Shafaq News – Mosul

Dozens of families in Mosul’s Wadi Hajar district staged a protest on Tuesday, urging Iraqi authorities to reveal the fate of more than 600 men who vanished after ISIS seized the city in 2014.

Gathering on the Right Bank of Mosul, once the group’s declared capital in Nineveh, the protesters carried photographs of their loved ones and banners demanding official clarification. The missing were policemen and civilians who disappeared during the militants’ occupation and remain unaccounted for eight years after the city’s liberation.

Speaking with Shafaq News, one of the protesters, Um Ahmed, praised Nineveh Governor Abdul Qadir al-Dakhil for reopening the file of al-Khafsa — a massive natural sinkhole about 20 kilometers south of Mosul that is considered one of the world’s largest mass graves, with estimates ranging from 3,000 victims to far higher.

“If they are martyrs, we want to bury them with dignity. If they are alive, we demand their release,” she said. “We have been waiting for years, and no one has come to ask about us.”

Residents of Wadi Hajar stress that their suffering did not end with Mosul’s liberation. They insist some of the missing were seen later in Iraqi prisons, while other accounts suggest ISIS executed them and dumped the bodies in al-Khafsa.