Sinjar, Iraq – A grim discovery has been made in the Iraqi town of Sinjar as Kurdish fighters who claimed victory over the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, entered the war-torn community and found at least one mass grave containing the bodies of Yazidis.
Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters said they dug up bones, hair and personal items, evidence of what they said was ISIL brutality. Hussein Haffoun, an adviser to the Kurdish regional government, told Al Jazeera that the grave found by the Peshmerga contains 76 bodies, including that of young women. Haffoun said that the attack occurred on August 15, 2014, and that it could qualify as a genocide.
He said that young girls who escaped from ISIL told investigators about the details of the mass killing. Authorities told Al Jazeera there could be hundreds of mass grave sites across Sinjar. According to the US, ISIL killed at least 3,000 Yazidi men and women, when the group took control of the region in June.
The Yazidi community practises an ancient religion, and ISIL considers them heretics. The Yazidis were then either forced to convert to Islam, or killed, while the women became sex slaves for the fighters.
