Shafaq News- Nineveh

Nineveh’s authorities began excavating a mass grave in the Harmat and Musheirfa areas west of Mosul on Thursday, uncovering the remains of dozens of victims executed by ISIS during the group's occupation of the city.

Ahmed Qusai al-Asadi, head of the Mass Graves Excavation Department at the Iraqi Martyrs Foundation, told Shafaq News that the site has been documented and listed in the committee's registry for Nineveh province since 2015, adding that excavation work began on Thursday and will continue until May 6, with more than 30 bodies having been recovered so far.

The remains are believed to belong to Peshmerga fighters, Iraqi security personnel, as well as women and children thought to be members of the Yazidi community —a religious minority that bore the brunt of ISIS's systematic campaign of genocide during the group's occupation of Nineveh between 2014 and 2017.

During this period, ISIS established its self-declared caliphate across northern and central Iraq, with Mosul as its capital, extending control over large parts of Nineveh, Kirkuk, and Saladin provinces. The group's systematic campaign of killing left mass graves across all three provinces, primarily targeting Yazidis, Shia Muslims, and other minorities.

The United Nations has identified over 200 such sites containing an estimated 12,000 victims —a figure many researchers consider conservative, given that Iraq's total missing persons count may reach 400,000. Nineveh alone holds the highest concentration of sites, including the al-Khasfa sinkhole south of Mosul, which local authorities describe as one of the largest mass graves in the world.

Read more: HRW urges Iraq to intensify mass grave exhumations