By Xinhua
Baghdad : Iraqi army soldiers found a mass grave containing more than 30 bodies in the town of Mahmoudiyah south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said on Friday.
The troops discovered the site of the mass grave at a house in the town on Thursday and initial reports showed that the remains have been buried for more than a year, the military said in a statement.
The entire house has been declared as a grave site and the Iraqi troops are excavating the entire area, the statement said, adding that U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to investigate the incident.
Mahmoudiyah, some 30 km south of Baghdad, was a stronghold for Sunni insurgents and a part of an area code-named “Triangle of Death” because of the frequent insurgent attacks and sectarian violence last year.
U.S. and Iraqi security forces regularly discover mass graves in different parts of Iraq.
On February, the Iraqi security forces found a mass grave contained 50 bodies in an open area near the city of Samarra, some120 km north of Baghdad, during an operation against the network of al-Qaida in Iraq. It was the largest mass graves found in recent months.