Source: Yazidi mass graves discovered in Mosul exceed 70
This image released by the the Mass Graves Directorate of the Kurdish Regional Government shows a human skull in a mass grave containing Yazidis killed by Islamic State militants in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in May, 2015. An analysis by The Associated Press has found 72 mass graves left behind by Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria, and many more are expected to be discovered as the group loses territory. (Kurdish Mass Graves Directorate via AP)
Mosul (IraqiNews.com) The number of mass graves containing the relics of people from the Iraqi Yazidi minority discovered in Mosul has reached 70.
Alghad Press quoted a source at al-Shohadaa (martyrs) institution saying that technical teams have explored more than 70 mass graves in Sinjar, Tal Afar and Al-Baaj, adding that a large number of those belonged to Yazidis killed under Islamic State militants’ rule.
Based on the Iraqi constitution, al-Shohadaa is tasked with assisting families of victims of injustice under the regime of late president Saddam Hussein.
According to the source, many of those graves are prone to damage due to weather factors and grubbing animals.
The source said the institution does not, however, possess a database of families who had lost members in a way that enables authorities to identify the affiliation of dead bodies.
A statistic released by the Kurdistan Region Government’s Endowments and Religious Affairs Ministry in July said Islamic State’s massacres of Yazidis forced nearly 360.000 of the religious minority to flee their areas. It said IS had kidnapped 6417 Yazidis since 2014, the report added. Those included 1102 women and 1655 children, the statistics show, adding that authorities had run into 43 mass graves of Yazidi victims slaughtered by IS,.
Islamic State massacred and enslaved thousands of Yazidis when they overran their Sinjar region, west of Nineveh.
In August, the United Nations said Yazidi atrocities under the Islamic State continued. “The genocide is ongoing and remains largely unaddressed, despite the obligation of States…to prevent and to punish the crime,” the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in a report.
“Thousands of Yazidi men and boys remain missing and the terrorist group continues to subject some 3,000 women and girls in Syria to horrific violence including brutal daily rapes and beatings,” it added.