The victims’ souls of scream for a demand for fair punishment from terrorism

Shaimaa Hefzy

The United Nations said in a report on Wednesday that more than 200 mass graves were discovered for the victims of the terrorist organization Daesh in Iraq, which were killed during a three-year period from June 2014 to December 2017.

The UN Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) said it had found 202 graves containing up to 12,000 bodies in the northern and western provinces of Nineveh, Kirkuk, Salahuddin and Anbar, including thousands of people who had been dumped in a riverbed south of Mosul.

UN officials said they believed there were more graves still to be found, with thousands of men, women and children still unaccounted for.

Officials said that while it was not possible to determine the total number of bodies, it is believed that the largest graves located in a special area in southern Mosul and may contain thousands of bodies, the smallest is located in western Mosul and contain at least eight bodies.

“The mass grave sites documented in our report are testimony to the horrific human losses, deep suffering and shocking brutality,” said Jan Kubis, the UN representative in Iraq.

He added that determining the circumstances surrounding the losses of life would be an important step in the process of mourning for families and their journey to secure their rights in truth and justice.

According to the UN report, as the militants invaded new lands, they led members of the captured security forces collectively and enslaved Yezidi women. And regularly urged the killing of anyone who did not conform to his extremist ideology, including ethnic and religious minorities.

There are still up to 30,000 Daesh fighters in Iraq and Syria, according to the United Nations.

With regard to Daesh’s victims, some 30,000 civilians are believed to have been killed and more than 55,000 wounded in Iraq by Daesh. The United Nations estimates that more than 3,100 Yazidis remain in foster homes, including 1,452 women and girls.

Many of the graves in the Iraqi province of Salah al-Din contain the remains of victims of the Camp Spitzer massacre in 2014, when militants killed about 1,700 Iraqi security forces and military students, according to the UN report.

The organization does not care about burying its victims; in some cases, insurgents have dropped victims or bodies of their victims in wells or sewers rather than digging graves.

The United Nations urged the Iraqi authorities to excavate, remove and identify the remains of all graves so that they can be returned to families, leading to “a meaningful truth and justice”.

The United Nations has said that the Iraqi authorities have succeeded in exhuming the remains of 1,258 victims from 28 graves.

“The horrific crimes in Iraq have left headlines, but the trauma of the families of the victims remains, where thousands of women, men and children are still unknown,” said Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In August, UN investigators began to collect evidence for Iraqi war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide for use in a trial of defiant terrorists