ISISUp to 15,000 ISIS victims buried in 72 mass graves found in Syria, Iraq

Published 30 August 2016

The vast areas in Syria and Iraq which came under the control of ISIS in 2014 are dotted with grim reminders of the Islamist group’s brutality. The AP reports that a comprehensive survey by the news agency, using satellite imagery, excavations, mapping, and survivors testimony, has identified seventy-two mass graves in Syria and Iraq – containing up to 15,000 bodies — and that many more such graves will be discovered as the U.S.-led coalition is pushing ISIS back and shrinking the territory under the group’s control.

The vast areas in Syria and Iraq which came under the control of ISIS in 2014 are dotted with grim reminders of the Islamist group’s brutality. The AP reports that a comprehensive survey by the news agency, using satellite imagery, excavations, mapping, and survivors testimony, has identified seventy-two mass graves in Syria and Iraq – and that many more such graves will be discovered as the U.S.-led coalition is pushing ISIS back and shrinking the territory under the group’s control.

This is a drop in an ocean of mass graves expected to be discovered in the future in Syria,” Ziad Awad, the editor of online publication The Eye of the City, told AP. Awad is trying to document ISIS’s mass burial plots.

AP says that it has used satellite imagery, photos, and interviews, to find the location of seventeen mass graves in Syria and sixteen mass graves in Iraq – although the latter are in areas still too dangerous to excavate. AP says from 5,200 to more than 15,000 ISIS victims are buried in the graves it knows about.

They don’t even try to hide their crimes,” Sirwan Jalal, director of the Iraqi Kurdistan agency in charge of mass graves, told AP. “They are beheading them, shooting them, running them over in cars, all kinds of killing techniques, and they don’t even try to hide it.”

The Iraqi Kurds and other local groups note that the evidence is degraded with the passage of time and exposure to the elements, as is the ability to identify the dead. The Kurds are now seeking international forensic help.

The goal is not only to find people who have disappeared and return their remains to the their families – but also to collect the evidence which will allow bringing a war crimes case against ISIS leaders. “We want to take them out of here,” Rasho Qassim, an Iraqi Yazidi, says of the remains of his two sons. “There are only bones left. But they said ‘No, they have to stay there, a committee will come and exhume them later’…. It has been two years but nobody has come.”

There’s been virtually no effort to systematically document the crimes perpetrated, to preserve the evidence,” said Naomi Kikoler, who recently visited for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The graves are largely documented by the aid group Yazda.

— Read more in “AP documents 72 mass graves in territory freed of IS” (AP, 20 August 2016)