Martyrs Foundation prepares to open mass grave in the Samawah desert

Iraq's Martyrs Foundation is preparing to open more than 77 new sites to detect and investigate mass graves in the liberated governorates, while revealing that work is underway to open a mass grave in the Samawah desert, south of the country, that dates back to the eighties of the last century.

Al-Sabah newspaper quoted the Director-General of Mass Graves in the Foundation, Dia al-Saadi, as saying on Tuesday, that "technical committees affiliated with the Martyrs Foundation, the Ministry of Health and the security authorities will begin, during the next few periods, to open sites in Sinjar, Badush, Tal Afar and Ramadi, as well as other sites in Saladin to search for mass graves." 

He explained that "most of the information that comes to the department regarding mass graves is by the displaced families after their return or by the security forces, after which a technical team is sent to verify the accuracy of the information, and then the site is included in a database to take the necessary measures to open those graves and hand over Victims to their families.

Al-Saadi pointed out that "many sites of graves were revealed after sending the technical teams, which in turn submitted a report containing recommendations to excavate them, whether collective or individual and enter them into a database, whether they were before the fall of the defunct regime or the graves committed by the Islamic State terrorist gangs."

He pointed out that "the lack of financial allocations affected the work of the department, as its budget over five years reached zero, so foreign organizations were relied on to finance the opening of graves, including the International Committee on Missing Persons and the International Committee of the Red Cross."

Al-Saadi added that "there are works underway to open a mass grave in the Samawah desert that dates back to the eighties of the last century, committed by the defunct regime," noting that "technical teams hand over the remains to the forensic medicine department to verify the samples of the victims' families and match them with their relatives."

Many of Iraq's mass graves date back to the era of Saddam Hussein's Baath Regime who murdered over 180,000 Kurds during the notorious Anfal campaigns.

The Islamic State terrorist organization left many mass graves before its fall in 2017. Thousands of Yazidis were killed by the terrorist organization when they invaded Shingal, the mainland of the Yazidis, in August of 2014.



PUKmedia