ISIL mass graves: its legacy to Iraq
Investigators discover up to 100 bodies outside Mosul – one of dozens of such burial grounds found in reclaimed areas of country as the insurgents lose ground
HAMAM AL ALIL, IRAQ // Three men set up a fence and a ribbon of yellow-and-black crime scene tape around a site south of Mosul in Iraq, marking a mass grave for the victims of extremists who had held the city.
It is one of dozens of such sites in areas across Iraq that have been recaptured from ISIL.
As ISIL was forced to retreat, its fighters set fire to oil wells and smashed up refineries to slow the advance of Iraqi forces.
Now investigators face the task of piecing together details of what happened to the victims, and determining who they were.
“It really is a crime scene,” Fawaz Abdulabbas, deputy head of the International Committee on Missing Persons in Iraq, says of the site near Hamam Al Alil discovered after Iraqi forces recaptured the town last month.
“Between 80 and 100 bodies are here, including those of women and children,” says Mr Abdulabbas. Among the bodies may be that of Imed Dhaer, a policeman who was kidnapped by ISIL, leaving 10 children without their father and two wives without their husband, says his brother, Fuad.
When Iraqi forces launched an offensive in October to recapture Mosul, the last ISIL-held city in the country, the militants “came to search for members of the security forces”, including 33-yearold Imed, his brother says.
The ISIL militants “were locals – they knew the houses and professions of all those they took”, Fuad says.
Since then, he has had no news of his brother, but residents of Hamam Al Alil say they heard shooting at the grave site, a former Iraqi firing range near the town.
“For three days, from 7 to 11pm, they executed” the people they had seized and then “dumped the bodies before partially covering them with dirt mixed with rubbish” in what they termed “burials of dishonour”, says Dargham Kamil, an official from the Martyrs’ Foundation.
The organisation, which is under the authority of the Iraqi premier’s office, has been working for over a month to establish how the killings unfolded. Fuad can imagine what happened and now wants only one thing – to see the body of his brother, to know for sure. “Only that can soothe our hearts,” he says.
But before that can happen, Iraqi and international teams will have to identify the remains, carrying out DNA tests once relatives have been found.
Additional investigation of the site is also needed “to see if there are any deeper layers, and therefore more bodies”, says Dhia Karim, the Martyrs’ Foundation official responsible for mass graves. More bodies would be added to hundreds discovered in other mass graves left by ISIL militants, who overran swaths of territory north and west of Baghdad in 2014 but have been pushed back by Iraqi forces.
Twenty-nine mass graves containing at least 1,600 bodies have been found in Sinjar, west of Mosul, since Iraqi Kurdish forces recaptured it last year, according to Mahma Khalil, the official responsible for the area.
“A number of graves have not been discovered or searched yet,” Mr Abdulabbas says.
Amid the ISIL assault, fighting with Iraqi forces, murders and other abuses carried out by the extremists, it is very difficult to establish the number of people who are missing, says Mr Karim. Mr Karim’s teams have been working to collect testimony from witnesses and relatives of missing persons.
“We will have to gather all this in a database – it will be a very long-term job,” says Mr Abdulabbas.
Once compiled, the evidence will have to be presented to the judicial system, which is already overwhelmed with similar cases from years of violence in Iraq.
But the legal process is of utmost importance for national reconciliation, Mr Abdulabbas says.
“Many of the people in ISIL are from here,” he says, and their brutality “could lead to revenge or vendettas between families”.
Twenty-nine mass graves containing at least 1,600 bodies have been found in Sinjar, west of Mosul