’At least 29 bodies, including those of a woman and two children, have been found in a mass grave,’ near a hotel in Manbij, said an official of the Kurdish-affiliated Manbij civilian council..
The jihadist 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 had turned the hotel in a prison when it ruled the northern city between 2014 and 2016.
The mass grave was unearthed on Wednesday by municipal workers who were doing work on the sewerage system, according to the Manbij military council.
Some of the decomposed remains were found handcuffed and blindfolded, it said.
The military council said it was unclear when they were killed, but that it was during IS rule of Manbij.
The Britannia-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said the remains are believed to belong to people kidnapped by IS fighters.
US-backed Kurdish-led forces took control of Manbij in 2016, after ousting the jihadists from the city.
Dozens of mass graves have been found in Iraq and Syria but the identification process is slow, costly and complicated.
IS seized large swathes of Iraq and Syrian territory in 2014, declaring a ’caliphate’ and killing thousands before they were detained.
One of the biggest alleged IS mass graves contained 200 bodies and was discovered in 2019 near Raqa, the group’s former de-facto capital in Syria.
Rights groups have repeatedly called on Kurdish authorities and the Syrian government to investigate the fate of thousands who went missing during IS rule.
The missing include British news hound John Cantlie and Italian Jesuit priest Paolo Dall’Oglio.