HILLA, IRAQ, MAY 15, 2003 - Searching for friends and relatives, Iraqis sift through the remains of bodies exhumed from a newly unearthed, unmarked mass grave in Hilla, south of Baghdad. Nearly 1,000 bodies were immediately identified. The men, women and children had been secretly buried there when the regime of Saddam Hussein crushed Shiite uprisings in central and southern Iraq in 1991. Unlike the mass graves exhumed in the former Yugoslavia, which were carefully protected by NATO forces for meticulous examination, these sites were left uncontrolled, allowing important war crimes evidence to be destroyed.