When Dhorgham Abdelmajid first arrived at the 20-metre-deep hole in Tal Afar district, in northern Iraq, in June, he says he saw something he had never witnessed in his 15 years working as an excavator of mass graves.
“It was unlike other mass graves where bodies are buried underground. Here the corpses, piled eight metres high, were clearly visible and also well preserved because it’s very dry.”
In order to excavate the bodies – victims of the militant group Islamic State – his team had to build a stair and employ a reptile expert to prevent snake bites.
“This site is different from any other I’ve been working on: from the point of view of the team’s effort, for the depth, the difficulties of going up and down, the human remains one over another, the stones falling, the insects, and the mass of the soil we moved to retrieve these victims.”
The complex geological structure – known as Alo Antar hole – was once used to collect water and is just one of the crime scenes where Abdelmajid and his team have recently been engaged.
For more than 45 years, Iraqi soil was drenched with blood from the bodies of hundreds of thousands of people buried in mass, unmarked graves as the country dealt with multiple conflicts including the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, the civil wars of 2006 to 2008 and IS occupation between 2014 and 2017, as well as victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
For these reasons Iraq is believed to have more missing people than any other country, according to the International Red Cross, with estimates ranging from 250,000 to one million.
Since 2008, the Iraqi health ministry and the Martyrs Foundation – a government body helping to identify victims and compensate relatives – have been sending teams of forensic anthropologists and doctors across the country to find and excavate mass graves and retrieve bodies.
Their goal is to identify the bodies with the help of DNA analysis and return them to families searching for their missing loved ones – mafqoodeen in Arabic.
While we know of more than 200 mass graves from the IS occupation, the number from the Saddam regime remains unknown.
The corpses piled in Alo Antar – more than 100 in total – were victims of one of many crimes committed by IS when the terrorist group occupied the north of Iraq. This included claiming the country’s second biggest city, Mosul, as its capital. The mass grave is about 60km west of the city.
From January to June this year, IS claimed more than 150 attacks in Iraq and Syria. At this rate, the militant group will more than double the number of attacks it claimed in 2023 as it attempts to rebuild after years of decreased capability.
The forensic team is still working on identifying the victims in Alo Antar. But thanks to a witness – a Yazidi woman who survived the massacre and three years of IS sexual slavery in Iraq and Syria – Abdelmajid already knows that the victims are from different communities.
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Clockwise from top left: excavations at the Badoush mass grave near Mosul; the remains of a body are carried on to a refrigerated truck before being taken to Baghdad; boxes full of remains and clothing are stored in Baghdad for identification, these ones from the first Gulf war in 1991; and forensic anthropologists analyse the uniform of an Iraqi soldier killed in the Iran-Iraq war in the south of the country
In an illustration of the complexity of the missing people issue in Iraq, however, Abdelmajid says they have found bones that “probably belong to victims of preceding massacres, maybe from the 1990s or from al-Qaida times post-2003”.
The Iraqi teams have been supported by experts from the UN who have previously helped collect evidence to prosecute IS crimes, as well as working on massacres in Rwanda, Bosnia, Argentina and Cambodia.
In addition to excavating graves, teams are travelling across Iraq connecting with the victims of families to acquire DNA samples and other evidence to match the excavated remains.
Collecting the DNA of Yazidi families – one of Iraq’s oldest minorities – has been the most challenging task since many members of the same family were killed, or left Iraq as refugees to travel to Europe or as far away as Australia.
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Yazidi women gather to mark the opening of mass graves in Kojo, Sinjar, 10 years after hundreds of men – their brothers, husbands and fathers – were killed by IS in 2014
In the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, the homeland of the Yazidi people, Shiren Ibrahim Ahmed and her community gathered in August at the Yazidi genocide memorial in nearby Solagh to mark the 10th anniversary of the IS atrocity.
Shiren’s mother and grandmother were killed in the same place where Nadia’s Initiative – the organisation started by Yazidi Nobel peace prize laureate Nadia Murad – built the memorial. Despite the grave having been excavated by the forensic team, their bodies have not yet been identified. Both are still considered mafqoodeen.
Shiren says she has also lost her brother and father. Only two sisters survived and now live in Dohuk, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
“When I was kidnapped by IS, I was with my sister and two cousins. But each was taken by a different family and I was left alone. I came back thanks to a cousin in Iraq, called by the Daeshi (IS member). A smuggler came to pick me up: they sold me for $10,000,” Shiren says.
The Iraqi mass graves team expect their work will continue for many years as they try to unearth what happened to loved ones and investigate those accountable for the atrocities. They say they have one hope: that the next mass grave will be the last.
