Anbar (IraqiNews.com) A mass grave containing human remains of burnt bodies has been found, north of Ramadi, Anbar Operations Command announced on Thursday.

“Troops of the army’s tenth division, affiliated to Anbar Operations Command, ran into a mass grave containing remains of unidentified burnt bodies inside a house in al-Tarabisha region, north of Ramadi,” a senior source from the command told AlSumaria News.

“The bodies have not been recognized yet; whether they are civilians or members of the Islamic State militant group,” the source, who preferred anonymity, added.

Thousands of IS militants as well as Iraqi civilians were killed since the government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition was launched in October 2016 to fight the militant group, which declared a self-styled “caliphate” from Mosul in June 2014.

A total of 104 Iraqi civilians and policemen were killed, while 177 others were injured in acts of terrorism, violence and armed conflict in Iraq in March, according to casualty figures by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

As many as 3,298 civilians were killed and 4,781 others were wounded in 2017, excluding Anbar civilian casualty figures for November and December, which are not available, UNAMI said in a report in December.

In December, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced full liberation of Iraqi lands, declaring end of war against IS members. </s> 200 corpses found in mass grave in Syria’s Raqa: official

BEIRUT: Two hundred corpses, including those of people believed to have been executed by the Islamic State group, were found near the Syrian city of Raqa, a local official and a war monitor said Wednesday. The mass grave contained the bodies of five middle-aged men in orange jumpsuits of the kind typically worn by IS hostages, Yasser al-Khamees and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. “They were shackled and shot in the head,” said Khamees, who heads a team of first responders. </s> Iraqi security forces say they have discovered a mass grave containing some 150 decapitated corpses in the town of Hammam al-Alil which was seized from Islamic State last week. Mana Rabiee reports. </s> The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said yesterday that a new mass grave containing 200 bodies has been found in Raqqa, the former stronghold of Daesh in Syria.

The group said the grave included the bodies of three women who were likely to have been stoned to death and at least five middle aged men dressed in orange jumpsuits; typically worn by Daesh hostages.

In May, the UK-based group announced that a mass grave containing nearly 1,700 bodies was uncovered inside a house controlled by a group in the town of Al-Shafa, east of Deir Ez-Zor.

The observatory said at the time that the large number of corpses raises questions whether the victims were killed in air strikes launched by the international coalition as part of its war on Daesh.

The Syrian Observatory called for the formation of a fact-finding committee to investigate the mass graves in Raqqa and identify those responsible for the deaths. </s> Iraqi authorities have discovered a mass grave with the bodies of 38 Indian construction workers abducted when Daesh militants overran the northern city of Mosul in 2014, officials said Tuesday.

The bodies were found buried near the village of Badush, northwest of Mosul, in an area that Iraqi forces recaptured last July.

The killing was a "heinous crime carried out by Daesh terrorist gangs," Iraqi official Najiha Abdul-Amir al-Shimari told reporters.

The people killed were "citizens of the friendly Indian state. Their dignity was supposed to be protected, but the forces of evil wanted to defame the principles of Islam," said Najiha, the head of Iraq's Martyrs Establishment, a government body dealing with people killed in the fight against the Daesh terror group.

The abducted workers, most from northern India, had been employed by a construction company operating near Mosul when militants captured wide swaths of northern Iraq in the summer of 2014.

Relatives said they received panicked phone calls from some of the workers five days after Mosul was captured, asking for help.

Around 10,000 Indians worked and lived in Iraq at that time.

Dozens of mass graves have been discovered in territory once held by the Daesh terror group, though Iraq's government has only been able to examine a handful of them. Iraqi officials say they lack the resources and trained personnel to properly exhume so many sites.

At the height of their power, Daesh controlled nearly a third of the country.

After Iraq recaptured the area around Mosul, search operations led to a mound of dirt near Badush, where local residents said bodies had been buried by Daesh, Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj said in Parliament.

Iraqi authorities used radar to verify that the mound was a mass grave, she said, and then exhumed the bodies. Indian authorities then sent DNA samples from relatives of the missing workers.

Forty Indians were captured by the militants, though one man managed to escape. Iraqi authorities said the mass grave held 39 bodies, but only 38 have been positively identified through DNA analysis. Analysis on the last body has not yet been completed, Swaraj said.

