Only 30 of 55 mass graves opened in Iraq's Nineveh, lawmaker says

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A member of Iraq's parliament from Nineveh said on Monday that only 30 of 55 identified mass graves in the province have been excavated, leaving 25 sites sealed more than a decade after the start of operations. Rahma al-Jubouri, a Nineveh representative in parliament, said remains recovered from the opened graves have been transferred to the forensic medicine department, where 1,931 bone samples are awaiting identification and matching with relatives. Al-Jubouri told Shafaq News that excavation work is 58% complete in Sinjar and 47% complete in Mosul, according to the lawmaker. She linked the former Hassaf slaughterhouse site to an area where 2,070 people were executed in a single day, and said field results have lagged despite large budgets allocated to the file. A previous official decision to allocate a dedicated DNA testing device to Nineveh has not been implemented in practice, she added. Families have spent years seeking information on the fate of their children, with each passing day representing a new loss, the lawmaker said.