An extensive report by The Associated Press has found at least 72 mass graves in Iraq and Syria, where the Islamic State terror group is feared to have slaughtered thousands of people in its ongoing genocide of Yazidis, Christians, and all who stand in its way.
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A survey of territory formerly held by the Islamic State has discovered dozens of mass graves containing anywhere from 5,200 to more than 15,000 bodies, according to reports.
Using satellite imagery, photos, and interviews, AP has found the location of 17 mass graves in Syria, and 16 of the mass graves the news organization located in Iraq are in areas still to unsafe to excavate.
Exact numbers for the total amount of dead are hard to decipher, as many graves are located in areas too unsafe to fully explore.
In the meantime, estimates of the numbers killed and dumped in mass graves are now based on the reports of traumatised survivors, ISIL propaganda and what can be gleaned from a cursory look at the Earth from satellite and other imagery.
No one outside IS has seen the Iraqi ravine where hundreds of prison inmates were killed. Another man, Rasho Qassim, drives every day past the grave where his two sons are interred. But proving what United Nations officials and others have described as an ongoing genocide – and prosecuting those behind it – will be complicated as the condition of the graves deteriorates.
“There’s been virtually no effort to systematically document the crimes perpetrated, to preserve the evidence, and to ensure that mass graves are identified and protected”, she continued.
“It has been two years but nobody has come”.
Satellite imaging offers the clearest look at massacres – such as one at Badoush Prison in the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014 that left 600 male inmates dead. A patch of scraped earth and tyre tracks show the probable killing site, according to exclusive photos obtained by imagery intelligence firm AllSource Analysis.
AP noted that one of the 72 graves it documented contains only three bodies, while the largest is believed to hold thousands, but there is no precise number of victims yet. AllSource looked for images of disturbed earth in the city in the northwest of Iraq – big enough to be noticeable from a satellite image – that tallied with accounts given by survivors to Human Rights Watch.
Kurdish Peshmerga forces inspect a site marked in Kurdish with a sign reading, “Kurdish mass grave”, in Hardan village in northern Iraq on December 22, 2014.
Activists believe there are hundreds of mass graves in Syria in territories still held by IS, AP says.
Justice has been done at least once – in the deaths of about 1 700 Iraqi soldiers machine-gunned at Camp Speicher.
But justice is likely to be elusive in areas still firmly under DAESH control, even though some of the extremists have filmed themselves committing atrocities. That’s the case for a natural sinkhole outside Mosul that is now a pit of corpses.
With war still ongoing, in places such as Hardan, a Kurdish area, the authorities have merely roped off the mass graves, and say there are now no resources to excavate and document the dead.
Some of the worst are in Deir el-Zour province.
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“This is a drop in an ocean of mass graves expected to be discovered in the future in Syria”, Awad said.
