“[ISIS] would bring in people every day after 10pm. We could hear the gunshots and the screaming,” Saad Abdullah, a local shepherd, told HRW.
“Later, we went to the well to get water and there was flesh and blood in the well. Flesh and blood,” he described. “Eventually we closed the wells. We couldn’t draw water. It was full of blood from Khafsa.”
Khafsa is a naturally occurring sinkhole located 8 kilometres south of Mosul. It has water flowing in the bottom.
The stench from the mass grave could be smelled 3 to 4 kilometres away, another shepherd told HRW anonymously.
People complained of the smell to ISIS who filled in the sinkhole and stopped carrying out executions at the site around May or June 2015.
For one year, however, militants carried out weekly mass executions at the site and brought in truckloads of victims, both men and women. One witness saw ISIS drive in 11 freezer trucks on one day, estimating 1,000 victims were dumped in the mass grave.
When ISIS withdrew from the area in mid-February, they laid IEDs around the site. One of these killed Rudaw’s Shifa Gardi along with a commander of the Hashd al-Shaabi and four others on February 25.
Video of Shifa Gardi at the Khafsa mass grave.
“This mass grave is a grotesque symbol of ISIS’ cruel and depraved conduct – a crime of a monumental scale,” the deputy Middle East director at HRW, Lama Fakih, said. “Laying landmines in the mass grave is clearly an attempt by ISIS to maximize harm to Iraqis.”
HRW urged Iraqi authorities to cordon off the site to protect the remains and begin the process of de-mining the area in the hopes of being able to exhume the grave in the future.
