Iraqi officials started the excavation of what is considered a mass grave left by the Islamic State Extremist Group During his rampage throughout the country ten years ago.
Local authorities work together with the judiciary, forensic investigation, Iraq’s Martyrs’ FoundationAnd the Massagraven directorate to carry out the excavation of the site of a zinc hole in Al-Khafsa, south of the northern city of Mosul, reported the Iraqi news agency run by the state on Sunday.
Ahmad Qusay al-Asady, head of the Mass Graves Excavation Department of the Martyrs Foundation, told The Associated Press that his team started working at Khasfa on 9 August at the request of the GOV. Abdulqadir al-Dakhil van Nineveh.
The operation is initially limited to collecting visible human remains and surface recovery material during the preparation of a complete excavation that, according to officials, requires international support.
After a first 15 days of work, the Mosul teams of the foundation will build a database and collect DNA monsters from families of suspected victims.
Al-Asady explained that laboratory processing and a DNA database should first come to guarantee good identification. Complete trained can only continue if specialized help is guaranteed to navigate the dangers of the site, including sulfur water and non -depleted ammunition.
Khasfa is “a very complicated site,” he said.
On the basis of non -rewarded reports of witnesses and families and other unofficial testimonies, the authorities estimate that thousands of bodies can be buried there, he said.
Dozens of Massagraven with thousands of people of people who are assumed to have been killed by the extremist group were found in Iraq And Syria.
Some mass graves in Iraq in the last two decades are supposed to date back to the early nineties, during the Saddam Hussein regime. Other mass graves include Bodies of women and children.
At its peak is ruled as an area of half of the size of the United Kingdom in Iraq and Syria and was notorious for its brutality. The beheaded citizens and slave and thousands of women from the Yazidi community raped, one of the oldest religious minorities in Iraq. The extremist group has talked about getting rid of Shiites and other opponents, often releasing horrible videos and photos of the murders.
The group was defeated in Iraq in July 2017, when the Iraqi troops conquered the northern city of Mosul. Three months later it suffered a big blow when the Kurdish troops conquered the Syrian northern city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the group. The war against it will be officially terminated in March 2019, when the US supported and by Kurdish by Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic troops the Eastern Syrian city of BaghouzThat the last piece of land was that the extremists checked.
Rabah Nouri Attiyah, a lawyer who has worked on more than 70 cases of missing people in Nineve, told the AP that he obtained information that he obtained during his research from the foundation and various Iraqi courts and various Iraqi courts on Khasfa as ‘the greatest mass grave in modern Iraqi history’.
Al-Asady, however, said that researchers “cannot yet confirm whether it is the biggest mass grave” to be found in Iraq, “but according to the size of the space we estimate that it is one of the largest.”
Attiyah said that about 70% of human remains in Khasfa are supposed to belong to the Iraqi army and police personnel, with other victims, including Yazidis.
He said he interviewed countless eyewitnesses from the area who saw hunters take people there by bus and kill them. “Many of them were beheaded,” he said.
Attiyah’s own uncle and cousin were killed by police officers, and he is one of those who wanted to identify and restore the remains of loved ones.
Testimonials and witness statements, as well as findings from other mass graves in Nineve, indicate that the majority of the military, police and other security forces are being killed by being expected to be found in Khasfa, together with Yazidis van Sinjar and Shiite victims of Tal Afar, he said.
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