"It is indeed a moment of deep grief and sadness for us," India's ambassador to Iraq, Pradeep Singh Rajpurohit, told reporters in Baghdad. "India strongly condemns terrorism in all forms and manifestations and stands in solidarity with the government and the people of Iraq in their fight against terrorism."

He said the bodies will be sent back to India "in a couple of weeks or so."

Harjit Masih, the only Indian survivor, has long said that the rest of the group had been killed. He said they had all been held for a number of days, then taken outside and ordered to kneel. Then the militants opened fire.

"They were killed in front of my eyes," he told reporters Tuesday in his north Indian home village. He was shot in the thigh but managed to escape.

Iraq, which is in the midst of an economic crisis, is also struggling to remove rebuild after more than three years of grueling war against the militants. The fight against Daesh has cost Iraq more than $1 billion in destroyed infrastructure, officials say.

In February, Turkey pledged $5 billion in loans and investment to its southern neighbor, making the country one of the top contributors to reconstruction efforts. </s> Mosul (IraqiNews.com) A mass grave with the remains of at least 60 Iraqi civilians was found in the former Islamic State bastion, Mosul, a police officer was quoted saying on Wednesday.

Cap. Amir Watheq, from Nineveh police force, told BasNews website that security forces found the grave at Hammam al-Alil in southern Mosul, adding that most of the remains belonged to women who attempted to flee the area during the military campaign to retake the region.

As Iraqi troops recaptured areas held by Islamic State militants since 2014, they have regularly run into mass graves of civilians and security agents executed by the militants for fleeing the group’s havens or collaborating with security forces.

Iraq’s war against the Islamic State displaced millions of civilians both inside and outside the country, and left thousands dead, according to government and United Nations figures. In 2017 alone, violence left more than 3000 dead and more than 4000 wounded.

Iraq declared victory over the Islamic State last December, ending a three-year war to bring down the group’s self-styled “caliphate” declared from Nineveh’s Mosul in 2014. Security continues to comb recaptured areas for remnant cells as a number of attacks against civilians and security grew fears of their resurgence. </s> IS buried thousands in 72 mass graves, AP finds

HARDAN, Iraq (AP) — Surrounded by smoke and flames, the sound of gunshots echoing around him, the young man crouched in the creek for hours, listening to the men in his family die.

On the other side of the mountain, another survivor peered through binoculars as the handcuffed men of neighboring villages were shot and then buried by a waiting bulldozer. For six days he watched as the extremists filled one grave after another with his friends and relatives.

Between them, the two scenes of horror on Sinjar mountain contain six burial sites and the bodies of more than 100 people, just a small fraction of the mass graves Islamic State extremists have scattered across Iraq and Syria.

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)

In exclusive interviews, photos and research, The Associated Press has documented and mapped 72 of the mass graves, the most comprehensive survey so far, with many more expected to be uncovered as the Islamic State group's territory shrinks. In Syria, AP has obtained locations for 17 mass graves, including one with the bodies of hundreds of members of a single tribe all but exterminated when IS extremists took over their region. For at least 16 of the Iraqi graves, most in territory too dangerous to excavate, officials do not even guess the number of dead. In others, the estimates are based on memories of traumatized survivors, Islamic State propaganda and what can be gleaned from a cursory look at the earth.

Still, even the known numbers of victims buried are staggering — from 5,200 to more than 15,000.

Sinjar mountain is dotted with mass graves, some in territory clawed back from IS after the group's onslaught against the Yazidi minority in August 2014; others in the deadly no man's land that has yet to be secured.

The bodies of Talal Murat's father, uncles and cousins lie beneath the rubble of the family farm, awaiting a time when it is safe for surviving relatives to return to the place where the men were gunned down. On Sinjar's other flank, Rasho Qassim drives daily past the graves holding the bodies of his two sons. The road is in territory long since seized back, but the five sites are untouched, roped off and awaiting the money or the political will for excavation, as the evidence they contain is scoured away by the wind and baked by the sun.

"We want to take them out of here. There are only bones left. But they said 'No, they have to stay there, a committee will come and exhume them later,'" said Qassim, standing at the edge of the flimsy fence surrounding one site, where his two sons are buried. "It has been two years but nobody has come."

IS made no attempt to hide its atrocities. In fact it boasted of them. But proving what United Nations officials and others have described as an ongoing genocide — and prosecuting those behind it — will be complicated as the graves deteriorate.

