"The technical division of the Federal Police discovered a mass grave in a village in Kirkuk during a security search raid," Brigadier General Yahya Rasool, spokesperson of the Iraqi Armed Forces said in a tweet on Tuesday night.
Rasool added that the mass grave "contained the bodies of 50 people who were executed by Daesh [ISIS] terrorists during their control over the region."
Rasool did not provide more details on the identity of the bodies.
The diverse province of Kirkuk is disputed between Erbil and Baghdad. It is home to Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and others of many religions. Large parts of the province, other than the city which was strongly defended by the Kurdish Peshmerga, fell to the hands of the extremist group in 2014. It took Iraqi forces three years to fully recapture the territory from the clutches of the group, which held areas including Hawija, Riaz and Rashad towns and a myriad more villages in the southern part of the province.
Some 202 mass grave sites were documented in November 2018 by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and the UN Human Rights Office in Nineveh, Kirkuk, Salahaddin and Anbar, but there are feared to be many more.
ISIS militants swept across western Iraq and the Tigris River Valley in the summer of 2014, capturing wide swathes of territory. The group established its so-called ‘caliphate’ encompassing areas in both Iraq and Syria.
The Yezidis of northern Iraq, considered devil worshippers by ISIS, were targeted in a genocidal campaign, of which dozens of mass graves have been found. Thousands of women and children were also kidnapped to be sold into sexual slavery.
Iraq declared the defeat of ISIS in December 2017, months after the group’s last major urban stronghold Mosul was liberated by Iraqi forces with US-led coalition air support.
The group’s remnants continue to operate primarily along the Iraq-Syria border and in the mountainous areas of Kirkuk, Diyala, and Salahaddin.
