ISIS fighters buried in Mosul mass grave
Nine months after final battle for city, many bodies still scattered among rubble
MOSUL, Iraq — Authorities in Mosul have buried more than 1,000 bodies in a mass grave in a desert valley outside the city, most of them believed to be Islamic State group militants, according to a provincial official. More remains are being dug out of the rubble of the district where the fighters made their final stand last year.
Hundreds more bodies are still strewn across or buried in Maydan district nine months after it was flattened in the final battles to retake Mosul, creating one of the grimmest scenes from a brutal war that was compared to the worst urban combat of World War II.
During a recent visit by The Associated Press, pieces of desiccated bodies, often in shreds of fighters’ uniforms, were visible scattered in the ruins, which are also laced with unexploded bombs and unused suicide belts.
Most of the bodies appeared to belong to ISIS fighters killed by airstrikes or shelling, their remains half-buried. But there were also women and small children.
Multiple neighborhoods suffered heavy damage. Clearing of rubble is largely financed by the United Nations’ development agency, and repairs are proceeding slowly. In some areas, streets have been cleared but many buildings remain shattered.
Maydan is at a further disadvantage because Iraqi officials don’t appear to see removing bodies of ISIS fighters as a high priority. The provincial council’s office told the AP that clearing the area was the job of the civil defense; the civil defense said it was the job of the morgue; the head of the morgue declined to comment.
Faris Abdulrazzaq, mayor of Maydan, said the failure to clear the area — not just the bodies, but also the huge amount of unexploded ordnance — was preventing residents from returning to rebuild what they can, as others have in other districts.
He expressed fears over the health impact of the bodies. The World Health Organization has often noted that even large numbers of bodies left after a disaster do not pose a major health risk.
Even by the awful standards of Mosul, the devastation is shocking in this part of the Old City stretching roughly a half-mile along the Tigris River. The piles of dirt, rubble, smashed concrete, metal and vehicle skeletons are so high it is barely possible in many places to tell where the street ended and the buildings once began.
Bashar al-Kiki, the head of the provincial council for Nineveh governorate, told the AP that the municipal government had no resources to clean up the site. He estimated that 1,000 bodies had been buried at the site. Al-Kiki said the morgue makes an effort to identify the bodies or at least to tell if they belonged to fighters or civilians, but lack of resources prevents them from carrying out a proper identification process.
Iraqi and U.S. officials have never given a detailed estimate of how many ISIS militants were killed in Mosul, only putting the figure in the thousands. Thousands more escaped and continued to fight elsewhere.
An AP investigation last year found that between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians died in the battle to retake Mosul from the Islamic State group, at least a third of them killed by Iraqi or coalition bombardment.
The extremists had controlled the city, Iraq’s second largest, since June 2014, when they declared their “caliphate” over a third of Iraq and Syria. Nearly all of that territory has been wrested back in the campaign led by U.S.backed Iraqi and Syrian forces, except for small pockets held by ISIS in Syria.