A file photo for the files of Iraqis who were sentenced to death by Saddam

By Aws al-Sharqi, IOL Iraq Correspondent

BAGHDAD, July 21 (IslamOnline.net) - The Iraqi Free Prisoners Association (IFPA) said Sunday, July 20, it was drawing up an archive of hundreds of thousands of executions conducted by the ousted Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, saying that it will be the first of its kind and could gain Saddam a place in Guinness  Book of World Records uncompetitively. 

"The unprecedented number of executions and mass graves found across Iraq for which Saddam really merits a place in Guinness  Book of World Records," Nazem al-Tarehi, a lawyer and member of the IFPA, told IslamOnline.net Sunday.

"As far as I know, no other leader could have killed hundreds of thousands of his people, including children and women, as Saddam did to our people," he added.

The IFPA said Saturday, July 19, that a fresh mass grave was discovered near the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad and included some 1200 bodies.

Ramadi's grave is one of the largest mass graves ever found in the war-scarred country since the downfall of the Iraqi regime on April 9.

The remains of about 300 people, believed to be Kurdish victims of the deposed regime of Saddam Hussein, had been found in a mass grave in northern Iraq on July 5.

Tarehi further said that Saddam committed ethnic cleansing operations against Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiites in the south, noting that the mass graves found every now and then were a case in point.

Mohammad Hussein Hammoud, an IFPA member, said that one of the execution lists which had been inked by Saddam himself contained 700, who were all executed at one site for reasons not necessarily related to anti-regime operations.

"Silent opposition was more than enough for Saddam to hunt, imprison and even execute," he said.

The IFPA was founded at the beginning of last May in the city of Imam Moussa al-Kazem, to investigate the disappearance and the killings of Iraqis at the hands of the former Iraqi regime over the past three decades.