Another mass grave of victims killed during the Islamic State (ISIS) massacre of 2014 was unearthed in the Sinjar (Shengal) district of northern Iraq, the Yazidi homeland, on Tuesday.
The remains were uncovered during work by a United Arab Emirates construction company on a school construction site in the region.
The recently discovered mass grave includes the remains of women and children, some of whom belong to Sinjar’s Shiite minority, ANHA news agency reported, citing a human rights organisation. The human bones were fractured due to construction works at the site.
The remains of the victims, presumed to be Shiite, will be sent to Baghdad for DNA testing.
Since the search for the remains of victims in Sinjar began in 2019, the number of mass graves discovered from the ISIS’s 2014 massacre has reached 85.
ISIS started its attacks against Yazidis in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq on 3 August 2014. The fundamentalist group overran the Yazidi lands, massacring thousands of people, forcing young women into sexual and domestic servitude for ISIS fighters and driving Yazidis from the area.
Sinjar was taken back from ISIS on 13 November 2015. In 2016 the United Nations recognised the 2014 massacre as a Yazidi Genocide.
Roughly 10,000 Yazidis were either killed or kidnapped during the assault, according to a 2019 London School of Economics Middle East Centre report.
