Mass grave found in Iraq

IRAQI forces have found more than 40 bodies, including those of women and children, in a mass grave in the city of Ramadi west of Baghdad, which they recently retook from Islamic State militants.

Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Saad Maan said the grave in central Ramadi contained the bodies of civilians as well as police. Video footage from the site shows local security forces and a small forensics team wearing face masks and digging with shovels.

Ramadi, the provincial capital of the sprawling Anbar province, fell to IS in May, marking a major setback for U.S.-allied Iraqi forces. Iraqi troops retook the city centre last month with heavy coalition air support.

Similar mass graves have been found in other areas liberated from the IS group in Syria and Iraq. The extremist group has boasted of massacring Shiites and other opponents, often releasing gruesome videos and pictures of the killings.

Last month the U.N. said 16 mass graves had been found in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, where Kurdish forces pushed out IS in November. The extremist group captured Sinjar during its rampage across northern and western Iraq in the summer of 2014 and killed and captured thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority, including women who were forced into sexual slavery.

In June 2014, IS captured and killed some 1,700 Iraqi soldiers when it overran Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. The soldiers were trying to flee from Camp Speicher, a nearby army base. Mass graves with the bodies of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were found after the city was liberated in April.

The excavation and identification of bodies found in mass graves can take several months, as many of the sites are near the front lines of the conflict.

Footage posted on the Facebook page of the provincial police showed what appeared to be bodies in varying states of decay being pulled from a shallow grave in the capital of Anbar province which Iraq’s military recaptured last month.

Police chief Major General Hadi Razij spoke in the video about the grave, and an adviser to the governor confirmed the images were authentic. Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan also confirmed the reports.

“We believe they were the last to fight #DAESH before #Ramadi fell in May 2015. Investigation ongoing,” Anbar Governor Sohaib al-Rawi said in a tweet with a picture of body bags lying in a street.

IS overran Ramadi last year as the Iraqi army abandoned its posts for the second time in less than a year, setting back government efforts to push back the ultra-hard line Sunni militants. The military, backed by US-led coalition air strikes, recaptured the city in December, but widespread destruction and explosives planted by the insurgents in streets and houses have prevented civilians from returning.

Several mass graves have been uncovered in areas retaken from IS, which imposes strict restrictions and harsh punishments on the millions of civilians living under its control.