BAGHDAD, November 8 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) ruling Iraq said Saturday, November 8, there are 263 reported mass graves of people executed in the war-ravaged country under Saddam Hussein, including 40 containing evidence of systematic killings, as the occupied country suffers instability and chaos.

"We have received reports of 263 mass graves. We confirmed approximately 40 of them" hold evidence of systematic executions, said Sandra Hodgkinson, director of the Office for Human Rights Transitional Justice (OHRTJ) within the CPA, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"We have found mass graves of women and children, with bullet holes in their heads and we have found mass graves of husbands and fathers out in the desert where they were buried," she told a conference on probing mass graves.

"We met survivors who crawled out of mass graves after being buried alive. We met with families whose loved ones did not escape," Hodgkinson said.

She further added that the graves were first discovered in a "rush" of families seeking to identify the whereabouts of their long lost loved ones, following the April 9 fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The number of people missing as a result of atrocities committed by Saddam's regime, which gained power in 1979, was estimated to be anywhere between 300,000 and 1.3 million, according to AFP, citing various sources.

Teams of foreign forensic experts were expected to start working on mass grave sites in Iraq in early January.

Between eight and 20 sites have been selected for about 400 foreign experts to start working on the ground, along with Iraqis to be trained in the task over a nine-month period, she said.

"The military is carrying out initial reconnaissance to prepare the ground for the foreign forensic experts. The process also involves satellite imagery and field surveys," Hodgkinson added.

Iraqi Minister for Human Rights Abdel Bassit Turki said at the conference, "We have to be realistic, we need such training.

"But the urgent matter is now the protection of these mass graves ... We need guards and fences to prevent people and families from disturbing the graves," he said.

Hodgkinson said the process to excavate, exhume, identify and re-bury human remains in a proper and "dignified" process would take years.

"In Bosnia, it has so far taken eight or nine years to exhume 8,000 remains out of 30,000 remains in mass graves. Here we have 300,000 remains," she said.

The process will also cost at least tens of millions of dollars in the initial phase, she said, announcing plans for an Iraqi bureau for the missing at the ministry of human rights affairs to help centralize information.

Promises of about 100 million dollars, in cash, equipment and teams, over the next five years that were made at the international donors' conference in Madrid last month have still not materialized, Hodgkinson said.

According to Hodgkinson, the mass graves mostly included the remains of ethnic Kurds and Shiite Muslims repressed by Saddam's Sunni dominated regime, particularly between 1983 and 1991.

Many of the mass graves were in or near prisons, mainly north and south of Baghdad, as well as in the western sector of the country.

"Mass graves are being discovered all around Iraq. Each provides graphic evidence of the atrocities of the former regime against all ethnic and religious groups," she said.

"Mass graves provide many answers," Hodgkinson added. "They tell the story of missed loved ones. They allow families to regain remains to be buried in dignity. They are the first step to reconciliation.

"Mass graves also provide answers about who committed crimes and corroborate witness statements of atrocities and documents describing executions," she said.

"These answers will be necessary for reconciliation. There is an urgent need for reconciliation in Iraq. Iraqi people cannot embrace the future without reconciliation."