Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The Al-Khasfa site, near the second Iraqi city, could contain 4,000 remains and possibly thousands of others.
Iraqi officials began to excavate what is supposed to be a mass grave left by Isil (Isis) During its years of carnage, demanded on the civilian population after having seized great expanses of the nation from 2014, until it was defeated three years later.
Local authorities worked alongside the judiciary, medico-legal investigators, the Iraqi martyrs Foundation and the Directorate of Mass Tombs to excavate in Al-Khafsa, south of the northern city of Mosul, the Iraqi press agency reported by the State reported on Sunday.
The site – a chasm about 150 meters (almost 500 feet) deep and 110 meters (360 feet) wide – would have been the macabre scene of some of the worst massacres committed by ISIL.
Ahmad Qusay Al-Asady, head of the Martyrs Foundation Excavation Department, told the Associated Press press agency that his team had started working on August 9 at the request of the province of Nineveh.
The operation will be initially limited to the collection of visible human remains and surface evidence, while preparing a complete exhumation which, according to officials, will require international support, said Al-Asady.
The foundation will then built a database and will begin to take DNA samples from families of alleged victims.
Complete exhumations can only proceed once the specialized assistance is guaranteed to navigate the dangers of the site, including sulfur water and unploded ammunition. Water may also have eroded human remains, complicating DNA identification.
Due to the presence of these elements, Al-Khafsa is “a very complicated site,” added Al-Asady.
On the basis of the unaccompanied accounts of witnesses and families and other unofficial testimonies, the authorities estimate that the site could contain at least 4,000 remains, with the possibility of thousands of others.
Al-Khasfa is located near MossoulThe second largest city in Iraq, where ISIL took control before being defeated in Iraq at the end of 2017. At its peak, ISIL tried an area of half the size of the United Kingdom, extending to Iraq and Syria, Raqqa in the latter being the capital of their self-declaraged “caliphate”.
The group was known for its brutality. The group made massacres of Thousands of Yézidis And enslaved thousands of Yezidi women. The Yézidis, a long -term group whose faith is rooted in Zoroastrism, is always recovering from the horrors of the assault of ISIL on their community in the District of Sinjar in Iraq in 2014.
Rabah Nouri Attiyah, a lawyer who worked on more than 70 cases of missing people in Nineveh, told the AP that the information indicates that Al-Khasfa was “the greatest mass tomb in modern Iraqi history”.
Al-Asady, however, said that the investigators had not yet been able to confirm its size.
About 70 percent of the estimated human remains are supposed to belong to the Iraqi army and police staff, as well as other victims, in particular Yézidis.
The interviews with many witnesses to the region suggest that ISIL fighters have brought people by bus to kill them. “Many of them have been beheaded,” said Al-Asady.
In addition to the mass trolleys of ISIL, the Iraqi authorities continue to find such sites dating from the rule of Saddam Hussein, which was overthrown in an invasion led by the United States in 2003.
