The Bottomless Mass Grave of Mosul: How Many Thousands of ISIS Victims Were Thrown Into the Khasfa S

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The Bottomless Mass Grave of Mosul: How Many Thousands of ISIS Victims Were Thrown Into the Khasfa Sinkhole?
The Daily Beast Florian Neuhof

MOSUL, Iraq—The rugged desert that rolls gently toward Mosul in an uneven pattern of stunted ridge lines and shallow hollows seems worlds away from what is now the noisy, bustling city that straddles the Tigris River. On a deserted road that turns off the Baghdad-Mosul highway, the silence is only punctuated by the sound of wind sweeping over the inhospitable terrain; sheep feeding off the sparse vegetation offer the only movement.

It is here that the jihadists of the self-proclaimed Islamic State came after storming Mosul in June 2014, here at a huge sinkhole called Khasfa that they consolidated their stunning victory with a relentless, continuous campaign of slaughter. The deep cavity in the ground was said to have water at its base, but that was too far down to see, and the people who live nearby say its history as a dumping ground for the tortured and the dead was a long one. Saddam Hussein’s regime rid itself of opponents here, according to local legend. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the forebear of ISIS, is supposed to have disposed of victims here during the insurgency that followed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Read more at: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-bottomless-mass-grave-of-mosul-how-many-thousands-of-isis-victims-were-thrown-into-the-khasfa-sinkhole/ar-AAvKGcl