ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A hundred and four people exhumed from mass graves of Islamic State (ISIS) group victims in Shingal have been identified, an official told Rudaw English. “235 corpses have been sent to Baghdad’s forensics in 2019, this year 124 corpses were sent,” Major Faleh Hasan, a member of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Commission for Investigation and Gathering Evidence (CIGE), told Rudaw English on Saturday. Among the 359 people exhumed since 2019, “104 have been identified,” he added, all male. The official would not provide an exact time line for the return of the corpses to their families, who eagerly await a proper burial for their loved ones. ISIS took control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Iraq’s Yazidis were particularly targeted when the group invaded the religious minority’s heartland of Shingal in August 2014, launching a genocide against the community. Thousands were killed and taken into captivity. Exhumation of mass graves started in March 2019 in Shingal, then was halted around one year later due to the coronavirus pandemic, as most ministries and medical examiners stopped working, said Hasan. The delay in identifying the remains of mass graves have angered many in the Yazidi community. Exhumation resumed in October 2020 in the village of Solagh on the northern side of Mount Shingal. Around 20 mass graves have been exhumed as of yet, focused in the villages of Solagh and Kocho, as well as one lying in the center of Shingal district. Family members of those who have gone missing have been invited to provide DNA samples to help the investigatory teams identify the remains. In northern and western Iraq alone are at least 202 documented mass graves, UNAMI and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) estimated in 2018, and they conceded that there exist many more mass burial sites that have yet to be identified.
