brother of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was captured in a US commando raid in Baghdad.

With fighting all but finished, US forces struggled for yet another day yesterday to restore security and vital services for civilians in the Iraqi capital and elsewhere in the war-torn country.

Soldiers thwarted a Baghdad bank robbery over the protests of Iraqis eager to share in the loot, and US Marines sought to calm tensions in the northern city of Mosul after shooting 17 Iraqis to death in clashes over the past two days.

Kurds brought American officials to what they said was a large area of unmarked graves near Kirkuk, but it was not immediately clear who was buried or how they died. US military officials surveyed the site yesterday.

The graves were laid out in neat rows stretching several hundred yards across a parched landscape near a military base and industrial park on the city’s southern edge. They were marked only by weeds and little mounds of dirt.

A Kurdish Iraqi soldier who was based near the site in 1987 said that night-time caravans often brought bodies to the site. Residents of a nearby district said the bodies of unidentified Iraqi soldiers who died in the 1991 Gulf War were buried there.

Tens of thousands of Kurdish men disappeared in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule – part of a drive to crush an independence movement and drive ethnic minorities from oil-rich areas. Human rights groups say Saddam’s government abducted and murdered them.

In Baghdad, Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, a half-brother of the former Iraqi leader, was captured by US forces, said US Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said at US Central Command in Qatar.

Barzan Ibrahim has “extensive knowledge of the regime’s inner workings”, General Brooks said.

A US intelligence official said Barzan Ibrahim had been an adviser to Saddam’s regime since 1998 but had a shaky relationship with his half-brother and was not part of the regime’s inner circle.

He was a representative to the UN in Geneva from 1989 to 1998. He also was a leading figure in and former director of Iraq’s dreaded Mukhabarat intelligence service from the early 1970s until 1983, a period when the organisation arranged executions of regime opponents in Iraq and overseas.

Another of Saddam’s three half-brothers – Watban Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti - was captured earlier by US forces. The third has not been found.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the military’s search for chemical and biological weapons is unlikely to succeed until Iraqis lead American forces to them.

“The war is not over,” Rumsfeld said in Washington.

Some participants at a UN-sponsored meeting in Paris said the looting at Baghdad’s National Museum of Antiquities and other sites appeared to be organised. Some of those involved had keys to museum vaults and were able to remove items from safes.

The Baghdad museum housed irreplaceable Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections that chronicled ancient life around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where much of modern human civilisation is considered to have begun.

US forces have been criticised for failing to stop looting in several cities, and there have been complaints that humanitarian relief has been slow in arriving.

More than two dozen FBI agents travelled to Baghdad to help recover items from the antiquities museum and other cultural facilities looted in recent days.

Agents are also helping to examine seized Iraqi documents for links to terrorists, evidence of weapons of mass destruction and activities of Iraqi intelligence agents, FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector for Iraq, urged the US-led coalition to allow his team back into the country, saying it would increase the credibility of any weapons discoveries.

The team left Iraq just before the fighting started, after several months of work.

In Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, Iraqi police patrolled the streets yesterday. US Marines holding the city, 100 miles north of Baghdad, said they had recovered some 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles, more than 80,000 of them at a hospital.