ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – At the height of its brutal rule over northern Syria, the Islamic State (ISIS) hurled its victims into al-Hota gorge, a deep natural pit outside Raqqa – the group’s one-time de facto capital. Although the area was liberated in 2017, the mass grave is yet to be fully investigated.
Thousands of bodies are thought to lie at the bottom of the 50 meter-deep pit, situated 85-km north of Raqqa. A Human Rights Watch (HRW) team of investigators recently returned to the site with a drone to get a better look at the horror far below.
“Al-Hota gorge, once a beautiful natural site, has become a place of horror and reckoning,” said Sara Kayyali, a HRW Syria researcher, following the publication of a new report on Monday.
“Exposing what happened there, and at the other mass graves in Syria, is crucial to determining what happened to the thousands of the people ISIS executed and holding their killers to account.”
The New York-based monitor urged the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army that controls the area to preserve the site and the evidence therein, clear the vicinity of booby-traps and unexploded ordnance, and support a full investigation that meets international standards.
“Whichever authority controls the al-Hota area is obliged to protect and preserve the site,” Kayyali said.
“They should facilitate the collection of evidence to hold ISIS members accountable for their horrendous crimes, as well as those who dumped bodies in al-Hota before or after the ISIS rule.”
The drone footage and a 3D topographical model of the gorge show there is a deep pool of water at the bottom of al-Hota.
Six bodies could be seen floating on the surface of the pool. Their state of decomposition indicated they had been put there long after ISIS was driven out. Their identities and cause of death are unknown, but their presence in the pit raises fears al-Hota is still in use as a burial site.
And the gorge has history.
“Some local residents said they heard about other anti-government armed groups throwing the bodies of government soldiers and pro-government militia fighters into al-Hota before ISIS controlled the area, though none of them had seen this themselves,” HRW said.
If experts are denied the opportunity to investigate mass grave sites, vital evidence to explain what happened and to successfully prosecute perpetrators can be lost.
“The effort to exhume the ISIS mass graves has been faltering and incomplete, in part due to the fluid security situation,” the monitor said.
“With limited resources and minimal outside support, local groups, such as Raqqa’s First Responders Team, have been conducting partial exhumations, but the sites are still not protected and have not been examined in line with international best practices.”
“No teams are working at al-Hota or the apparent mass grave sites that are currently under Turkish control,” HRW added.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) has controlled Raqqa since its armed wing, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), liberated the city from ISIS in 2017.
On April 5, the SDC established a working group to help identify what happened to the thousands of ISIS victims still unaccounted for.
However, owing to the conflict between Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed factions in northeast Syria, it is unlikely the SDC’s working group will be allowed access to sites like al-Hota.
Similar mass graves containing the bodies of ISIS victims have been uncovered across northern Syria and in neighbouring Iraq.
In February this year, a sinkhole containing almost 1,000 bodies, including around 30 Yezidis, killed by ISIS from mid-2014 to late 2017, was uncovered in Tal Afar.
To date, more than 70 mass graves have been identified in the Yezidi homeland of Shingal following its liberation in November 2015. Some of the remains have been washed away by heavy rains, while others have been exhumed by locals.
Following the territorial defeat of ISIS in Iraq in December 2017, the Iraqi government, the International Commission on Missing Persons, and the United Nations launched a campaign to exhume suspected mass grave sites in the Shingal area in March 2019.
As part of the exhumation process, a total of 12 mass graves have been exhumed in the village of Kocho, which were found to contain 138 Yezidis, according to Iraqi military officials.
The fate of thousands more Yezidi men and women remains unknown.
The UN Security Council agreed in 2017 to establish a probe to ensure ISIS perpetrators face justice for war crimes in Iraq and Syria – a cause championed by Yezidi Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad and international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.
