Once promised paradise, IS fighters end up in mass graves
DHULUIYAH (Iraq): The Islamic State group once drew recruits from near and far with promises of paradise but now bodies of jihadists lie in mass graves or at the mercy of wild dogs as its “caliphate” collapses.
Flies buzz around human remains poking through the dusty earth here, 90km north of Baghdad, at a hastily-dug pit containing the bodies of dozens of IS fighters killed in 2015.
“They should have ended up in the stomachs of stray dogs,” said local police officer Mohammed al-Juburi.
“We buried them here not out of love but because we wanted to avoid diseases.”
Since the launch in 2014 of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against the group, a United States-led coalition said 80,000 jihadists had been killed. The overall number of dead was higher if included those targeted by Russian and Syrian strikes.
In agricultural town here on the banks of the Tigris river, residents faced a dilemma over what to do with the corpses of IS fighters after Sunni militiamen beat back the jihadists.
“We could have thrown them into the water, but we love the river too much to pollute it,” said the policeman, who lost his own brother in the violence.
Locals finally decided to dig a mass grave for the fighters — but they said they refused to honour them with Islamic rites.
“We buried them with bulldozers. Even in the ground, they are still mired in their own filth,” said farmer Shalan al-Juburi.
“They said that they would go to paradise to enjoy the gardens of delights, but this is how they ended up.”
Elsewhere, in western Iraq’s Anbar province, the luckiest among the IS dead appear to be those killed during its offensives against the army in 2015.
In the centre of Fallujah, hundreds of memorials in a makeshift cemetery bear the noms de guerre of foreign fighters buried by their comrades.
But as Iraqi forces in Anbar look to oust the jihadists from their final footholds, operation commander Mahmoud al-Fellahi insisted any jihadists killed would end up in mass graves.
A similar fate befell IS members in the city of Mosul, the group’s largest urban stronghold in Iraq that it lost in July.
There, a senior Iraqi commander said authorities used earthmoving equipment “to bury the jihadists after we collected information on their identities and nationalities”.
Across the border in Syria — where competing Russia and US-backed offensives are squeezing IS — the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated some 50,000 IS members had been killed.
As clashes rage with the jihadists, one Syrian commander said what happened to dead fighters was not a priority.
Another military source said the identities of the fighters could provide useful intelligence.
In the desert plains that the jihadists once dominated, the bodies of dead fighters are left abandoned, a pro-regime militia head said.
“The desert dogs are waiting for them,” he said.
“When fighting ends, the jihadists come out of their hiding places to collect the remains.”
While the rank-and-file were often left forgotten, IS appeared to have taken care to hide the final resting places of prominent Western jihadists.
They included notorious British executioner Mohamed Emwazi, known as “Jihadi John”, propaganda chief Abu Muhammad al-Adnani and military leader Omar al-Shishani.
There has been no record of bodies of foreign jihadists being repatriated. AFP