"We see clear evidence of the intent to destroy the Yazidi people," said Naomi Kikoler, who recently visited the region for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. "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."

Following the release of the AP research, the State Department noted that it is providing assistance to Iraqi authorities for the investigation of mass graves.

"Sadly, we anticipate that additional mass graves will be discovered as additional lands are liberated from Da'esh," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

Then there are the graves still out of reach. The Islamic State group's atrocities extend well outside the Yazidi region in northern Iraq.

Satellites offer the clearest look at massacres such as the one at Badoush Prison in June 2014 that left 600 male inmates dead. A patch of scraped earth and tire tracks show the likely killing site, according to exclusive photos obtained by the imagery intelligence firm AllSource Analysis.

Of the 72 mass graves documented by AP, the smallest contains three bodies; the largest is believed to hold thousands, but no one knows for sure.

___

ALL THEY COULD DO WAS WATCH THE SLAUGHTER

On the northern flank of Sinjar mountain, five grave sites ring a desert crossroads. It is here that the young men of Hardan village are buried, under thistles and piles of cracked earth. They were killed in the bloody IS offensive of August 2014.

Through his binoculars, Arkan Qassem watched it all. His village, Gurmiz, is just up the slope from Hardan, giving a clear view over the plain below. When the jihadis swept over the area, everyone in Gurmiz fled up the mountaintop for refuge. Then Arkan and nine other men returned to their village with light weapons to try to defend their homes.

Instead, all they could do was watch the slaughter below. Arkan witnessed the militants set up checkpoints, preventing residents from leaving. Women and children were taken away.

Then the killings began. The first night, Arkan saw the militants line up a group of handcuffed men in the headlights of a bulldozer at an intersection, less than a kilometer (half mile) down the slope from Gurmiz. They gunned the men down, then the bulldozer plowed the earth over their bodies.

Over six days, Arkan and his comrades watched helplessly as the fighters brought out three more groups of men — several dozen each, usually with hands bound — to the crossroads and killed them. He didn't always see what they did with the bodies. One time, he saw them lighting a bonfire, but he couldn't see why.

Finally, the jihadis brought in artillery and prepared to make an assault on Gurmiz. Arkan and his comrades fled up the mountain to where their families had taken refuge.

Now, since IS fighters were driven out of the area, the 32-year-old has returned to his home. But he's haunted by the site. As documented by the aid group Yazda, which has mapped the Sinjar sites, the graves are in a rough pentagon flanking the crossroads, largely unprotected. Around one of them is a mesh fence and a wind-battered sign. As Arkan spoke at the site, a shepherd herded his flock nearby.

"I have lots of people I know there. Mostly friends and neighbors," he said. "It's very difficult to look at them every day."

___

"THIS BODY IS WEARING MY FATHER'S CLOTHES"

As IS fighters swarmed into the Sinjar area in early August 2014, Talal fled his town along with his father, mother, four sisters and younger brother. They and dozens of other men, women and children from his extended clan converged on an uncle's farm outside the town of Tel Azer. They prayed it was remote enough to escape the killings that were already engulfing so many Yazidis.

It wasn't.

The jihadis fired at the house from a distance. Then they rolled up in their vehicles and shot one man in the head as they stood in the yard. They surrounded the farmhouse, ordered everyone outside and demanded the impossible: Convert.

The Yazidi faith, one of the region's oldest, has elements of Christianity and Islam but is distinct. Yazidis worship the Peacock Angel, fallen and forgiven by God under their tradition, and their shrines feature carved images of the birds and references to the sun. Muslim extremists condemned them as "devil worshippers" and over the centuries have subjected them to multiple massacres — 72, by the Yazidis' count.

In its own propaganda, the Islamic State group made clear its intention to wipe out the Yazidi community. In an issue of its online English-language magazine Dabiq, it scolded Muslims for allowing the Yazidis to continue existing, calling their ancient religion a form of paganism. It quoted Quranic verses to justify killing the Yazidis unless they become Muslim.

Thwarted in their halfhearted attempt at conversions, the fighters separated about 35 teenage girls and young women from the rest, crammed them into a few cars and drove away. The militants herded the older women and young children into the farmhouse and locked the door.

Then they lined the men and teenaged boys against the wall of the stables — around 40 in all, including Talal.

