Retrieve Yezidi remains from Baghouz mass grave, KRG urges Baghdad
“As the Daesh terrorist group makes a last stand and is getting weakened day by day, the group’s abundant gruesome atrocities against humanity are unveiled, the latest of which was the killing of a number of innocent Yezidi girls and women in the Syrian Baghouz city,” read a statement from the Kurdistan Parliament on Sunday, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper published a report on February 23 quoting an unnamed source claiming British Special Forces had discovered the severed heads of 50 Yezidi women in dustbins around Baghouz.
“ISIS has beheaded 50 Yezidi women and girls in a very barbaric way in Baghouz,” it said.
Speaking to Rudaw, a Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) official confirmed a mass grave had been discovered as troops advanced on the village.
“ISIS kidnapped a lot of Yezidi women and kids. During our advances, we liberated 200 kids and women. In the meantime, we discovered a large number of Yezidi women bodies,” said Lilwa Abdulla, spokesperson of the SDF’s Jazeera Storm operation now besieging the village.
The Kurdistan parliament said the news “once again reminds us of the mass killing crime committed by the terrorist Daesh organization against the Yezids” in 2014, when ISIS militants swept northern Iraq.
“We are urging relevant authorities from the Iraqi federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government to follow up on that and take necessary measures to repatriate the bodies of the victims and document evidence.”
Roughly half of the 6,000 Yezidis abducted by ISIS in 2014 have been found.
On Thursday, AFP quoted SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin, who said a mass grave had been discovered in an area near Baghouz 10 days ago.
“It contains the bodies of men as well as the severed heads of women,” Afrin told AFP, adding that the number of victims and their identity is currently unknown.
Although none of the reports have been independently verified, Yezidis and Iraqi politicians have demanded more information.
Most Yezidis are yet to return to their homes in Shingal. The majority live in camps in the Kurdistan Region’s province of Duhok.
Twenty-one Yezidi children and their relatives were overcome with emotion on Saturday as they were reunited in Iraq four years after their kidnap.
