A Yazidi mass grave near Sinjar, Iraq, 2015. Photo: AFP
SINJAR, Northwest Iraq,— The bodies of 94 Yazidis killed by Islamic State (ISIS) militants have been recovered by a joint team of Iraqi and Kurdistan Regional Government specialists from a mass grave in Kocho village in Sinjar district.
The federal National Team for Uncovering the Mass Graves, in cooperation with the Kurdistan Region’s Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs, has completed the third phase of exhuming a number of mass graves in Sinjar, the secretariat of the federal Council of Ministers announced on Monday.
Ninety-four bodies were uncovered during the latest phase.
Another mass grave was also exhumed outside the village in the Sabahia area of Sinjar district, according to the statement.
The teams are working closely with the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD), led by British barrister Karim Asad Ahmad Khan.
The UN body was set up last year to collect and document forensic and legal evidence of ISIS’ crimes, preserving them for any future proceedings. Khan told the UN Security Council on July 15 that “significant progress” had been made during the first half of 2019.
The Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs in the Kurdistan Region has said there were 217 Yazidi mass graves in Sinjar, according to AFP.
In March, the first mass grave in Kocho was uncovered, which led to the recovery of 28 bodies. In May, UNITAD announced that the team had uncovered additional 12 mass graves.
So far, a total of 235 remains have been exhumed from 27 mass graves, the Council of Ministers’ statement said.
In August 2014, the Islamic State ISIS militants attacked the Sinjar district, which was home to hundreds of thousands of Yazidis, after Massoud Barzani’s KDP peshmerga militia forces withdrew from the area without a fight leaving behind the Yazidi civilians to IS killing and genocide.
An unpublished report by Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government KRG reportedly reveals that an 18,000 peshmerga forces of KRG were on the spot and retreat without mounting any defense when Islamic state IS attacked the Yazidi area of Sinjar. Many critics and Kurdish politicians blame Massoud Barzani, the commander in-chief of the Peshmerga, for the Yazidi massacre.
Thousands of Yazidi women were raped and murdered, with many of the survivors sold into sexual slavery and taken away to other parts of Iraq, Syria, and even further afield. Men and boys were systematically murdered, forced to work for the group, or coerced into becoming child soldiers.
It is estimated that 3,000 Yazidis were killed over a period of several days and 6,800 others were abducted.
Although several thousand Yazidis have been rescued over the last four-and-a-half years, another 3,000 remain missing.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish speaking religious group linked to Zoroastrianism and Sufism. The religious has roots that date back to ancient Mesopotamia, are considered heretics by the hard-line Islamic State group.
Some 600,000 Yazidis live in villages in Iraqi Kurdistan region and in Kurdish areas outside Kurdistan region in around Mosul in Nineveh province, with additional communities in Transcaucasia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and Syria. Since the 1990s, the Yazidis have emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany. There are almost 1.5 million Yazidis worldwide.
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