Killing fields uncovered in Iraq
Islamic State using graves to send Baghdad a message
It was hardly the first evidence of wholesale massacre by the Islamic State group. But all indications are this is the worst, with the bodies now emerging from a dozen mass graves in newly liberated Tikrit adding up to slaughter on a scale unseen in Iraq since the darkest days of Saddam Hussein.
We knew it was coming. Unlike Saddam, the group also known as ISIS made no effort to hide its will to kill, going so far as to boast of cutting down 1,700 unarmed and Shia recruits last June at Camp Speicher during its formative territorial surge.
They want the bodies found. Sectarian war — Sunni versus Shia — is, if not a primary goal, a means to an end; inviting reprisals, deepening divisions, shrinking Iraqi governance, widening the vacuum ISIS covets.
Human Rights Watch, which earlier documented the Speicher killings, determining ISIS killed at least 770 prisoners at five execution sites, on Tuesday warned of more to come.
“I fear we will see more mass graves uncovered, as the effort to take back cities from ISIS continues in Anbar and other provinces,” Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch told the Star.
“But what we don’t want to see is more mass graves created. That means first and foremost pressing the Iraqi government to take every step to prevent revenge attacks on the part of Shia militias and the Iraqi forces on the ground.”
Also watching closely is the Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which has spent the past decade helping Iraq build its institutional capacity to deal with mass graves. Iraqi forensic teams on the ground in Tikrit all underwent ICMP training, including the introduction of DNA technology.
“The discoveries in Tikrit are enormously sad news and also a major test for Iraq in such a politically charged atmosphere,” said ICMP director-general Kathryne Bomberger.
“We’ve worked closely with five ministries, including the Ministry of Human Rights and the Medical Legal Institute, to help them take on the huge challenge that sites like this present. And we’re ready to do more, whatever they require.”
Iraq’s killing fields date to the 1960s and the ICMP estimates as many as a million Iraqis remain missing, victims of the violent decades that followed.
In 2003, when thousands of bodies were discovered in a cluster of mass graves near al-Mahawil military base south of Baghdad, the fledgling Iraqi government proved incapable of securing the sites. At one point backhoes were used in exhumation, unintentionally severing corpses, rendering identification impossible.
“If you can’t secure sites and take the proper steps to identify bodies, you can’t deliver justice, reparations or compensation,” said Bomberger. “And because it’s mostly men who goes missing, huge numbers of women are left behind to fend for themselves, often unable to claim inheritance rights because their husband is technically not dead.”
The Iraqi riddle since the toppling of Saddam is often described in terms of resource-sharing — how to divide the oil wealth and the power that flows from it among mutually distrustful constituencies.