MOSUL, Iraq (AP) – A human skull, worn pants and a shoe were among the remains found in a mass grave discovered this week in northern Iraq, a vestige of the group’s brutal Islamic State government, Iraqi officials said. Thursday.
The new mass grave was discovered on Monday in the village of Humeydat near the Badoush area west of the city of Mosul, six years after the IS group — at the height of its power — declared a caliphate that stretched across eastern Syria and much of northern and western Iraq.
Dozens of bodies buried in a ditch that stretched by metres (yards) long were discovered. Forensic experts conducted an initial investigation, but the new coronavirus prevented the excavation, medical officials in Mosul told The Associated Press.
Although an investigation is needed to identify the bodies, many were Shiite convicts taken to the local criminal in Badoush via IS and killed through militants, shortly after the takeover of Mosul in June 2014.
Iraqi forces recaptured the criminal in March 2017. The Islamic State reportedly killed up to 600 prisoners in the crime, most of them Shia prisoners. According to an investigation conducted at the time through Human Rights Watch, based on eyewitness accounts, at least 1,500 detainees were arrested and transported to a desert area. There, Sunni and Shia detainees were separated and killed.
Iraqi security forces, with the help of the US-led coalition, defeated the Islamic State and recaptured northern Iraq in an army campaign in 2016. Although the Islamic State no longer has territory in Iraq, the remains of the group remain active and provoke attacks opposed to Iraqi security forces.
But memories of the group’s brutal reign persist, years after the army’s crusade for them.
Hussein al-Nesr, a resident of the Badoush region, is unhappy that the newly discovered remains are well buried.
“They’re all full of humans,” he said, pointing to the place where IS allegedly carried out the massacre. “There are so many that you can’t bury them with your hands.”
He had tried in vain to give the sick a proper burial. In one, al-Nesr had introduced a young man passing through a truck 200,000 Iraqi dinars and a can of diesel to bury the bodies. First he agreed, but he never listened again.
The Mosul Martyrs Foundation, a government facility that cares for the families of those killed under IS, first examined the area, said Dr. Hassan Raouf, head of Mosul’s forensics department, affiliated with the Ministry of Fitness. “But we will not conduct any search or exhumous the bodies because of the coronavirus scenario in Mosul and Iraq.”
At least 2,160 Iraqis have died among more than 53,000 reported cases of viruses across Iraq. The country has noticed an exponential buildup of virus cases in recent weeks.
Raouf estimates that there are more than a hundred bodies buried at the site, “but it can be much more.”
“We have a giant database that includes samples of relatives of people who lack people and we hope to identify bodies,” he said.
Before the virus outbreak, Iraq had difficulty examining mass graves. According to a UN report in November 2018, a government branch responsible for opening and examining mass graves is understaffed and lacks an area to buy and identify human remains.
According to the report, meetings with officials from Iraq’s Mass Gravee Directorate revealed that its 43 people cover the entire country, which is not enough to cope with the scale of the new findings. He also claimed that the government did not have enough devices to search for graves.