There were too many of them, too bunched up, to efficiently mow down, so the fighters then ordered them to lie on the ground in a row, Talal said. That was when his uncle told him to make a run for it. Talal bolted into his uncle's hayfield, as did several other men. The militants fired at them, and the bullets ignited the hay, dry from the summer sun. The fire covered Talal's escape, and he took shelter in a nearby creek.

There he hid, listening as the gunmen shot his family to death. He eventually fled toward the mountain, joined by three others who had survived the massacre. Four out of 40.

Back at the farm, the gunmen eventually left and the women and children emerged, looking around with growing horror.

Nouri Murat, Talal's mother, found her husband. His body was untouched, but his head was shattered. Her daughters, she said, were confused at first. "This is strange, this body is wearing my father's clothes," one of them said. As Nouri frantically searched around the property for any surviving menfolk, her 9-year-old daughter Rukhan lay down beside her father's corpse.

Finally, other women persuaded the family to head to the mountain before the Islamic State fighters returned.

As they began the long walk north, Nouri noticed Rukhan's bloody fist. Fearing her daughter was wounded, she pried open the girl's clenched fingers. Inside were a handful of her father's teeth.

___

"THEY DON'T EVEN TRY TO HIDE THEIR CRIMES"

Nearly every area freed from IS control has unmasked new mass graves, like one found by the sports stadium in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Many of the graves themselves are easy enough to find, most covered with just a thin coating of earth.

"They don't even try to hide their crimes," said Sirwan Jalal, the director of Iraqi Kurdistan's agency in charge of mass graves. "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."

No one outside IS has seen the Iraqi ravine where hundreds of Shiite prison inmates were killed point blank and then torched. Satellite images of scraped dirt along the river point to its location, according to Steve Wood of AllSource. His analysts triangulated survivors' accounts and began to systematically search the desert according to their descriptions of that day, June 10, 2014.

The inmates were separated out by religion, and Shiites were loaded onto trucks, driven for a few kilometers (miles) and forced to line up and count off, according to accounts by 15 survivors gathered by Human Rights Watch. Then they knelt along the edge of the crescent-shaped ravine, according to a report cited by AllSource.

"I was number 43. I heard them say '615,' and then one ISIS guy said, 'We're going to eat well tonight.' A man behind us asked, 'Are you ready?' Another person answered 'Yes,' and began shooting at us with a machine-gun. Then they all started to shoot us from behind, going down the row," according to the Human Rights Watch account of a survivor identified only as A.S.

The men survived by pretending to be dead.

Using their accounts and others, AllSource examined an image from July 17, 2014, that appeared to show the location as described, between a main road and the railway outside Mosul. The bodies are believed to be packed tightly together, side by side in a space approximately the length of two football fields end to end, in what the AllSource analysis described as a "sardine trench." Tire tracks lead to and from the site.

"There's actually earth that has been pushed over and actually moved to cover parts of the ravine. As we look across the entire ravine we only see that in this one location," said Wood. "Ultimately there are many, many more sites across Iraq and Syria that have yet to be either forensically exhumed or be able to be detailed and there's quite a bit more research that needs to take place."

The key, Wood said, is having photos to indicate a grave's location taken soon after its creation.

Justice has been done in at least one IS mass killing — that of about 1,700 Iraqi soldiers who were forced to lie face-down in a ditch and then machine-gunned at Camp Speicher. On Aug. 21, 36 men convicted in those killings were hanged at Iraq's Nasiriyah prison.

But justice is likely to be elusive in areas still firmly under IS control, even though the extremists have filmed themselves committing the atrocities. That's the case for a deep natural sinkhole outside Mosul that is now a pit of corpses. In Syria's Raqqa province, thousands of bodies are believed to have been thrown into the giant al-Houta crevasse.

Conditions in much of Syria remain a mystery. Activists believe there are hundreds of mass graves in IS-controlled areas that can only be explored when fighting stops. By that time, they fear any effort to document the massacres, exhume and identify the remains will become infinitely more complicated.

Working behind IS lines, local residents have informally documented some mass graves, even partially digging some up. Some of the worst have been found in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour. There, 400 members of the Shueitat tribe were found in one grave, just some of the up to 1,000 members of the tribe believed to have been massacred by IS when the militants took over the area, said Ziad Awad, the editor of an online publication on Deir el-Zour called The Eye of the City who is trying to document the graves.

