Mass grave of Yazidis in Iraq tells horror story

Sara Carter

American Media Institute

A makeshift memorial made of stones is the only sign marking a Yazidi mass grave in northern Iraq.

SINUNI, Iraq — A few thousand people once lived in this tiny Iraqi village 270 miles north of Baghdad. Today, it is a ghost town with few signs of life — and a mass grave nearby where members of the Yazidi sect were slaughtered by Islamic State militants.

It's one of 11 mass graves discovered in northern Iraq by Kurdish residents who fear other undiscovered burial sites exist in neighboring Syria. Those graves have yet to be unearthed because their locations are under Islamic State control.

Human Rights Watch estimates the militants killed 3,000 to 5,000 people — burying some alive — and captured 3,000 Yazidi women as sexual slaves when they swept through the area in August 2014.

On Thursday, Kurdish fighters backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes launched a ground offensive to recapture the nearby Iraqi town of Sinjar, which became a symbol of Islamic State brutality when the Islamic extremists began murdering the Yazidis 15 months ago.

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The grave here was first discovered in February by a Kurdish sheep herder. Among the 37 skeletal remains were women and children, some who appeared to be toddlers. The victims had been herded together and beheaded or shot.

During a recent visit here, dirt could still be seen piled high from the tractor that Islamic State forces used to dig the 7-foot-deep grave. About 30 feet away, two concrete chicken coops stood where the militants held the victims before they were taken to the grave and killed, Kurdish soldiers said.

Yazidi journalist and soldier Sahar Attai holds the weather worn shirt of a small Yazidi child believed to have been part of 37 people executed by Islamic State militants in the village of Sinuni, Iraq, in August 2014. The small blouse was among other tattered clothing, toys and shoes still within a mass grave after it was discovered in February 2015 by a sheep herder.

Family members identified the decomposed victims through their clothing, trinkets and what little had been in their pockets, according to the soldiers.

Inside the grave, blood had darkened on the brittle dirt walls. A deflated rubber ball rested alongside a toy gun inside the pit. Unmatched sandals, torn clothing and a bone from a finger could be seen among the rubble. A foot away from the mass grave, a baby doll’s head rolled in the wind amid spent shell casings.

What silenced Kurdish soldier Qasam Ismael was a dusty purple blouse worn by a girl perhaps no older than 2 that was clinging to the rocks of a memorial erected inside the grave.

He just stared at it. “Some of these people are from my village,” Ismael said through an interpreter. “They lined them up on the edge of this wall and beheaded them. Then put them in the grave all together. When I arrived, their flesh was all gone. There was a little girl I recognized by her hair. It was blond.”

“We want the world to recognize this genocide," Ismael said. "We are Kurds, Yazidi, and we don’t want to be an Arabic region any more. We need the Western coalition to protect us and help us fight these monsters.”

The Islamic State considers Yazidis “devil worshipers” because they are not followers of Islam. Yazidis believe in God as the creator of the world, which he has placed under the care of seven holy beings or angels.

Islamic State militants killed more than 700 Yazidis in Kocho, another small village in northern Iraq in August 2014. American airstrikes pushed back the invaders at the end of that month, allowing Yazidi fighters to re-enter the village. They described a massacre, with bodies piled on top of each other as pools of blood covered the streets.

The Free Yazidi Foundation and the U.S.-based human-rights group Yazda detailed those massacres and the Sinuni grave in a report to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, Netherlands. The savage rapes of young girls were detailed in the report. Boys between 8 and 15 years old were “taught how to load and unload guns, shoot using live bullets and launch small- and medium-sized rockets and forced to watch videos of beheadings.”

Yazidi journalist and soldier Sahar Attai looks over the remenants of a mass grave where 37 people were executed by Islamic State militants in the village of Sinuni, Iraq, in August 2014. Attai's home in Sinjar City is still under seige of Islamic State militants. When a sheep herder discovered the mass grave in February 2015, Attai, along with peshmerga soldiers stationed nearby were the first to arrive at the site. The victims, including women and children, were beheaded and gunned down by the militants.

However, because Syria and Iraq are not signatories to The Hague treaty, the ICC ruled in August that it had no territorial jurisdiction over crimes committed by Islamic State militants.

Nariman Hassan, a Yazidi mother who escaped Islamic State militants last year from Bashiqa, another town in northern Iraq, said the situation remains perilous for many Yazidi families.

“We left everything behind — our documents, pictures everything,” said Hassan, who now lives in an unfinished building called the Al-Amal Hope Center with other Yazidi and Christian families who fled the Islamic State rampage. “But the most important thing that we left behind was our children’s future.”

Hassan recalled the horror stories from relatives and friends who didn’t make it out in time. She said they were “slaughtering Yazidi men, raping and kidnapping our young girls."

Ismael said his people feel betrayed. “Arab villagers in our province assured the people who were unable to leave that (the Islamic State) would not harm them," he said. "They lied to us."

American Media Institute is a non-profit investigative news organization. USA TODAY assisted in the editing of this story.

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