Exhumation of Possibly the Biggest Mass Grave Begins in Nineveh

Department of Mass Graves Affairs & Protection

Khasfa mass grave in Nineveh province.

Iraq's Department of Mass Graves Affairs and Protection announced on Sunday, 17 August 2025, the commencement of exhumation work at what could possibly be the biggest mass grave in Iraq and the world.

Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organisation dumped the bodies of possibly thousands of their victims into the Khasfa mass grave in Nineveh province when they controlled the area between 2014-2017.

In a statement, the Department confirmed that the specialised team from the Department of Mass Graves Affairs and Protection, part of the Martyrs Foundation, has begun excavation operations at the Khasfa site, located south of Mosul.

The statement noted that the site contains the remains of victims executed by the ISIS terrorist organisation during its occupation of Mosul. 

The Khasfa grave is considered the largest of its kind, described as the most tragic testimony to ISIS’s crimes in Iraq and a stark symbol of genocide.

The Department of Mass Graves Affairs and Protection explained in their statement that the recovered remains will be transferred to the Department of Forensic Medicine for examination and DNA testing, in order to match them with victims’ families. All procedures will be carried out within a legal and humanitarian framework, under the supervision of judicial, security, medical, and technical authorities.

Multiple witnesses told Human Rights Watch in a 2017 report that the bodies of those killed, including bodies of members of Iraqi security forces, were thrown into a naturally occurring sinkhole at a site known as Khafsa, about eight kilometers south of western Mosul. Local residents said that before pulling out of the area in mid-February 2017, ISIS laid improvised landmines at the site, which are sometimes referred to as improvised explosive devices or booby traps.

Five residents from villages near Khafsa told Human Rights Watch in the same report that on 10 June 2014, they saw ISIS fighters bring four large trucks filled with blindfolded men, with their hands bound, to the sinkhole. Two residents of al-Athba, a village three kilometers from Khafsa, two residents of Swada, a neighboring village, and a resident of Irbid, three kilometers away, who were able to see the site, described what they saw.

The witnesses said the fighters unloaded the men, lined most of them up on the edge of the sinkhole, and opened fire so that the bodies fell in. Fighters shot a smaller number of people a short distance away and threw their bodies into the hole, the witnesses said. One of the men from al-Athba and the man from Irbid said ISIS fighters later told them that the men they had executed were prisoners from Badoush.

In June 2014, ISIS launched a brutal campaign, seizing large parts of northern and western Iraq. On 3 August 2014, they carried out a genocidal assault against the Yezidi community in Shingal (Sinjar),  Nineveh province, the historic heartland of the Yezidis. The terrorists abducted 6,417 women and children, subjecting many to sexual slavery and forced labour. In just a few weeks, more than 5,000 people were massacred.

Iraq eventually announced the defeat of the terrorist organisation in December 2017. 



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