Yazidi mass grave found in Iraq’s northern Sinjar region

Iraqi officials said they found another mass grave in the northern Sinjar region on Wednesday containing the bodies of dozens of members of the Yazidi minority killed by the ISIS group.

“The mass grave contains the bodies of 73 people, men, women and children executed by the Daesh group when they controlled the region,” local official Chokor Melhem Elias told AFP.

He said Iraqi security forces made the latest discovery in the Rambussi area near the town of Qahtaniyya.

In 2014, ISIS killed thousands of Yazidis in Sinjar and kidnapped thousands of the community’s women and girls as sex slaves.

The United Nations estimates 3,000 of them are still being held captive.

Kurdish fighters backed by the US-led coalition recaptured Sinjar from Daesh in November 2015 before Iraqi security forces took control of the region in October.

As government troops have advanced across Iraq they have uncovered dozens of mass graves holding hundreds of bodies in areas that fell under the extremists’ brutal rule.

Recently, air strikes by the US-led coalition against the ISIS group in Iraq and Syria have dropped significantly, a spokesman said Tuesday, as the war against the extremists winds down.

A single strike on November 8 “marked fewest strikes/munitions dropped” in the more than three-year-old campaign against ISIS, coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon said on social media.

“Nearly all territory once controlled by ISIS retaken; 7.5 million people no longer under Daesh control,” wrote Dillon.

Coalition aircraft have conducted dozens of strikes, which can each consist of multiple engagements, in November, a month that saw heavy fighting to dislodge Daesh from its last remaining bastions.

Syrian regime and allied forces this month retook the town of Albu Kamal, which lies on the border with Iraq, where anti-Daesh forces also retook Rawa, the last town the extremists held in the country.

Nonetheless, major operations − such as those that saw tens of thousands of troops battle for several months to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second city, in July, and Raqa, the extremists’ main hub in Syria, last month − are over.

Source: Gulf Today