MADRID, 17 (EUROPA PRESS)
Iraqi authorities began the first phase of the exhumation work on Sunday at the Jasfa mass grave, about eight kilometers south of Mosul in Nineveh province, where thousands of victims of the "caliphate" declared in 2014 by the jihadist group Islamic State are feared to lie.
Nineveh Governor Abdul Qadir al-Dajil explained that the University of Mosul will collaborate to help identify the remains and announced that a monument will be built to honor the victims.
Around 20,000 people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds were killed under the rule of the Islamic State, according to the governor, who said authorities will also work with the judiciary to carry out the exhumations, according to the IRNA news agency.
Iraqi forces took control of the area in mid-February 2017. According to the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), an improvised explosive device in the mass grave – located in a 35-meter-wide natural sinkhole – killed a journalist and three police officers that same month.
Badush prison was the scene of an Islamic State attack on June 10, 2014, which executed 670 Shia prisoners after separating them from Sunni inmates. Prison guards locked the prisoners in and fled hours before the jihadists arrived.
In August 2014, the then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navy Pillay, stated that interviews with 20 survivors and 16 witnesses of the massacre led to the conclusion that the Islamic State had taken between 1,000 and 1,500 prisoners from the prison, moving them to an uninhabited area to separate them and execute the Shiites. Some of these bodies may be in the aforementioned mass grave.