In Raqqa province, the bodies of 160 Syrian soldiers, killed when IS overran their base, were found in seven large pits.

So far, at least 17 mass graves are known, though largely unreachable, in a list put together from AP interviews with activists from Syrian provinces still under IS rule as well as fighters and residents in former IS strongholds.

"This is a drop in an ocean of mass graves expected to be discovered in the future in Syria," said Awad.

___

Butler reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Balint Szlanko and Salar Salim in Irbil, Iraq; Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad; Zeina Karam and Philip Issa in Beirut, and Maya Alleruzzo in Cairo contributed to this story.

___

Read previous stories in AP's occasional series "Islamic State: A Savage Legacy" at www.ap.org/explore/a-savage-legacy/

FILE - In this April 3, 2015, file photo, an Iraqi man prays for his slain relative at the site of a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of Iraqi soldiers killed by Islamic State group militants when they overran Camp Speicher military base in Tikrit, Iraq, in June 2014. 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. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed, File)

In this Wednesday, May 18, 2016 photo, a relative shows a phone picture of Murat Mahmoud during an interview with the Associated Press at Kankhe Camp for the internally displaced in Dahuk, northern Iraq. Murat was killed on Aug. 3, 2014 by Islamic State militants in a massacre of Yazidis and his body is among 40 believed in a mass grave at a farm on Sinjar Mountain. His daughter is still held by the militants. An analysis by The AP 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. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

FILE - In this June 8, 2016 file photo, Sgt. Ahmed Abdelaziz of Iraq's elite counterterrorism forces shows an Islamic State video of his brother's death at the hands of the IS at a battle position on the southern edge of Fallujah, Iraq. Saad Abdelaziz was killed in June 2014 at Camp Speicher when the militants overran his base. More than 1,000 of Saad's comrades killed in the massacre ended up in a mass grave nearby. 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. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)

This image posted online by Islamic State militants on June 14, 2014 shows Iraqi cadets captured by IS moments before they were killed in Tikrit, Iraq. Their bodies are believed to be in one of the many mass graves left behind by Islamic State extremists. An analysis by The Associated Press has found 72 such graves in Iraq and Syria, and many more are expected to be discovered as the group loses territory. (Militant photo via AP)

In this May 17, 2016 photo, Sirwan Jalal, Director of Mass Graves for the Kurdish Regional Government, points to an image of the site of a mass grave during an interview with the Associated Press in Irbil, northern Iraq. An analysis by The AP 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. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

In this May 19, 2016 photo, the site where dozens of Yazidi men were killed in August 2014 is fenced off in Hardan, northern Iraq. 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. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

FILE - In this Dec. 22, 2014, file photo, Kurdish Peshmerga forces inspect a site marked in Kurdish with a sign reading, "Kurdish mass grave,¿ in Hardan village in northern Iraq. A handful of Yazidis who fled this tiny northern Iraqi hamlet when Islamic State militants overran it in August 2014 have returned after Kurdish fighters drove out the extremists. (AP Photo/Dalton Bennett, File)

In this May 19, 2016 photo, Arkan Qassim, center, stands at the site where he witnessed the killing dozens of Yazidi men including two sons of Rasho Qassim, right, in August 2014 in Hardan, northern Iraq. Both survivors say they simply want the graves exhumed. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

This photo released by the the Mass Graves Directorate of the Kurdish Regional Government shows a skeleton exhumed from a mass grave containing Yazidis killed by Islamic State militants in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. 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)

In this May 19, 2016 photo, Arkan Qassim, center, looks at the site where he witnessed the killing dozens of Yazidi men in August 2014 in Hardan, northern Iraq. Rasho Qassim, right, lost two sons in the massacre. Both survivors say they simply want the graves exhumed. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

FILE - In this April 19, 2016 file photo, an Iraqi security forces forensic team works at the site of a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of Iraqi civilians, security forces and members of their families, including women and children, killed by Islamic State group militants at the stadium area in Ramadi, Iraq. 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. Only a handful have been exhumed. (AP Photo, File)

This image released by the the Mass Graves Directorate of the Kurdish Regional Government shows a human jaw bone exhumed from a mass grave containing Yazidis killed by Islamic State militants in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in 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)

