HARDAN, Iraq – Tens of graves were dug outside the village of Hardan in the Yazidi heartland of Shingal (Sinjar) on Tuesday for the reburial of Yazidis killed by the Islamic State (ISIS) whose dead bodies were identified in Baghdad a year after they were uncovered. 

The identified remains, which were discovered across several mass graves, numbered 57 and are scheduled to be reburied in a special ceremony later in January. 

Hardan village is located on the main road from Shingal and Tal Afar into Syria in Iraq’s northern Nineveh province. It was the site of heinous Islamic State (ISIS) crimes on the Yazidi ethnoreligious community in 2014, with many residents killed. 

The remains whose identities were revealed were all males aged between 18 and 80 years old, according to Rudaw’s Adla Abubakir reporting from the site of the newly-dug graves. 

More than half of the 366 people from Hardan village who had been captured by ISIS were rescued and 132 remain unaccounted for, according to data obtained by Rudaw from local Shingal authorities. 

ISIS seized control of large swathes of land in Iraq and Syria in 2014. The group committed genocide against Yazidis when they overran the ethnoreligious minority’s heartland of Shingal, killing around 5,000 Yazidi men, some of whom were put into mass graves. Around 7,000 women and girls, some as young as nine, were enslaved. 

Exhumation of mass graves began in 2019 in Shingal. Progress halted during the coronavirus pandemic and resumed in October 2020. 

The exhumations are carried out by the Iraqi government in coordination with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and are overseen by the United Nations Investigation Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Daesh (UNITAD).