“The number of unidentified bodies recovered since the liberation of Mosul from the old areas of the city reached 1,495 bodies, while the number of known bodies whose graves were uncovered reached 3,749,” Shahed Arif Hamid, the director of forensics medicine in Nineveh province, told Rudaw’s Mushtaq Ramadhan.
ISIS swept through Iraq in 2014, capturing cities across the center and north of the country in a brazen offensive, including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and the capital of Nineveh province, where the group’s former leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared its so-called “caliphate.”
The city was retaken in a major Iraqi and Kurdish counteroffensive in 2017, supported by the US-led global coalition.
According to Hamid, Mosul’s civil defense teams, who are responsible for uncovering remains from the rubble, receive fewer remains than previous years as there are no decomposing bodies left.
“If there is no claimant, the remains are left unidentified and in storage until a database for missing persons is announced, and anyone who has lost a relative must donate blood to match the samples with the missing bodies,” she said.
Mosul’s Old City, on the western bank of the Tigris River that divides the city into two, was severely damaged as a result of the fight against ISIS and bombardments by both the Iraqi air force and the US-led coalition.
The process of uncovering bodies in Nineveh province began in May 2018, through government teams and volunteers.
According to statistics from Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights, there are more than 800 bodies of children among the bodies of civilians exhumed in Mosul.