In this May 18, 2016 photo, Nouri, right, and her son speak to the Associated Press at Kankhe Camp for the internally displaced in Dahuk, northern Iraq. Her husband, Murat Mahmoud, was killed on Aug. 3, 2014, by Islamic State militants in a massacre of Yazidis. Their bodies are buried in a mass grave at the farm where they died, the family said. An analysis by The AP 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. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo) </s> IS buried thousands in 72 mass graves – 5,200 to more than 15,000 people buried

HARDAN: Surrounded by smoke and flames, the sound of gunshots echoing around him, the young man crouched in the creek for hours, listening to the men in his family die. On the other side of the mountain, another survivor peered through binoculars as the handcuffed men of neighboring villages were shot and then buried by a waiting bulldozer. For six days he watched as the extremists filled one grave after another with his friends and relatives.

Between them, the two scenes of horror on Sinjar mountain contain six burial sites and the bodies of more than 100 people, just a small fraction of the mass graves Islamic State extremists have scattered across Iraq and Syria. In exclusive interviews, photos and research, The Associated Press has documented and mapped 72 of the mass graves, the most comprehensive survey so far, with many more expected to be uncovered as the Islamic State group’s territory shrinks.

In Syria, AP has obtained locations for 17 mass graves, including one with the bodies of hundreds of members of a single tribe all but exterminated when IS extremists took over their region. For at least 16 of the Iraqi graves, most in territory too dangerous to excavate, officials do not even guess the number of dead. In others, the estimates are based on memories of traumatized survivors, Islamic State propaganda and what can be gleaned from a cursory look at the earth. Still, even the known victims buried are staggering – from 5,200 to more than 15,000.

Sinjar mountain is dotted with mass graves, some in territory clawed back from IS after the group’s onslaught against the Yazidi minority in August 2014; others in the deadly no man’s land that has yet to be secured. The bodies of Talal Murat’s father, uncles and cousins lie beneath the rubble of the family farm, awaiting a time when it is safe for surviving relatives to return to the place where the men were gunned down. On Sinjar’s other flank, Rasho Qassim drives daily past the graves holding the bodies of his two sons.

The road is in territory long since seized back, but the five sites are untouched, roped off and awaiting the money or the political will for excavation, as the evidence they contain is scoured away by the wind and baked by the sun. “We want to take them out of here. There are only bones left. But they said ‘No, they have to stay there, a committee will come and exhume them later,'” said Qassim, standing at the edge of the flimsy fence surrounding one site, where his two sons are buried. “It has been two years but nobody has come.”

IS made no attempt to hide its atrocities. In fact it boasted of them. But proving what United Nations officials and others have described as an ongoing genocide – and prosecuting those behind it will be complicated as the graves deteriorate. “We see clear evidence of the intent to destroy the Yazidi people,” said Naomi Kikoler, who recently visited the region for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. “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.”

Then there are the graves still out of reach. The Islamic State group’s atrocities extend well outside the Yazidi region in northern Iraq. Satellites offer the clearest look at massacres such as the one at Badoush Prison in June 2014 that left 600 male inmates dead. A patch of scraped earth and tire tracks show the likely killing site, according to exclusive photos obtained by the imagery intelligence firm AllSource Analysis. Of the 72 mass graves documented by AP, the smallest contains three bodies; the largest is believed to hold thousands, but no one knows for sure.

Watch the slaughter

 On the northern flank of Sinjar mountain, five grave sites ring a desert crossroads. It is here that the young men of Hardan village are buried, under thistles and piles of cracked earth. They were killed in the bloody IS offensive of August 2014. Through his binoculars, Arkan Qassem watched it all. His village, Gurmiz, is just up the slope from Hardan, giving a clear view over the plain below. When the jihadis swept over the area, everyone in Gurmiz fled up the mountaintop for refuge. Then Arkan and nine other men returned to their village with light weapons to try to defend their homes.

Instead, all they could do was watch the slaughter below. Arkan witnessed the militants set up checkpoints, preventing residents from leaving. Women and children were taken away. Then the killings began. The first night, Arkan saw the militants line up a group of handcuffed men in the headlights of a bulldozer at an intersection, less than a kilometer (half mile) down the slope from Gurmiz. They gunned the men down, then the bulldozer plowed the earth over their bodies.

