Shafaq News
7,709 is the number of sets of human remains Iraq has
officially recovered from its mass graves across all eras. The United Nations
estimates the total number of people buried in those graves at between 250,000
and one million.
Iraq has a dedicated government directorate for mass graves,
an annual national day commemorating its victims, and burial sites spanning
five distinct periods of violence across half a century. The bodies continue to
be counted, and the vast majority of remains have not yet been matched to a
name or returned to a family.
The Saddam Era: 1968–2003
The largest concentration of mass graves in Iraq dates to
the Baath regime under Saddam Hussein, whose campaigns of political repression,
ethnic cleansing, and genocide produced burial sites across the country’s
south, center, and north.
The Anfal campaign of 1986–1989, directed against the
Kurdish population of northern Iraq, resulted in the forced disappearance of
more than 180,000 people, according to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s
Martyrs Foundation. The Halabja chemical attack of March 16, 1988, one of the
largest use of chemical weapons against a civilian population in history,
killed more than 5,000 people in a single day. The Samawa desert in the south
contains mass graves filled with Kurdish women and children displaced during
Saddam’s Arabization program; one site alone holds approximately 1,500 bodies,
most killed at close range, according to Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights
documentation.
The 1991 Shia uprising, following the Gulf War, was
suppressed with mass executions across southern Iraq. The 8,000 men from the
Barzan area killed in 1983, a case ruled by the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal
to constitute genocide and a crime against humanity, remain only partially
accounted for, with some remains recovered from a mass grave in Samawa as
recently as 2019.
The sites from this era are the most numerous and the most
politically charged. The perpetrators were tried, but the victims were never
fully found.
The 2003 Invasion And Its Aftermath
The fall of the Baath regime in April 2003 opened the
country’s buried history to systematic documentation for the first time. By
mid-January 2004, 53 mass grave sites from the Saddam era had been confirmed,
with early estimates suggesting the remains of 400,000 people across sites
discovered in the months following the invasion. Iraq’s Ministry of Human
Rights eventually confirmed 315 mass graves found since the US-led conflict
began.
But the collapse of state authority produced new casualties
almost immediately. Sectarian armed groups, insurgent factions, and security
forces operating outside legal oversight contributed to a wave of killings in
which bodies were routinely found in streets, rivers, and unmarked sites. UNAMI
reported that 34,452 civilians were violently killed in 2006 alone, many
bearing signs of execution-style killings, torture, and, in some cases,
decapitation. The Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute received 30,204 bodies between
2003 and mid-2006.
Dedicated mass grave sites from this period have been
identified but remain incompletely excavated. The distinction between Baath-era
and post-2003 graves is a continuing source of dispute in some locations. In
the recent case of a newly discovered site in western al-Anbar province, a
province that bore the weight of both Baath-era repression and post-invasion
insurgency, a civil activist told Shafaq News that the file “cannot
tolerate speculation” and demanded a transparent investigation to
establish the timeline and the identity of the victims. The politics of who is
buried where, and by whom, carry present-day stakes that complicate every
excavation decision.
The ISIS Period: 2014–2017
The Islamic State’s three-year territorial control of
northern and western Iraq produced the most recently documented and most
internationally investigated mass graves in Iraqi history. A UN Human Rights
Office and UNAMI report documented 202 mass grave sites in the governorates of
Nineveh, Kirkuk, Saladin, and al-Anbar, containing the remains of women,
children, the elderly, disabled persons, and members of Iraq’s armed forces and
police.
No community suffered more disproportionately than the
Yazidis. More than 5,000 Yazidis were killed in the ISIS campaign that began in
August 2014; more than 6,000 others, mostly women and children, were abducted
and sold into sexual slavery. Nadia Murad, a survivor from the Yazidi village
of Kocho, became the international face of that campaign, winning the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2018 and testifying before the UN Security Council.
According to data from the Petrichor Human Rights
Organization, 95 mass graves have been located in the Yazidi stronghold of
Sinjar district. Of these, 68 have been exhumed, recovering approximately 850
bodies, of which only 96 have been identified. As of July 2025, more than 2,560
Yazidis remain missing, according to the International Organization for
Migration.
