Politics

In 2019, a total of 18 mass graves discovered in Iraq

On Tuesday, Iraq announced that 18 mass graves containing members of multiple ethnic and religious groups were discovered in the country in 2019, some from recent years and others from conflicts that occurred decades ago.

Mustafa Shilani 2019/12/24 15:20

middle east Iraq Kurds Ezidi ISIS Baathist regime

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – On Tuesday, Iraq announced that 18 mass graves containing members of several ethnic and religious groups were discovered in the country in 2019, some from recent years and others from conflicts that occurred decades ago.

“The victims in the mass graves are from the crimes of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the previous Baath regime and are located in several provinces in the country,” said Dhaya Karim, from the Mass Graves Directorate of the Iraqi Martyr's Foundation, a government body under the Council of Ministers.

Karim specified that among the provinces where mass graves were found are Najaf, Dhi Qar, Diyala, and Anbar, adding that officials expect to find multiple others in the coming months and years, due to the “high number of missing people.”

The most recent was discovered north of Fallujah on Dec. 15 and reportedly contained at least 643 bodies, the same number of Sunni Iraqis that disappeared nearby in 2016 and for which international human rights organizations have accused sectarian Shia militias of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) of being responsible for.

Several other mass graves containing members of the Yezidi (Ezidi) religious minority were also found this year in and around Sinjar (Shingal).

Ezidis suffered heavily at the hands of the Islamic State following its rise to prominence in Iraq in 2014. The group's occupation of Shingal led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of their community, considered heretics by the terror group, and the kidnapping, enslavement, killing, and disappearance of thousands more.

In mid-2019, Muthanna Governor Ahmed Manfi told Kurdistan 24 that teams had found two mass graves containing Kurds believed to have been killed during the former Baathist regime’s deadly Anfal campaign.

Primarily in the late 1980s, the government of Saddam Hussein undertook a campaign of genocide against the Kurds in the north. Led by the infamous Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as “Chemical Ali,” the operation resulted in the deaths of up to 182,000 ethnic Kurds.

Large numbers of Kurds, including women and children, were forcefully displaced and transferred to camps in southern Iraq where the government killed thousands and buried them in the desert, some while still alive. Since the fall of the Baathist regime in 2003, many mass graves filled with Anfal victims have been exhumed in various locations throughout Iraq.

As the Islamic State took control of nearly one third of Iraq in 2014, excavation efforts were largely halted. Teams have since resumed their grizzly work, with an untold number of new mass graves, created in the most recent conflict, to look for.

Editing by John J. Catherine