IRBIL, Iraq (AP) – The U.N. human rights office in Iraq said on Friday that it has received reports of 16 mass graves discovered near the town of Sinjar after it was liberated from the Islamic State group last month.
The reports were the latest among many instances of mass graves being uncovered in territory wrested from IS militants in Iraq and Syria – thousands of people have been killed in summary and extrajudicial killings by the Sunni militants and the graves have been a dark testimony to the group’s brutality.
In June 2014, some 1,700 Iraqi soldiers were captured and then killed by IS militants when they overran Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. At the time, the soldiers were trying to flee from Camp Speicher, a nearby army base where they were deployed. Mass graves with hundreds of Iraqi soldiers’ bodies were found after the city was liberated in April.
There were no immediate details about how many bodies might be inside the newly found Sinjar graves, according to spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
She did not provide the source of the reports but said that her office has called on Iraq’s government to investigate.