In a solemn ceremony at Najaf's newly opened airport, Human Rights Minister Wejdan Mikhail and Najaf's governor, Assad Abu Gulal, paid their respects to the victims of Saddam's brutal campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s.

"On this day the picture of the crimes of the former regime against the Iraqi people is made clear. These are the remains of men, women and children, entire families," Abu Gulal said.

"This is yet more evidence of the ugliness of Saddam's regime," he said, adding that in the Najaf governorate of central Iraq alone authorities had uncovered 45 mass graves and expected to find more.

The remains are believed to be of Kurds killed by Iraqi security forces during the infamous Anfal campaign in the late 1980s, when an estimated 182,000 Kurds were murdered and some 3,000 villages destroyed in a scorched-earth response to a Kurdish uprising.

The remains were flown to Kurdistan in northern Iraq for a funeral to be held on Thursday in Arbil, to be followed by burials in a village north of Sulaimaniyah.

"There were 150 bodies (of Kurds) found in a group of 250 bodies," Mikhail said. "We identified 20 of the bodies from their ID cards and personal items, but there are still 130 bodies we were not able to identify."

She added that once the bodies are returned to the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan their DNA would be cross-checked with different Kurdish families so they could be identified.

During the Anfal campaign an unknown number of people were forcibly deported from the Kurdish regions in northern Iraq to desert areas where many were killed and buried en masse.