Baghdad, The Human Rights Watch organization “Human Rights Watch” confirmed: “The bodies of hundreds of thousands of victims of unlawful killings are still buried in mass graves throughout Iraq, calling for their exhumation “to achieve justice” and for people to know the fate of their sons.
The organization called, in a statement, on the Iraqi government, in order to promote justice and accountability for the victims and their families, to intensify efforts to exhume the bodies from the graves, identify the victims, return the remains to the families for proper burial, issue death certificates, and compensate the families, as required by Iraqi law.
The graves contain the bodies of victims of successive conflicts, including the mass killing during the previous regime against the Kurds in 1988, and those committed by ISIS between 2014 and 2017.
The call of the human rights organization comes before the expiration of the mandate granted by the UN Security Council to UNITAD, which is the “United Nations Invest
igative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by ISIS next month.
This UN team, established by the Security Council in 2017, has been supporting the Iraqi government’s ‘Mass Graves Affairs and Protection Department’ and ‘Legal Medicine Department’ in exhuming 67 mass graves containing ISIS victims.
The Strategic Center for Human Rights in Iraq estimates that the country’s mass graves contain the remains of 400,000 people.
Human Rights Watch says Iraq has one of the highest numbers of missing people in the world, estimated at between 250,000 and 1 million people, many of whom are believed to be buried in mass graves.
Director General of the Iraqi government’s Office for the Protection of Mass Graves, Dhiya Karim Taama, told Human Rights Watch that officials have exhumed 288 mass graves since 2003.
Between 2017 and 2023, UNITAD helped Iraqi authorities exhume 1,237 bodies of victims of the Camp Speicher massacre, where ISIS killed 1,700 soldiers, cadets, and volunteers from the Tikrit Air Aca
demy between June 12 and 14, 2014, from 14 graves and two crime scenes.
Source: National Iraqi News Agency