Possible mass grave of Daesh victims found near Mosul

The remains of hundreds of mainly Shia inmates killed by Daesh militants when they overran a prison in northern Iraq more than two years ago have been unearthed by Shia jihadists retaking the area from the group, a spokesman said.

An Iraqi Shia paramilitary group, the Iran-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) of Shia jihadists, claimed to have made the discovery after driving the militants from the Badush area where the prison is located, as part of a wider US and Iran-backed campaign to dislodge Daesh from the city of Mosul.

As an array of forces dismantle Daesh’s self-proclaimed caliphate across Iraq and Syria, more evidence is emerging of the war crimes committed by the militants, who targeted Shia civilians, religious minorities as well as countless Sunnis opposed to their ideology and methods.

Karim Nouri, spokesman for the PMF, said:

Initial checks of part of the mass grave revealed remains with prison uniforms and lined up in a way that indicates they were shot dead in groups

One of the Shia jihadist groups – the Abbas Division – is fighting alongside the regular Iraqi army, which in recent days jointly completed the encirclement of Mosul, about 10 kilometres (6 miles) southeast of Badush.

The militants used the prison to hold their own captives including thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority, but blew the jail up some time before Iraqi forces drew near.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report that as many as 600 people were killed in the Badush prison massacre, which took place on the same day that Daesh militants captured Mosul in June 2014.

The militants corralled the inmates, who had been serving sentences for a range of crimes – from murder and assaults to nonviolent offences – onto trucks and drove them to an isolated stretch of desert about 2 kilometres (1 miles) from the prison, HRW said.

There, they separated a few Sunni and Christian inmates from the rest, who were overwhelmingly Shia, before forcing them to form one long line along the edge of a ravine and machine-gunning them down.

The report was based on the testimony of more than a dozen men who survived by playing dead or because they were shielded by the bodies of other prisoners who fell on top of them.

“We are waiting for forensic teams and human rights officials to begin unearthing the grave to uncover the whole story of how the ruthless criminal Daesh killed them in cold blood only because they were from a certain sect,” Nouri said.

Read: Daesh frees dozens of Iraqis from Mosul jails

Government, PMF also killed prisoners

The mass killing of Shia inmates is a reflection of what units fighting under the banner of the Iraqi government also did on many occasions, showing how both sides have perpetrated brutal acts of violence since the outbreak of yet another war within Iraq’s borders.

One of the most prominent extrajudicial mass killings of Sunni Arab prisoners at the hands of the Iraqi regime occurred around the same time as Daesh killed Shia inmates in 2014.

In July 2014, HRW reported that Iraqi forces under the authority of the Baghdad government executed approximately 255 prisoners in six Iraqi cities as revenge attacks against Daesh. This occurred despite the fact that the prisoners had not been given access to any fair trials, and they had no proven links to Daesh.

HRW said:

The vast majority of [Iraqi] security forces and militias are Shia, while the murdered prisoners were Sunni. At least eight of those killed were boys under the age of 18.

This orgy of sectarian violence saw the deaths of men and children who were languishing in Iraqi prisons, many of whom were there due to their sectarian identity rather than having actually committed any crime.

The government’s unlawful killing of Sunni prisoners constitutes a war crime, comparable to crimes committed by Daesh extremists.

“Gunning down prisoners is an outrageous violation of international law,” Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at HRW, said at the time. “While the world rightly denounces the atrocious acts of [Daesh], it should not turn a blind eye to sectarian killing sprees by government and pro-government forces.”

To date, no investigation into these or other crimes has been conducted by the Iraqi government, and the fate of 643 men and boys abducted by the PMF last year is still unknown, though they are presumed dead or worse.