Civil Defense teams in Nineveh Governorate retrieved the remains of 10 people from a sewage pit in the Al-Qahtaniyah district center (Tal Uzair) of Shingal (Sinjar) district, a matter provoked civil activists and organizations working to document violations committed against the Ezidis (Yazidis), as special teams are tasked for exhumation.
The fire brigade exhumed the remains, probably for Ezidis civilians slaughtered at the hands of the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant ISIL militants, on Thursday, December 2nd from a sewage pit.
Khudeda Jamil Hammo, a civil activist in the district of al-Qahtaniyah, said Civil Defense teams have extracted the remains of 10 bodies from a sewage pit in the sub-district.
“We express our dissatisfaction with what the Civil Defense has done, because according to International laws and norms this task should be carried out by special teams from the Martyrs Foundation, Mass Graves and Forensic Medicine.”
"The civil defense teams had to inform the concerned authorities in this regard, because this task requires good knowledge, and at the same time, it would have been better for the Martyrs and Mass Graves Foundation to take over the matter for the sake of those remains," Hammo added.
KirkukNow was unable to obtain statements from officials of the mass graves team in Baghdad or the Civil Defense about the incident.
It was the sixth mass grave that was found within the boundaries of Shingal district, home to the Ezidi community, within the past three days, suspected of being Yazidi victims who were killed during the period of ISIS control (2014-2017). It is estimated that the six mass graves contain the remains of 25 people.
On November 21st, the national team of the martyrs Foundation has unearthed a mass grave in Gir Ouzer home to seven bodies, all members of one family, sons and grandsons of Mother Shamé, named mother of martyrs by the Ezidis since she has lost 32 members out of her 65-member family.
Seized in August 2014 by ISIS militants whom accused the Ezidis of being “heretics,” Shingal has been the scene of tragedy: a genocidal campaign of killings, rape, abductions and enslavement, amounted to genocide.
Shingal is home to 82 mass graves and tens of individual graves for Ezidis slaughtered at the hands of the extremist militants of IS.
Shingal, on the border of Iraq-Syria, is home to hundreds of thousands of the Ezidi community targeted by Islamic State in Iraq and Levant ISIL in August 2014 and one of the disputed territories between Baghdad and Erbil.
Nineveh, December 2nd 2021: The remains of 10 people were recovered from a sewage pit in sub-district of Gir Ouzer. Media of the Civil Defense Directorate in Ninewa
Khairy Ali, director of Shingal office for the Yazidi Documentation Organization, told KirkukNow one of those six mass graves is located in the village of Ain Fateh of the Qayrawan sub-district in the Shingal district.
"The identities of the victims are not known until now... We put red tapes around those graves to prevent people from approaching them."
"We informed the Foundation for Martyrs and Mass Graves in Baghdad to send its teams to that village in order to open the mass graves," Khairy Ali said.
On March 15, 2019, the first mass grave for the Eizidi victims was unearthed in the village of Kojo where 364 bodies were collected from 17 mass graves, official records of Iraqi national team for mass graves said.
