Iraq starts work on ISIL mass grave thought to contain thousands

MOSUL

Iraqi authorities have begun excavating the site of a mass grave near Mosul city believed to contain thousands of victims of the ISIL terrorist organization, the project's director has said.

The first phase, which was launched on Aug. 10, includes surface-level excavation at the Khasfa site, director Ahmed al-Assadi said.

An AFP correspondent visiting the site in northern Iraq on Aug. 17 said the team unearthed human skulls buried in the sand.

Khasfa is located near Mosul, where ISIL had established the capital of their self-declared "caliphate" before being defeated in Iraq in late 2017.

Assadi said that there were no precise figures for the numbers of victims buried there, one of dozens of mass graves ISIL left behind in Iraq , but a U.N. report from 2018 said Khasfa was likely the country's largest.

Official estimates put the number of bodies buried at the site at at least 4,000, with the possibility of thousands more.

The project director said the victims buried there include "soldiers executed by ISIL,” members of the Yazidi minority and residents of Mosul.

Exhuming the bodies from Khasfa is particularly difficult, Assadi said, as underground sulphur water makes the earth very porous.

The water may have also eroded the human remains, complicating DNA identification of victims, he added.

Assadi said further studies will be required before his team can dig deeper and exhume bodies at the site, a sinkhole about 150-metre (nearly 500-foot) deep and 110-metre wide.

Iraqi authorities said it was the site of "one of the worst massacres" committed by Isıl jihadists, executing 280 in a single day in 2016, many of them interior ministry employees.