Afp

The newspaper La Jornada
Monday, July 15, 2024, p. 27

Mosul. Some 139 victims of the Islamic State group (IS) have been exhumed from a mass grave in Iraq, officials confirmed yesterday to the AFP news agency. Authorities have been carrying out laborious searches for years to find the places where the jihadists buried their victims. The Alo Antar natural well, where the bodies were dumped, is located in the Tal Afar region, 70 kilometers west of Mosul, the former capital of the country. capital of the armed group in northern Iraq. The remains of 139 people were recovered, along with body parts.said Dia Karim, director of the mass graves department of the Martyrs’ Foundation, a government institution that manages this complicated issue. According to witnesses, the victims are Yazidis or Shiite Turkmen and some residents of Mosul enrolled in the security forces.The Alo Antar well was discovered when Iraqi security forces recaptured the region in 2017, but work on the site only began last May, according to Ahmed al Asadi, another official with the Martyrs’ Foundation.