In the capital, Baghdad, in front of the Martyr’s Monument, the victims were buried in coffins covered with the Iraqi flag and placed in army cars, to the tunes played by a military band.
On Tuesday, the Iraqi authorities organized a funeral ceremony for the bodies of 78 victims of the Islamic State group executed in 2014. Their identities were identified through a DNA test after they were found in a mass grave near Badoush prison, in the north of the country.
In June 2014, during its control of large areas in northern Iraq and neighboring Syria, the Islamic State transported about 600 men who had been detained in the Iraqi Badoush prison, most of them Shiites, in trucks to a valley before its members shot them.
On Tuesday, funeral ceremonies took place in Baghdad and another in the Shiite holy city of Najaf (center) for the burial of 78 victims of Badoush prison, according to AFP correspondents.
In the capital, Baghdad, in front of the Martyr’s Monument, 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 years old), 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 the shrine of Imam Ali bin Abi Talib.
“We feel pain, but on the other hand, we got his remains, at least for his family to visit,” al-Azzawi told AFP.
The official Iraqi News Agency quoted the Minister of Health, Salih al-Hasnawi, as saying, “On the occasion of identifying the remains of 78 of the martyrs of Badoush prison who were executed in cold blood by the criminal terrorist gangs of ISIS, a symbolic funeral was held for the remains of the martyrs and a memorial for this painful tragedy.”
“As a first stage, 78 out of 605 cases were identified,” said Dr. Zaid Ali Abbas, director general of the forensic medicine department, speaking from Najaf.
Although the first mass grave was found in 2017, the remains were exhumed in 2021, under slow and tiring procedures related to DNA examination with the aim of identifying the bodies of the victims.
The jihadists in Badoush prison committed “crimes against humanity,” according to a United Nations team responsible for investigating ISIS violations, noting that “about 1,000 prisoners, the majority of them Shiites, were executed by ISIS elements inside the prison and in other locations.”
The Islamic State carried out successive attacks in 2014 and committed “genocide” crimes in Iraq, according to the United Nations, which are among the most serious crimes under international law.
In December 2021, a funeral was held in northern Iraq, where 41 victims from the Yazidi minority were buried, who were found in a mass grave.
In addition to the mass graves associated with the crimes of the Islamic State, Iraq continues to uncover mass graves dating back to the era of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was overthrown after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
