In June 2014, while controlling large areas of northern Iraq and neighboring Syria, ISIS transported around 600 male detainees in Iraq’s Badoush prison in trucks to a valley before his armed men do not cut them down.
On Tuesday, funeral ceremonies were held in Baghdad and another in Najaf, in the center of the country, to bury 78 of the victims of Badoush prison, according to “Agence France Presse”.
In Baghdad, in front of the Monument of the Martyrs, the victims were buried in coffins covered with the Iraqi flag and placed in army cars, to the tunes played by a military band.
Among the relatives of the victims was Khaled Jabbar Al-Azzawi (43), who stood at the forensic medicine building in the city of Najaf awaiting the funeral of his cousin, who will be buried in the Wadi Al-Salam cemetery, near Imam Ali shrine.
“We feel pain, but on the other hand, we have recovered his body, at least so that his family can visit him,” al-Azzawi told AFP.
The official Iraqi news agency (INA) quoted Health Minister Salih al-Hasnawi as saying: “On the occasion of the identification of the remains of 78 of the remains of the martyrs of the Badoush prison who were executed in cold blood by the criminal Islamic State terrorist gangs, a symbolic funeral was held for the remains of the martyrs and this painful tragedy was remembered.”
Speaking from Najaf, Dr Zaid Ali Abbas, Director General of the Department of Forensic Medicine, said: “78 out of 605 cases have been identified as a first step.”
crimes against humanity
• Although the first mass grave was discovered in 2017, the remains were exhumed in 2021, in slow and tiring procedures involving DNA testing to identify the bodies of the victims.
• Islamic State militants have committed “crimes against humanity” in Badoush prison, according to a United Nations team responsible for investigating the organization’s violations, highlighting “the execution of approximately a thousand prisoners, by elements of the Islamic State inside the prison and in other places”.
• The Islamic State carried out successive attacks in 2014 and committed crimes of “genocide” in Iraq, according to the United Nations, which is one of the most serious crimes under international law.
• In December 2021, a funeral was held in northern Iraq, where 41 victims of the Yazidi minority were buried, who were found in a mass grave.
• In addition to the mass graves associated with the crimes of the organization “ISIS”, Iraq is still discovering mass graves dating from the era of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was overthrown after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
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