„It was a grim task he would repeat in the weeks and months that followed, as mass graves – some uncovered, others only barely so – began to appear around the dusty landscape. He and others from al-Hud would find the bodies while out hunting for rabbits and birds. Afterward, Mohsin said, he’d grab his shovel and return on his motorbike to cover them, hoping to preserve a piece of the humanity that under the militants was eroding fast. Five civilians in one hole became seven soon after, he remembered. Another pit held 15. He found about 30 bodies in all, he said, and heard word of others. Some of them he recognized as people from his village. Others he’d never seen before. ‚We don’t know who they are – maybe Yazidis, anybody,‘ he said, requesting, for security reasons, to use only his first name. ‚Anyone we saw, we just buried.‘
Al-Hud was freed from ISIS earlier this month, as part of the offensive to retake Mosul, but the bodies have yet to be documented or exhumed. Iraqi soldiers let two BuzzFeed News journalists view only the Kurdish fighter’s grave, citing the risk of improvised explosive devices hidden further along the road. The cluster of mass graves outside the small village are some of the first grim signs of the atrocities soldiers expect to uncover as they push deeper into ISIS’s most important stronghold. ‚Probably there are more – we just haven’t seen them yet,‘ said Abdulsalam Bayati, an Iraqi soldier who drove an armored Humvee to the grave on Friday.“ (Mike Giglio: „Mass Graves On The Road To Mosul Show The Horrors That Lie Ahead“)