Over six days, Arkan and his comrades watched helplessly as the fighters brought out three more groups of men – several dozen each, usually with hands bound – to the crossroads and killed them. He didn’t always see what they did with the bodies. One time, he saw them lighting a bonfire, but he couldn’t see why. Finally, the jihadis brought in artillery and prepared to make an assault on Gurmiz. Arkan and his comrades fled up the mountain to where their families had taken refuge. Now, since IS fighters were driven out of the area, the 32-year-old has returned to his home.

But he’s haunted by the site. As documented by the aid group Yazda, which has mapped the Sinjar sites, the graves are in a rough pentagon flanking the crossroads, largely unprotected. Around one of them is a mesh fence and a wind-battered sign. As Arkan spoke at the site, a shepherd herded his flock nearby. “I have lots of people I know there. Mostly friends and neighbors,” he said. “It’s very difficult to look at them every day.”

‘My father’s clothes’

 As IS fighters swarmed into the Sinjar area in early August 2014, Talal fled his town along with his father, mother, four sisters and younger brother. They and dozens of other men, women and children from his extended clan converged on an uncle’s farm outside the town of Tel Azer. They prayed it was remote enough to escape the killings that were already engulfing so many Yazidis. It wasn’t. The jihadis fired at the house from a distance. Then they rolled up in their vehicles and shot one man in the head as they stood in the yard. They surrounded the farmhouse, ordered everyone outside and demanded the impossible: Convert.

The Yazidi faith, one of the region’s oldest, has elements of Christianity and Islam but is distinct. Yazidis worship the Peacock Angel, fallen and forgiven by God under their tradition, and their shrines feature carved images of the birds and references to the sun. Muslim extremists condemned them as “devil worshippers” and over the centuries have subjected them to multiple massacres – 72, by the Yazidis’ count.

In its own propaganda, the Islamic State group made clear its intention to wipe out the Yazidi community. In an issue of its online English-language magazine Dabiq, it scolded Muslims for allowing the Yazidis to continue existing, calling their ancient religion a form of paganism. It quoted Quranic verses to justify killing the Yazidis unless they become Muslim. Thwarted in their halfhearted attempt at conversions, the fighters separated about 35 teenage girls and young women from the rest, crammed them into a few cars and drove away. The militants herded the older women and young children into the farmhouse and locked the door. Then they lined the men and teenaged boys against the wall of the stables – around 40 in all, including Talal.

There were too many of them, too bunched up, to efficiently mow down, so the fighters then ordered them to lie on the ground in a row, Talal said. That was when his uncle told him to make a run for it. Talal bolted into his uncle’s hayfield, as did several other men. The militants fired at them, and the bullets ignited the hay, dry from the summer sun. The fire covered Talal’s escape, and he took shelter in a nearby creek. There he hid, listening as the gunmen shot his family to death. He eventually fled toward the mountain, joined by three others who had survived the massacre. Four out of 40. Back at the farm, the gunmen eventually left and the women and children emerged, looking around with growing horror.

Nouri Murat, Talal’s mother, found her husband. His body was untouched, but his head was shattered. Her daughters, she said, were confused at first. “This is strange, this body is wearing my father’s clothes,” one of them said. As Nouri frantically searched around the property for any surviving menfolk, her 9-year-old daughter Rukhan lay down beside her father’s corpse. Finally, other women persuaded the family to head to the mountain before the Islamic State fighters returned. As they began the long walk north, Nouri noticed Rukhan’s bloody fist. Fearing her daughter was wounded, she pried open the girl’s clenched fingers. Inside were a handful of her father’s teeth.

They don’t hide their crimes

 Nearly every area freed from IS control has unmasked new mass graves, like one found by the sports stadium in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Many of the graves themselves are easy enough to find, most covered with just a thin coating of earth. “They don’t even try to hide their crimes,” said Sirwan Jalal, the director of Iraqi Kurdistan’s agency in charge of mass graves. “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.” No one outside IS has seen the Iraqi ravine where hundreds of Shiite prison inmates were killed point blank and then torched. Satellite images of scraped dirt along the river point to its location, according to Steve Wood of AllSource.

His analysts triangulated survivors’ accounts and began to systematically search the desert according to their descriptions of that day, June 10, 2014. The inmates were separated out by religion, and Shiites were loaded onto trucks, driven for a few kilometers and forced to line up and count off, according to accounts by 15 survivors gathered by Human Rights Watch. Then they knelt along the edge of the crescent-shaped ravine, according to a report cited by AllSource. “I was number 43. I heard them say ‘615,’ and then one ISIS guy said, ‘We’re going to eat well tonight.’

