ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Local authorities in Kirkuk have begun exhuming a mass grave near Hawija district, southwest of the province, a region that had once been a stronghold of the Islamic State (ISIS), a day after it was declared discovered.

The exhumation is expected to reveal the fate of hundreds of people who have been missing for years. However, the exact number of the victims contained in the mass grave has yet to be known.

The mass grave is located inside the Bakara Camp, a former US military base. 

In November 2017, the then-acting governor of Kirkuk, Rakan al-Jubouri, announced the discovery of another mass grave containing “at least 400” bodies inside the camp, which was retaken from the group on October 8 of the same year.

A week after Hawija was retaken from ISIS in October 2017, the Iraqi Ministry of Defense said they had discovered a mass grave containing the remains of approximately 50 army and police personnel killed by ISIS in the village of Bakara in Hawija.

In 2018, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) revealed that it had documented 202 mass grave sites for ISIS victims in the provinces of Nineveh, Kirkuk, Salahaddin, and Anbar, estimating the number of victims in the mass graves range between 6,000 to 12,000 people.

ISIS took Hawija in mid-2014, along with several other districts and villages of Kirkuk province. Iraqi forces, along with the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), and with the support of Kurdish Peshmerga Forces, retook the city in early October 2017, three years after it was overrun.

With the ultimate territorial defeat of ISIS in Iraq, locals and authorities began discovering tens of mass graves across all the regions the extremist group had once overrun.

In August 2016, The Associated Press concluded an investigation into mass graves, finding that between 5,200-15,000 people were buried in 72 mass graves in regions ISIS had once ruled in Iraq and Syria.

ISIS controlled large swathes of territory in parts of Iraq and Syria following their rise in 2014. The group was declared territorially defeated in 2019.  The group no longer controls any territory but is active in their hit-and-run operations, posing a danger to security around the areas they once controlled.