IRBIL, IRAK (AP) – Iraqi officials began the excavation of what would be a grave of mass left by the Islamic state extremist group During his unleashing across the country a decade ago.
The local authorities work with the judiciary, the medical-legal investigations, the Foundation of the Iraqi martyrs and the management of Serious mass to make the excavation On the site of a sink hole in Al-Khafsa, south of the city in the north of Mossoul, the Iraqi news agency managed by the State reported on Sunday.
Ahmad Qusay Al-Asady, head of the Martyrs Foundation Excavation Department, told the Associated Press that his team had started working in Khasfa on August 9 at the request of the Governor of the province of Nineveh, Abdulqadir al-Dakhil.
The operation is initially limited to the collection of visible human remains and surface evidence while preparing a complete exhumation which, according to managers, will require international support.
After first 15 days of work, the foundation’s mosul teams build a database and will start to take DNA samples from families of alleged victims.
Al-Asady explained that laboratory processing and a DNA database must go first to ensure appropriate identification. Complete exhumations can only proceed once the specialized assistance is guaranteed to navigate the dangers of the site, including sulfur water and unploded ammunition.
Khasfa is “a very complicated site,” he said.
Based on the unaccompanied accounts of witnesses and families and other unofficial testimonies, the authorities believe that thousands of bodies could be buried there, he said.
Dozens of tombs containing thousands of bodies that were said to have been killed by the extremist group were found in Iraq and Syria.
At its peak, an area of the United Kingdom size in Iraq and Syria was considered an area of the size of the United Kingdom and was notorious for its brutality. He beheaded civilians and a slave and raped thousands of women in the Yezidia community, one of the oldest religious minorities in Iraq.
The group defeated Iraq in July 2017, when Iraqi forces captured the city in the north of Mosul. Three months later, he suffered a major blow when the Kurdish forces captured the north-in northern city of Raqqa, which was the group’s de facto capital. The war against officially ends in March 2019, when fighters supported by the United States and Kurdish from the Syrian democratic forces captured the eastern Syrian city of Baghouz, which was the last ribbon of earth controlled by the extremists.
Rabah Nouri Attiyah, a lawyer who worked on more than 70 cases of missing people in Nineveh, told AP that the information he had obtained from the Foundation and the various Iraqi courts during his investigations indicate Khasfa as “the greatest mass tomb of modern Iraqi history”.
Al-Asady, however, said that investigators “cannot yet confirm if it is the greatest grave” in Iraq, “but depending on the size of the space, we believe that it is one of the most important.”
Attiyah said that around 70% of human remains in Khasfa belong to the Iraqi army and police staff, with other victims, including the Yazidis.
He said he had interviewed many eyewitnesses in the region who saw combatants, the fighters bring people by bus and kill them. “Many of them have been beheaded,” he said.
The own uncle and cousin of Attiyah was police officers killed by IS, and he is one of those who hope to identify and recover the remains of dear.
The testimonies and declarations of the witnesses, as well as the conclusions of other male carts in Nineveh, indicate that most of the soldiers, the police and other members of the security forces killed by should be found in Khasfa, with the Yazidis de Sinjar and the Shiite victims of Tal Afar, he said.