A man behind us asked, ‘Are you ready?’ Another person answered ‘Yes,’ and began shooting at us with a machine-gun. Then they all started to shoot us from behind, going down the row,” according to the Human Rights Watch account of a survivor identified only as AS. The men survived by pretending to be dead. Using their accounts and others, AllSource examined an image from July 17, 2014, that appeared to show the location as described, between a main road and the railway outside Mosul. The bodies are believed to be packed tightly together, side by side in a space approximately the length of two football fields end to end, in what the AllSource analysis described as a “sardine trench.”

Tire tracks lead to and from the site. “There’s actually earth that has been pushed over and actually moved to cover parts of the ravine. As we look across the entire ravine we only see that in this one location,” said Wood. “Ultimately there are many, many more sites across Iraq and Syria that have yet to be either forensically exhumed or be able to be detailed and there’s quite a bit more research that needs to take place.”

The key, Wood said, is having photos to indicate a grave’s location taken soon after its creation. Justice has been done in at least one IS mass killing – that of about 1,700 Iraqi soldiers who were forced to lie face-down in a ditch and then machine-gunned at Camp Speicher. On Aug 21, 36 men convicted in those killings were hanged at Iraq’s Nasiriyah prison. But justice is likely to be elusive in areas still firmly under IS control, even though the extremists have filmed themselves committing the atrocities. That’s the case for a deep natural sinkhole outside Mosul that is now a pit of corpses.

In Syria’s Raqqa province, thousands of bodies are believed to have been thrown into the giant Al-Houta crevasse. Conditions in much of Syria remain a mystery. Activists believe there are hundreds of mass graves in IS-controlled areas that can only be explored when fighting stops. By that time, they fear any effort to document the massacres, exhume and identify the remains will become infinitely more complicated.

Working behind IS lines, local residents have informally documented some mass graves, even partially digging some up. Some of the worst have been found in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour. There, 400 members of the Shueitat tribe were found in one grave, just some of the up to 1,000 members of the tribe believed to have been massacred by IS when the militants took over the area, said Ziad Awad, the editor of an online publication on Deir el-Zour called The Eye of the City who is trying to document the graves.

In Raqqa province, the bodies of 160 Syrian soldiers, killed when IS overran their base, were found in seven large pits. So far, at least 17 mass graves are known, though largely unreachable, in a list put together from AP interviews with activists from Syrian provinces still under IS rule as well as fighters and residents in former IS strongholds. “This is a drop in an ocean of mass graves expected to be discovered in the future in Syria,” said Awad.- AP </s> (IraqiNews.com) Baghdad – In a survey conducted by the Associated Press Agency it was revealed that there are about 72 mass graves in Iraq and Syria, which contain the remains of nearly 15000 victims, who were killed by ISIS. The survey further suggested the presence of other graves in Mosul and Raqqa.

“There are about 72 mass graves in Iraq and Syria, which contains the remains of nearly 15000 victims who were killed by ISIS in the two nations,” the survey report said.

According to survey report, smallest grave contained the remains of three bodies, and the largest one is believed to contain the remains of thousand victims.

“The high number of bodies and the graves is a clear evidence of the genocides carried out by ISIS against the ethnic groups in Syria and thousands of Yezidi people in Iraq,” the report further stated.

The report further revealed that one of the 17 graves discovered in Syria holds the bodies of hundreds of members of a single tribe close to completely exterminated when ISIS violently took over their region.

The Sinjar Mountain in Iraq is the location of another horrifying discovery. Roughly 70 people of the Yezidi tribe tried to flee their Sinjar homes before ISIS invaded in August 2014.

Officials do not even guess the number of dead inside at least 16 of the Iraqi graves, mostly in territory too dangerous to excavate. The estimates are based on the memories of traumatized survivors.

“This is a drop in the ocean of mass graves expected to be discovered in the future in Syria,” added the survey report.

According to the survey, other mass graves are expected to be discovered in the Iraqi city of Mosul and Syrian city of Raqqa if the Iraqi forces backed by the international coalition succeeded in forcing an ISIS retreat.
A mass grave containing burnt bodies is found in al-Tarabisha, Anbar.