Iraq's mass graves: A record of violence across five decades
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.
