(Mosul) Around a hundred victims of the Islamic State group (IS) have been exhumed from a mass grave in Iraq, officials confirmed to AFP on Sunday, with authorities continuing their laborious search for years to find the mass graves dug by the jihadists.
The natural well Alo Antar, into which the jihadists threw their victims – notably Yazidis and Shiite Turkmen – is located in the Tal Afar region, 70 kilometres west of the metropolis of Mosul, the former “capital” of IS in northern Iraq.
“The remains of 139 victims were removed, along with human body parts,” Dia Karim, director of the department responsible for mass graves at the Martyrs’ Foundation, a government institution managing this thorny issue, told AFP.
“There are men and women,” he said. “According to the testimonies, the victims are Yazidis or Shiite Turkmen, and some Mosul residents who were recruited into the security forces,” Karim said.
These same testimonies, he said, refer to victims executed “during the reign of ISIS,” when the jihadists controlled Mosul between the summer of 2014 and 2017.
He mentions some accounts of older atrocities, when Al-Qaeda was active.
The Alo Antar mass grave was discovered when Iraqi security forces recaptured the area in 2017, but work on the site began last May, Ahmed al-Assadi, another official at the Martyrs’ Foundation, told AFP.
“The victims were not buried, but thrown into the abyss,” which was 12 to 42 meters deep, he said. Some victims were shot dead, others had their throats slit, Assadi said.
The traditional “clothing” found on some “indicates that they could be Yazidis or Turkmen,” the official said, adding that other bodies were wearing the orange uniform imposed by IS on its prisoners.
In an attempt to identify the victims, DNA tests will be carried out in Baghdad by the forensic department. Excavations are continuing at the site.
After a meteoric rise in power in 2014, IS had increased its atrocities in the territories it had conquered in Iraq and neighboring Syria. Routed in 2017 in Iraq, it left behind more than 200 mass graves that could contain up to 12,000 bodies, according to the UN.
In addition to these mass graves of jihadists, Iraq continues to unearth mass graves dating from the regime of Saddam Hussein, overthrown during the American invasion of 2003.