Mass grave discovered in Raqqa, likely belongs to “Ashbal of Caliphate”

This week, the Initial Response Team (IRT) of Raqqa Civil Council has retrieved 15 bodies from a recently discovered mass grave in al-Badou neighborhood, the mass grave is believed to be for the so-called “Ashbal al-Khilapha” (the cubs of the Caliphate), in northeastern Raqqa.

The Initial Response Team is still retrieving the found bodies from the mass graves where some of these graves were found inside old houses in the city.

The director of the Initial Response Team Yasser al-Khamis said: “The number of mass graves in al-Badou neighborhood in the city center has reached 16 mass graves, where the 16th one was discovered last week”.

Khamis said that the residents informed the team about the presence of a body in an old house in al-Badou neighborhood. “But when we started working we were surprised that there was a large number of bodies in the house,” he added.

Regarding the number of retrieved bodies from this mass grave, he said: “16 bodies have been retrieved from this cemetery until now, and the number is expected to exceed 20 bodies, where the work is ongoing until the end of this week to recover all the bodies”.

Regarding the identities of the retrieved bodies from this cemetery, the forensic doctor Mahmoud Haj Hasan told North-Press: “The bodies were varied among children, women and men, where the body of an ISIS fighter had lost its four limbs.”

The recently discovered mass grave is believed to have been a school for the so-called cubs of the caliphate (children were recruited by the Islamic State to get them into combat and commit suicidal operations), because there are school seats and blackboards distributed in the rooms of the house.

The IRT team has been working on retrieving bodies since January 9 last year, conducting extraction, analysis, documentation and burial of the bodies in an orderly manner.

According to the team director, more than 5,100 bodies were retrieved from 16 mass graves and more than 200 sites.

Khamis said: “More than 650 bodies have been identified, while 1,000 bodies of ISIS fighters have been retrieved, who have been identified by their military uniforms and weapons while the rest of the bodies are still difficult to identify”.