Iraqi authorities announced on Sunday that they exhumed from a mass grave in Mosul the remains of 85 Islamic State fighters and their relatives killed during the capture of that jihadist stronghold by the Iraqi army in 2016-2017.
The remains of 35 people were exhumed on Saturday, then those of another 50 people on Sunday, “and work continues,” Hassan Wathiq al-Anzi, director of legal medicine in Nineveh, northern Iraq province of which Mosul is the capital, told AFP.
It is not yet in a position to estimate how many bodies were buried in this place, nor under what circumstances those people, members of IS and their relatives, died.”
This could be one of the first discoveries of mass graves with the remains of members of the jihadist organization in Iraq killed during the Battle of Mosul between October 2016 and the summer of 2017.
From 2014 until the military defeat in late 2017, IS occupied wide areas of Iraqi territory and regarded Mosul as its stronghold in the country.
According to the UN, during that period, the jihadists carried out a “genocide” in Iraq and left 200 mass graves that could contain up to 12,000 bodies.
According to the Civil Defense of the province of Nineveh, the place of the Mosul mass grave was known to the authorities, but legal medicine only began digging on Saturday.
In addition to ISIS, Iraq continues to discover mass graves from the time of Saddam Hussein's regime, which was overthrown in 2003 by the United States.
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