According to the state-run Iraqi News Agency, local authorities were coordinating the excavation of al-Khafsa, south of Mosul, with the assistance of the judiciary, forensic investigators, the Iraqi Martyrs Foundation, and the directorate of mass graves.
The site is thought to have been the gruesome setting for some of the worst massacres ever carried out by ISIL, a sinkhole that is about 150 meters (nearly 500 feet) deep and 110 meters (360 ft) wide.
The Martyrs Foundation’s mass graves excavation team, led by Ahmad Qusay al-Asady, announced to The Associated Press that they started working on August 9 at the province’s request.
According to al-Asady, the operation will initially focus on gathering visible human remains and surface evidence, while preparing for a full exhumation, which officials claim will call for international assistance.
The foundation will then begin collecting DNA from suspected victims’ families and creating a database.
Full exhumations can only be performed with expert assistance, such as navigating the site’s hazards, such as sulfur water and unexploded objects. DNA identification may have been hampered by the fact that the human remains may have eroded as a result.
Al-Asady continued, “Al-Khafsa is a very complicated site because of the presence of these elements.”
Authorities estimate that the site may contain at least 4, 000 remains, with the possibility of thousands more, based on unverified accounts from witnesses, families, and other unofficial testimony.
Al-Khasfa is close to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, where ISIL once seized control before losing in Iraq in late 2017. ISIL’s eradication of Raqqa, the capital of their self-declared “caliphate,” stretched across Iraq and Syria, to the extent that it was half the size of the United Kingdom at its height.
For its brutality, the organization was well-known. The group systematically enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and massacred thousands of Yazidi people. The Yazidis, a long-held sect whose religion is rooted in Zoroastrianism, are still recovering from the horrors of ISIL’s 2014 atrocities against their community in Iraq’s Sinjar district.
According to Rabah Nouri Attiyah, a lawyer who has handled more than 70 cases of missing people in Nineveh, information points to al-Khasfa as “the largest mass grave in contemporary Iraqi history.”
Al-Asady claimed that investigators haven’t yet been able to determine its size.
According to estimates, Yazidis, the army, police, and other victims are the only ones who are credited with about 70% of the estimated human remains in Iraq.
ISIL fighters reportedly took people there by bus to kill them, according to interviews with numerous local witnesses. According to al-Asady, “Many of them were decapitated.”
