ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Families of victims of the Yazidi genocide, longing to learn the fate of their loved ones, gathered in the village of Hamadan in Shingal (Sinjar) on Saturday as specialized teams started to exhume a mass grave. The grave is believed to hold the bodies of at least 30 people killed by the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014. Ziyad Khalaf, a Yazidi survivor, recalled the moment ISIS militants took them en masse and ordered their execution. “Their emir [leader] came and said take them out and kill them all. I told my group to keep together in the hope that God and the Peacock Angel will save some of us,” he told Rudaw’s Ayub Nasri referring to a central figure in the Yazidi faith. The exhumation is being carried out by the Iraqi government in coordination with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and is overseen by the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Daesh (UNITAD). ISIS seized control of large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria in 2014. The group committed genocide against Yazidis when they swept through the religious 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. The fate of over 2,500 Yazidis who were kidnapped by ISIS remains unknown, according to data from Rescue Kidnapped Yazidis office established by Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani. Exhumation of mass graves began in 2019 in Shingal. Progress halted during the coronavirus pandemic and resumed in October of 2020.
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