Iraq begins the excavation of the alleged mass tomb of the Islamic State

Iraqi officials have begun excavation of what is believed to be a massive tomb left by the Extremist group of the Islamic State During his uproar throughout the country a decade ago.

Local authorities are working with the Judiciary, Forensic investigations, the Iraq martyrs foundation and the Brves Massas direction to carry out the excavation of the site of a sink in Al-Khafsa, south of the northern city of Mosul, the Iraqi news agency reported Sunday.

Ahmad Qusay Al-Asady, head of the Mass Serious Excavation Department of the Martyrs Foundation, told The News that his team began working in Khasfa on August 9 at the request of the governor of the province of Nineveh, Abdulqadir Al-Dakil.

The operation is initially limited to the compilation of visible human remains and surface evidence while preparing for a complete exhumation that officials say it will require international support.

After 15 days of initial work, the Mosul teams of the Foundation will build a database and begin to collect DNA samples of families from victims’ suspicions.

Al-Asady explained that laboratory processing and a DNA database must first be to guarantee adequate identification. Complete exhumations can only continue once specialized assistance is ensured to navigate the dangers of the site, including sulfur water and unspecified ammunition.

Khasfa is “a very complicated place,” he said.

Based on non -verified accounts of witnesses and families and other unofficial testimonies, the authorities estimate that thousands of bodies could be buried there, he said.

Dozens of mass graves which contains thousands of bodies of people who believe they were killed by the extremist group They have been found in Iraq and Syria.

It is believed that some of the massive tombs found in Iraq in the last two decades date from the early 1990s, during the Saddam Hussein regime. Other tombs of the dough include Bodies of women and children.

At its peak, an area of half the size of the United Kingdom in Iraq and Syria is governed and was known for its brutality. He gave civilians and enslaved and raped thousands of women from the Yazidi community, one of the oldest religious minorities in Iraq. The extremist group has boasted of Shiite Massacrar and other opponents, often releasing videos and images of the murders.

The group was defeated in Iraq in July 2017, when Iraqi forces captured the northern city of Mosul. Three months later, he suffered a great blow when the Kurdish forces captured the Syrian city of northern Raqqa, which was the group’s de facto capital. The war against it is officially ended in March 2019, when the combatants backed by the United States and led by the Kurds of Syrian Democratic Forces captured the Eastern Baghouz Citywhich was the last splinter of land that extremists controlled.

Rabah Nouri Attiyah, a lawyer who has worked on more than 70 cases of missing people in Nineveh, told the AP that the information he obtained from the Foundation and different Iraqi courts during his investigations points to Khasfa as “the greatest massive tomb in the modern history of Iraqi history.”

Al-Asady, however, said that researchers “still cannot confirm whether it is the largest mass tomb” found in Iraq “, but according to the size of the space, we estimate that it is one of the largest.”

Attiyah said that approximately 70% of human remains in Khasfa are believed to belong to the Iraqi army and police personnel, with other victims, including Yazidi.

He said he interviewed numerous ocular witnesses of the area that saw that the fighters of IS bring people there by bus and kill them. “Many of them were beheaded,” he said.

Attiyah’s own uncle and cousin were police officers killed by IS, and he is among those who hope to identify and recover the remains of loved ones.

The testimonies and witness statements, as well as the findings of other massive tombs in Nineveh, indicate that the majority of the military, the police and other members of the staff of the murdered security forces are in Khasfa, together with Yazidis de Sinjar and Shiite victims of such Afar, he said.

• Islamic extremism
• Iraq