The Petrichor Organization for Human Rights announced “the discovery of a new mass grave in the ‘Siba Sheikh Khidir’ complex,” in a statement published on their Facebook page which specified that the bodies buried in it were those of victims of the Yazidi genocide of 2014.
“The organization received information from site workers who were repairing the road for sidewalk installation, and immediately went to the site to investigate,” added Petrichor in the statement, stressing that relevant authorities have been informed about the discovery.
Khairi Ali, the head of Petrichor told Rudaw that workers found clothes believed to belong to an elderly woman while working at the site, noting that there is currently no information regarding the number of the people buried in the mass grave.
ISIS seized control of large swathes of land in Iraq and Syria in 2014. The group committed genocide against Yazidis when they overran the ethnoreligious minority’s heartland of Shingal, killing around 5,000 Yazidi men, some of whom were put into mass graves. Around 7,000 women and girls, some as young as nine, were enslaved.
Exhumation of mass graves in Shingal began in 2019. Progress on this front halted during the coronavirus pandemic and resumed in October 2020.
The exhumations are carried out by the Iraqi government in coordination with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and are overseen by the United Nations Investigation Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Daesh (UNITAD).
