Iraqi officials have begun the excavation of what is believed to be a mass grave left behind by the Islamic State extremist group during its rampage across the country a decade ago.
Local authorities are working with the judiciary, forensic investigations, Iraq’s Martyrs’ Foundation, and the directorate of mass graves to carry out the excavation of the site of a sinkhole in al-Khafsa, south of the northern city of Mosul, the state-run Iraqi News Agency reported Sunday.
Ahmad Qusay al-Asady, head of the Martyrs Foundation’s mass graves excavation department, told The Associated Press that his team began work at Khasfa on Aug. 9 at the request of Nineveh province’s Gov. Abdulqadir al-Dakhil.
The operation is initially limited to gathering visible human remains and surface evidence while preparing for a full exhumation that officials say will require international support.
After an initial 15 days of work, the foundation’s Mosul teams will build a database and start collecting DNA samples from families of suspected victims.
Al-Asady explained that laboratory processing and a DNA database must come first to ensure proper identification. Full exhumations can only proceed once specialized assistance is secured to navigate the site’s hazards, including sulfur water and unexploded ordnance.
Khasfa is “a very complicated site,” he said.
Based on unverified accounts from witnesses and families and other unofficial testimonies, authorities estimate that thousands of bodies could be buried there, he said.
Scores of mass graves containing thousands of bodies of people believed to have been killed by the extremist group have been found in Iraq and Syria.
Some of the mass graves found in Iraq over the past two decades are believed to date back to the early 1990s, during Saddam Hussein’s regime. Other mass graves include bodies of women and children.
At its peak, IS ruled an area half the size of the United Kingdom in Iraq and Syria and was notorious for its brutality. It beheaded civilians and enslaved and raped thousands of women from the Yazidi community, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities. The extremist group has boasted of massacring Shiites and other opponents, often releasing gruesome videos and pictures of the killings.
The group was defeated in Iraq in July 2017, when Iraqi forces captured the northern city of Mosul. Three months later, it suffered a major blow when Kurdish forces captured the Syrian northern city of Raqqa, which was the group’s de facto capital. The war against IS officially ended in March 2019, when U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces captured the eastern Syrian town of Baghouz, which was the last sliver of land the extremists controlled.
Rabah Nouri Attiyah, a lawyer who has worked on more than 70 cases of missing people in Nineveh, told the AP that information he obtained from the foundation and different Iraqi courts during his investigations points to Khasfa as “the largest mass grave in modern Iraqi history.”
Al-Asady, however, said investigators “cannot confirm yet if it is the largest mass grave” to be found in Iraq, “but according to the size of the space, we estimate it to be one of the largest.”
Attiyah said roughly 70% of the human remains at Khasfa are believed to belong to Iraqi army and police personnel, with other victims including Yazidis.
He said he has interviewed numerous eyewitnesses from the area who saw IS fighters bring people there by bus and kill them. “Many of them were decapitated,” he said.
Attiyah’s own uncle and cousin were police officers killed by IS, and he is among those hoping to identify and recover the remains of loved ones.
Testimonies and witness statements, as well as findings from other mass graves in Nineveh, indicate that most of the military, police and other security forces personnel killed by IS are expected to be found at Khasfa, along with Yazidis from Sinjar and Shiite victims from Tal Afar, he said.
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