By NYT –
For years, a U.N. team has painstakingly exhumed mass graves, but now the Iraqi government is ordering it to leave. Many sites remain unexamined.
The hours have been long, the heat extreme and the work painstaking for forensic experts extracting human remains from a mass grave in northern Iraq, evidence of one of this century’s most blatant cases of genocide: the murder of the Yazidi people by the Islamic State.
Now they are running out of time to document that 2014 slaughter, a yearslong campaign in which the Islamic State, or ISIS, murdered, tortured, kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery thousands of Yazidis, explicitly aiming to wipe them out as a separate ethnic and religious group.
The Iraqi government has given the team of international experts responsible for excavating the mass grave outside of Tal Afar, Iraq, less than two weeks to conclude its investigation, leaving unopened dozens of other mass graves that the United Nations says contain evidence critical for building a case to hold ISIS members criminally accountable.
Eager to turn the page on a horrific period when ISIS captured and controlled vast areas of its territory, Iraq is rapidly upending a decade of related policy: Moving to shutter the camps that hold displaced Yazidis, executing ISIS perpetrators and ending the U.N.-organized mission to excavate the mass graves.
For the families of nearly 2,700 missing Yazidis, the decision is heartbreaking. For them, each uncovered bone fragment could help solve the mystery what became of loved ones not seen since ISIS’s reign of terror.
“I am waiting for my family’s remains,” said Shireen Khudeeda, a Yazidi woman who was captured, along with her family, by ISIS in 2014, “and I believe they are there.”
The liberation in 2017 of areas formerly held by ISIS revealed previously untold atrocities. Soon after, at the request of the Iraqi government, the United Nations put together a team of investigators known as UNITAD to obtain, document and store evidence of those crimes so that courts around the world could prosecute cases. The Iraqi authorities informed the U.N. investigators last September that they would have only one more year to finish the mission.
Alo Antar, the pit near Tal Afar where ISIS dumped bodies, is one of 68 mass graves the U.N. team has helped excavate, and now, it may be the last. As of July, the Iraqi authorities had identified 93 mass graves that were believed to contain the remains of Yazidi victims; 32 remain unopened in the Sinjar and Al-Ba’aj districts.
Out of the thousands of Yazidis who are unaccounted for, the remains of fewer than 700 people have been exhumed, but only 243 bodies have been identified and returned to their families.
The work at Alo Antar, a natural pit more than 30 feet deep, is difficult and complicated, said Alan Robinson, the chief of UNITAD’s forensic science unit. But the findings, he said, have been revealing.
Some remains, he said, were interred in body bags, the corpses inside clad in the orange jumpsuits once seen in ISIS propaganda videos. Others were found alongside toothbrushes and blood pressure pills that they had grabbed when they fled. Many victims’ hands were bound behind their backs, and others were blindfolded. Preliminary findings showed that some had been shot, while others appeared to have died from being pushed into the pit.
Iraq’s complicated environmental conditions meant that some remains were mummified rather than skeletonized, Mr. Robinson said, resulting in intense odors of decomposition when they were uncovered.
“Between seven and 10 years after their death, the smell could be overpowering still,” Mr. Robinson said, “so you can imagine how it was closer to the time of their death.”
The government’s decision to end UNITAD’s mission is part of a broader push by the Iraqi government to emphasize its national sovereignty at a time when U.S. troops are still stationed in the country and many politicians are closely aligned with Iran, a U.S. adversary.
Ending its reliance on U.N. institutions may be part of Iraq’s attempts to shift its image, said Sarah Sanbar, an Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch. In May, the country called for an end to the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, which was created after the U.S. invasion in 2003 to help Iraq develop government institutions, hold elections and protect human rights. That mission is set to end by December 2025.
“Iraq wants to portray itself as a sovereign, post-conflict country,” Ms. Sanbar said, and some internal factions view the U.N. presence there as “unwarranted international interference in Iraqi affairs.”
The government’s key complaint, Ms. Sanbar said, “was that UNITAD refused to hand over the evidence it had collected to Iraqi authorities, even though it was sharing it with other states prosecuting ISIS fighters.”
The United Nations, which opposes capital punishment, would prefer that crimes by ISIS are prosecuted without the possibility of the death penalty. Iraq has sentenced convicted ISIS members to death.
Asked about the conflict over evidence sharing and the death penalty, UNITAD officials said in a statement that the organization had shared some evidence with the Iraqi authorities.
UNITAD officials said the Iraqi authorities had expressed a willingness to continue excavating the mass graves after the team leaves, though it was not immediately clear whether they would have the resources to do so.
Mahama Khalil, a Yazidi and a member of Iraq’s Parliament, attributed the government’s decision to end UNITAD’s mandate to “tension in the relationship between Iraq and the U.N. and also the presence of external pressure” from other countries on Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the prime minister of Iraq.
Mr. Khalil declined to say which countries he believed were exerting that pressure, but the Iraqi government has political and military ties to Iran.
When ISIS raised its black banners across one-third of Iraq in 2014, the country still bore scars from the American-led invasion that had toppled Saddam Hussein more than 10 years earlier. After most American troops withdrew in 2011, Iraq was unable to ward off ISIS as the terrorist group gathered strength. It ultimately seized the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, as well as the Yazidis’ homeland in the Sinjar region.
ISIS, which seeks to create a worldwide Sunni Muslim caliphate cleansed of religious infidels, targeted with particular brutality the Yazidis, an ethnoreligious minority. A 2017 study estimated that ISIS killed around 3,100 Yazidis and kidnapped around 6,800 in August 2014. Some escapees said they had been trafficked for sex.
The campaign was a clear case of genocide, investigators reported to the United Nations in 2021.
Ms. Khudeeda said ISIS fighters swept into her community in the Sinjar district one morning in early August 2014 and captured her as she and her family tried to flee. For three years, she said, she was held in captivity. The whereabouts of many of her family members remain unknown.
About 157,000 people, many of them from the Sinjar district, remained in displacement camps throughout northern Iraq as of May. Some missing Yazidis, believed to be held captive in Syria or Turkey, may still be alive.
But many were murdered, their bodies unceremoniously dumped in mass graves. Some survivors of the genocide had pinned their hopes of learning about what happened to their families on UNITAD’s excavation efforts.
Survivors anticipated that hundreds of victims’ remains would be exhumed from the Alo Antar site, but preliminary reports from UNITAD show the remains of only about 160 people were uncovered there so far.
“This site was hoped in the public imagination to be the solution to missing persons regarding Daesh, at least in that region,” Mr. Robinson said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
As UNITAD prepares to end its operation on Sept. 17, it leaves other known mass graves unexamined and the survivors’ dreams of closure shattered.
“This was another disaster for me,” Ms. Khudeeda said when she learned that relatively few remains had been found at Alo Antar and no other graves were likely to be opened.
“Where,” she asked of her missing family members, “are they now?”
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Main photo: Family members burying the remains of Yazidi victims who were exhumed from mass graves in Sinjar, Iraq, in 2021.Credit…Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
