Two hundred corpses, including those of people believed to have been executed by the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group, were found near the Syrian city of Raqqa, a local official and a war monitor said Wednesday.
The mass grave contained the bodies of five middle-aged men in orange jumpsuits of the kind typically worn by IS hostages, Yasser al-Khamees and the Britannia-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
"They were shackled and shot in the head," said Khamees, who heads a team of first responders.
They were believed to have been killed more than two years ago, he said, adding that his team was not immediately able to identify them.
The grave also included the bodies of three women who were believed to have been stoned to death, Khamees and the Observatory said.
"Their skulls were severely fractured and displayed signs of stoning," the local official added.
The digger said his team first discovered the mass grave early last month on the southern edges of Raqqa, IS’s former Syria capital.
As many as 800 people could be buried there in total, he said.
Its discovery could help identify even more of the several thousand people whose fates remain unknown, including foreigners imprisoned by IS.
US-backed forces ousted IS from the devastated city in October 2017, leaving the Raqqa Civil Council (RCC) to run it.
The RCC has been retrieving bodies from the rubble across Raqqa, left in ruins by the months-long assault to oust IS.
In February, an exhumation team uncovered a mass grave holding an estimated 3,500 people in Raqqa’s al-Fukheikha agricultural suburb ‐ the largest to date.
Several other mass graves have already been identified around the city, including one in the neighborhood known as "Panorama," from which more than 900 bodies were exhumed.