The Khasfa sinkhole south of Mosul is believed to contain
thousands of bodies and remains one of the largest and most technically
challenging sites yet to be excavated. The Martyrs Foundation reports that 54
ISIS-era mass graves have been exhumed from a total of 125 documented, with 71
still untouched and 3,258 sets of remains recovered. The gap between what has
been found and what has been returned to families is wider still.
Read more: A decade of suffering: Yazidis still seeking justice after ISIS atrocities
The Machinery Of Recovery
Iraq established two dedicated bodies to address the mass
graves file: the Mass Graves Protection and Missing Persons Directorate,
operating under the Martyrs Foundation and restructured under a November 2024
law, and the Medico-Legal Directorate under the Ministry of Health, responsible
for forensic identification. In its 2024 annual report, the Directorate
disclosed that it retrieved 677 sets of remains that year, obtained testimonies
and blood samples from 2,015 people with missing relatives, and succeeded in
identifying 168 remains from various sites across the country.
Between 2018 and 2024, UNITAD —the UN Investigative Team
established by Security Council Resolution 2379 in 2017— provided forensic,
technical, and legal support that Iraqi domestic institutions could not
replicate alone. Over its mandate, UNITAD participated in the excavation of 68
ISIS-related mass graves, digitized 20 million ISIS-related paper records, and
supported more than 300 requests for assistance from 21 countries for national
investigations and prosecutions. Its annual budget of approximately $20 million
was, by any measure, the primary financial engine of Iraq’s excavation effort.
UNITAD ended operations in September 2024 after Baghdad
declined to renew its mandate, amid disputes over evidence-sharing protocols
and Iraq’s application of the death penalty in terrorism cases. With it went
not only funding but forensic expertise, international legal reach, and the
institutional credibility that had encouraged third-state cooperation.
As of October 2025, more than 316 mass graves have been
exhumed across Iraq, according to Zaidan Khalaf, human rights advisor to former
Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, speaking at the Fifth International
Scientific Conference on the Genocide of the Kurdish People in Duhok. What has
not been replaced is the capacity that made those exhumations possible.
Read more: Inside Iraq’s ongoing search for answers in ISIS mass grave
Why The Graves Stay Closed
The obstacles to completing Iraq’s mass graves excavations
are institutional, financial, forensic, and political simultaneously, and they
do not operate in isolation from one another.
Funding is the most immediate constraint. With UNITAD gone,
the $20 million annual budget it provided no longer exists, and the state
funding available to Iraq’s two domestic directorates has never approached that
figure.
DNA identification capacity is concentrated in a single
licensed facility in Baghdad, a bottleneck that produces delays measured not in
weeks but in years for families already waiting decades.
Victims’ relatives face additional bureaucratic hurdles that
complicate access to compensation even when identification eventually succeeds.
In addition, some grave sites in Sinjar and the Nineveh
Plain lie in contested territory or areas where armed group presence restricts
access. The Khasfa sinkhole was classified by UNITAD as a high-risk site
requiring specialized equipment to prevent rock collapses during excavation,
equipment that Iraqi authorities do not currently possess.
Political sensitivities compound the technical obstacles.
Some Yazidi advocates have expressed concern about evidence files being
transferred to the Kurdistan Regional Government, which a portion of the Yazidi
community holds partially responsible for their vulnerability when ISIS attacked
in August 2014, a charge the KRG contests.
The question of institutional accountability for the
conditions that enabled the massacre is not resolved, and it shapes who trusts
whom to handle the evidence of its aftermath. The al-Anbar dispute illustrates
the same dynamic at a different scale: the civil activist who spoke to Shafaq
News called the mass graves file in that province “one of the most painful
humanitarian issues” in Iraq and warned explicitly against its
politicization.
The UN estimates that between a quarter of a million and one
million people disappeared in Iraq over the last half-century. Against that
scale, 7,709 recovered sets of remains, spread across eras, directorates, and
political cycles, is not a record of progress. It is a measure of what remains
to be done by institutions that have just lost their most capable partner, in a
country whose political class has not yet demonstrated the will to replace it.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
