Syria Unearths ISIS Mass Graves Near Iraqi Border
Syria Unearths ISIS Mass Graves Near Iraqi Border
BAGHDAD—Syrian forces have unearthed mass graves near the border with Iraq containing the remains of several hundred people executed by Islamic State, providing more evidence of the militants’ reign of terror as they are driven out of territory they once controlled.
Two Iraqis who have been in contact with Syrian forces said the discovery was made in the Abu Kamal area of eastern Syria on Wednesday. Photographs they provided showed men wearing white protective suits sifting through earth in several ditches. One image showed the wrists of a corpse—reduced almost to bone—bound together with a strip of fabric.
The war against Islamic State is winding down but evidence of the group’s atrocities continue to surface, shaking survivors of the violence and hindering efforts to turn the page four years after Islamic State overran a third of Iraq and a large part of Syria.
Iraqi authorities involved in exhuming mass graves and handling the remains said they hadn’t been officially notified of the grave because it lies in Syrian territory.
However, an intelligence officer in a government-backed Iraqi militia said Syrian security forces had invited them to watch as the graves were excavated, suspecting some of the victims might be Iraqi.
“We were able to identify one of the bodies because it had an Iraqi ID card,” said officer Qasim al-Jughaifi. “The Syrians gave us the body and we took it back to his family.”
The victim was a soldier from the border town of al-Qaim in Iraq’s western province of Anbar, according to Mr. Jughaifi and a local tribal leader, Qatari al-Samarmad. Like many Iraqi soldiers, he quit when Islamic State occupied the area and offered amnesty to members of the security forces. But later on, they said, the militants suspected him of secretly collaborating with Iraqi forces and arrested him. That was the last his family heard of him.
Islamic State is now confined to a strip of land in eastern Syria from which U.S.-backed fighters are seeking to dislodge it. The Syrian Democratic Forces last week entered Hajin—the biggest town in the area Islamic State still controls, according to U.S. special envoy Brett McGurk.
Mr. Samarmad said there were likely to be many Iraqis among the dead as Islamic State had detained hundreds of opponents in Anbar, which borders Syria. As Iraqi forces advanced into Anbar in 2017, the militants probably took their prisoners across the border to Syria and killed them there, Mr. Samarmad said.
Iraq claimed victory over Islamic State one year ago but has made little progress toward exhuming the graves since then. In November the United Nations said Islamic State had left more than 200 mass graves in Iraq, containing up to 12,000 victims of the group’s occupation. Only 28 of those grave sites had been excavated, the U.N. said, with the remains of 1,258 bodies unearthed.
Iraq’s Yazidi minority, the target of a genocidal campaign by Islamic State, complains Baghdad isn’t doing enough to exhume or at least preserve mass graves as evidence of the crimes committed against them.
Nearly half of the mass graves in Iraq are in the northern Nineveh governorate—most of them around Mosul, the largest city under Islamic State control until 2017. The U.N. believes the biggest grave, in the Khasfa sinkhole, could contain several thousand victims. Efforts to recover the dead have been hindered by the Iraqi government’s strained resources, including a limited number of people trained in exhumation techniques.
Though severely weakened, Islamic State continues to wage an insurgency from remote hide-outs in Iraq, complicating efforts to reach and excavate some graves.
Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com
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