Salute for 38 ISIS vics
Bodies of workers massacred in ’14 return to India from Iraq
THE BODIES of 38 Indian construction workers who were abducted and killed by ISIS for their religious beliefs are going home.
The Hindu and Sikh workers’ remains were transferred to Indian authorities at Baghdad International Airport and were expected to reach India on Monday via military transport.
India’s Minister of State for External Affairs, Vijay Kumar Singh, saluted the remains at the airport as workers loaded the caskets onto the aircraft.
Islamic State forces captured 40 men in the summer of 2014 after taking over Mosul.
One of the men escaped and the remains of another have yet to be identified. Officials are waiting on a relative’s DNA sample to match it with those remains.
For years, relatives of the men lived wondering if their loved ones were alive or dead.
Iraqi authorities discovered the bodies in mass graves last year after the city was recaptured by U.S. and Iraqi forces.
They were positively identified as the Indian workers last month. Only now can the workers, mostly from India’s poorest families, finally be laid to rest.
India authorities honored the dead and condemned the ruthless terror group.
“We are against terrorism in all its forms and manifestations,” Indian Ambassador Pradeep Singh Rajpurohit told reporters, describing ISIS as a “very cruel terrorist organization and our people have fallen to their bullets.”
The workers, most from northern India, had been employed by a construction company operating near Mosul.
Around 10,000 Indians lived and worked in Iraq at the time.
ISIS may have viewed the workers as polytheists deserving of death because of their Hindu or Sikh faith.
The terror group swept across northern and central Iraq in 2014, eventually seizing a third of the country. Iraqi forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition eventually drove the militants from all the territory under their control in a grueling three-year campaign.
The militants are still carrying out insurgent-style attacks.
Dozens of mass graves have been found in areas held by the extremist group, which boasted about massacring its enemies, and posted videos and photos of many of the mass killings online.
Iraq has only managed to excavate a few of the sites due to a lack of funding and specialized staff.