ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iraqi and Kurdish teams exhuming suspected mass graves in Shingal have sent the bodies of 138 Yezidis killed by Islamic State (ISIS) militants to Baghdad for DNA testing before they are handed over to their families for reburial, an official said Wednesday.
“Ten mass graves have so far been exhumed in the village of Kocho, which contained 138 bodies of Yezidis – mostly males,” Major Falah Hassan, a member of the Iraqi national team for exhuming bodies, told KirkukNow.
The bodies have been sent to Baghdad to establish their identities before they are handed over to their families for reburial in the town of Shingal.
“There are six more mass graves left to be exhumed in the village [of Kocho],” Hassan added, saying the team would resume work after the Eid break.
In Kocho alone, 16 mass grave sites have been identified.
"The remains will first be examined, and then DNA samples will be taken to compare with samples gathered from families," Zaid al-Yousef, the head of Baghdad's forensics office, told AFP on Thursday.
Finding DNA matches from the survivors is proving difficult. Many of their families were collectively killed in the genocide.
"We took around 1,280 samples from families in Sinjar, but the problem is that for a lot of them, there's just a single survivor and the rest are all missing," he said.
"If we compare it with other terrorist attacks, we would find three, four, or five survivors for every missing person. But here, we have three, four, or five missing people for a single survivor," Yousef added.
ISIS militants attacked the Yezidi homeland of Shingal in August 2014, slaughtering thousands of Yezidi men and burying them in mass graves. Women and children were abducted and sold into slavery – many facing years of repeated sexual violence.
Of the 6,417 Yezidis kidnapped by ISIS, some 3,369 have been rescued, but the fate of the remaining 2,992 is unclear, according to Yezidi Affairs Office in the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowment.
Thousands more are thought to lie undiscovered.
More than 70 mass graves were identified in Shingal district after it was retaken from ISIS in November 2015. Some have been washed away by heavy winter rain, others exhumed by locals.
Following the military defeat of ISIS in Iraq in 2017, the Iraqi government, the International Commission on Missing Persons, and the United Nations launched a campaign to exhume suspected mass grave sites in the Shingal area in March 2019.
The KRG High Committee for the Recognition of Genocide against Yezidi Kurds and other religious and ethnic minorities is also involved in the process.
Shingal is a disputed area claimed by both Erbil and Baghdad. Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution was supposed to have resolved the issue of disputed territories by 2007, but little progress has been made.
Update: 5:37 p.m.
