“There were children and elderly—70 to 75 years old—killed here,” he says as we walk around a pit that had been discovered the day before. Flipping through photos on his phone of the bodies being exhumed, he says they were probably executed not long after ISIS took the area in August. He bends down and lifts a severed skull still at the gravesite to show how these people were beheaded. Lt. Ibrahim knew some of the victims, although most were decomposed beyond recognition.
He tells a story of a man who found a key in the pocket of one of the corpses and thought it looked familiar. Only when he put it in the door of his own home and it worked did he know for sure that the body he had found was the body of his father.
The open pit of the mass grave still has bits of children’s clothing inside and even a pink stuffed animal. The ground has bloodstains dried around it. Lt. Ibrahim says it’s the spot where a beheading happened. He is certain there are more mass graves to be found in the area but says it is difficult to try to unearth them at the moment because the surrounding fields are mined.
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