41 Yezidis of ISIS victims buried in Iraq’s Sinjar
ERBIL, KRG, Iraq (North Press) – The remains of 41 Yezidis massacred at the hands of the Islamic State Organization (ISIS) militants in 2014 were returned to the village of Kocho in Shingal (Sinjar), northern Iraq, for burial on Thursday after being identified.
The ceremony was attended by delegations from the federal government of Baghdad and others from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRG), as well as the families of the victims and hundreds of residents of the region.
The bodies of the victims were earlier exhumed from mass graves in Shingal, to be tested through DNA to identify them.
The Yezidis of Shingal, which is located within the administrative borders of Nineveh governorate in the west of Iraq, were fiercely attacked in August of 2014 by ISIS, which committed massacres against them and kidnapped nearly 6,500 people, mostly women and children.
According to parties concerned with the Yezidi affairs, 105 mass graves containing the remains of the Yezidi victims have been found so far.
The village of Kocho is the birthplace of the Yezidi activist Nadia Murad who survived trafficking at the hands of ISIS and was chosen in 2016 as the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.