Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the Iraqi government to “intensify efforts” on Tuesday, to exhume victims of the successive conflicts that have plagued the country.
“To advance justice and accountability for victims and their families, the Iraqi government should intensify efforts to exhume graves, identify victims, return remains to families for proper burials,” HRW said.
The NGO’s appeal comes at a time when the UNITAD mission (United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by “Daesh”), which had provided significant support to the Iraqi state in exhuming these mass graves, sees its mandate come to an end in September 2024.
Hundreds of thousands of victims of illegal executions in Iraq, victims of the various conflicts that have struck the country, remain buried in mass graves, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Here remain the bodies of victims of successive conflicts, from Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurds in 1988 to the massacres committed by the Islamic State Organization (ISIS), between 2014 and 2017. Formal identification of those buried bodies could nonetheless provide the victims’ families with long-awaited answers and enable them to begin mourning.
HRW estimates that these mass graves could still contain the remains of 400,000 people. Iraq is one of the countries with the highest number of missing persons, estimated at between 250,000 and 1 million, so many are probably buried in these graves.
‘Complex and Delicate Process’
“The exhumation of these sites is a complex and delicate process, but we are determined to see it through to offer some form of comfort to the bereaved families,” according to Iraqi security officials interviewed by HRW.
UNITAD has enabled the authorities to work with forensic experts to ensure that exhumations are carried out in a rigorous and respectful manner. With the end of the UN mission’s mandate, HRW fears that the Iraqi government will not be able to “fill the void.”
The discovery of these mass graves has revived traumatic memories of ISIS brutality in the region. Many families have provided DNA samples in the hope of finding their missing loved ones. In particular, the authorities declared that identified remains would be returned to the families for a dignified burial.
HRW insists that this process is essential to bring some form of justice and to help communities heal and rebuild after the horrors inflicted by ISIS.
Babil province is not the only region of Iraq to be home to mass graves; they can also be found in the provinces of Nineveh, Kirkuk and Salaheddine, testifying to the scale of the crimes committed by ISIS during its reign.
