ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Local residents found another mass grave in the Yazidi heartland of Shingal (Sinjar) believed to contain victims of the Islamic State (ISIS), a Yazidi official said on Friday.
"The driver of a backhoe wanted to remove the soil of a barrier that Yazidis had built during the ISIS attack in 2014 and human remains were found there. Later, a team went to the site and it was revealed that there was a mass grave," Hussein Qasim, an advisor for Yazidi affairs at the Kurdistan Region Presidency, told Rudaw.
Along with the discovery of the mass grave, remains were also found of a Yazidi man named Saydo Abbas Chuko, from Siba Sheikh Khider north of Mount Shingal.
"The grave was found yesterday, and it has not yet been officially revealed how many Yazidi Kurdish remains it contains. It will be investigated in the future," Qasim said.
In June 2014, ISIS seized large parts of northern and western Iraq. In August, the group launched a brutal campaign against the Yazidi community in Shingal, killing an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Yazidi men and older women, and abducting 6,000 to 7,000 women and girls for sexual slavery and human trafficking.
The United Nations and many Western countries have officially recognized the atrocities committed against the Yazidis as genocide.
So far, 93 mass graves of Yazidis have been officially discovered in Shingal. Of that number, only 68 have been exhumed, in addition to dozens of individual graves.
There are 250 identified mass graves across Iraq, many dating back decades. More than 220 of them have been opened, the head of the state-affiliated Martyrs Foundation said on Thursday.
Only a few graves remain uncovered due to limited logistical capacity of the mass graves team, Abdul-Ilah al-Naeli told Rudaw. He said the foundation is coordinating with the Kurdistan Region’s Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs on “opening mass graves, handing over remains, and the issue of forensic medicine and DNA analysis.”
Soran Hussein contributed to this article.
