Grisly find: Iraq paramilitaries say mass grave of hundreds discovered
BAGHDAD: Daesh has released dozens of prisoners held in jails in the districts of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul that remain under its control, residents said on Saturday.
The release of the prisoners on Friday is another sign that the militants are getting overwhelmed by the US-backed Iraqi offensive that started on Oct. 17 to dislodge them from Mosul, their last major city stronghold in Iraq.
Daesh has lost most cities it captured in Iraq in 2014 and 2015. It declared a caliphate that also spanned parts of Syria from Mosul in 2014.
Among those released were people who had been caught selling cigarettes, violating a smoking ban, or in possession of a mobile phone and therefore suspected of communicating with the outside world, the residents said.
One of the men released on Friday said two militants got him out of a basement where he was held captive with other people, blindfolded the group and drove them away in a bus.
“After driving a distance, we stopped and they told us to remove the blindfolds and then they said ‘go, you are free,’” he said by phone, adding that about 25 prisoners were on the bus.
The man, who requested not to be identified, indicated that had spent two weeks in prison for selling cigarettes.
One Mosul resident said his brother had suddenly reappeared at the house on Friday after spending a month in captivity for possessing a mobile phone.
Meanwhile, Iraqi paramilitary forces announced Saturday that they had discovered a mass grave at Badush prison near Mosul containing the remains of hundreds of people executed by Daesh.
Daesh reportedly killed up to 600 people after seizing the jail in 2014, and was also said to have held hun- dreds of kidnapped women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority at the facility.
The Iraqi military said that forces from the Hashed Al-Shaabi — an umbrella group of pro-government forces that are dominated by Iranbacked Shiite militias — were among the units that recaptured the prison from the terrorists.
Hashed forces found “a large mass grave containing the remains of around 500 civilian prisoners in (Badush) prison who were executed by Daesh gangs after they controlled the prison during their occupation of Mosul,” they said.
The Hashed did not say how they reached that figure, which could not be independently confirmed, but it is in keeping with a Human Rights Watch report of Daesh killings at Badush.
According to HRW, Daesh gunmen executed up to 600 inmates from Badush prison on June 10, 2014, forcing them to kneel along a nearby ravine and then shooting them with assault rifles.
Iraqi lawmaker Vian Dakhil also said that year that the terrorists were holding more than 500 Yazidi women at Badush.