Thousands buried in mass grave near Mosul

The Khasfa sinkhole was once an inconspicuous feature in the barren desert just off the Baghdad-Mosul highway. Now this natural depression 8km outside Mosul is believed to be the biggest mass grave in Iraq.

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) killed and dumped the bodies of thousands of security personnel here after they captured the city in 2014, said local villagers, Iraqi police and human rights organisations.

Most victims were shot and thrown into the pit, witnesses said; others perished in vehicles driven over the edge of the pit.

"Daesh would drive the victims to Khasfa in convoys of minibuses, trucks and pick-ups. The men had their hands bound and their eyes blindfolded.

"They were taken to the sinkhole and shot in the back of the head," said Mahmoud, a 40-year-old from the nearby village of Sananik.

The dead would either tumble into the hole after being shot or be tossed into it by their masked killers, he said.

Journalists visited the Khasfa site after Iraqi security forces fighting to recapture the western half of Mosul took control of the area.

Iraqi fighters recaptured the city's airport from Isil on Friday, as they pushed into the densely populated western sector.

Isil is believed to have embarked on a campaign of extermination in Mosul, hunting down and killing policemen and soldiers and burying them in mass graves in the surrounding desert, which is pockmarked with sinkholes.

A grave containing the bodies of at least 300 members of the security forces was discovered last November on the outskirts of Hamman al Alil, a town about 30km from Mosul.

But the scale of the killing at Khasfa dwarfs all other known sites.

"Khasfa is definitely one of the biggest, if not the biggest, mass grave by Isil in Iraq," said Belkis Wille, senior Iraq researcher at Human Rights Watch. The organisation estimates that 4,000 bodies are buried at the site.

Locals said the sinkhole was more than 40m deep before the dead began piling up. At Khasfa, 2,000 policemen and soldiers were murdered in one day alone, claimed Mahmoud.

He once saw a bus full of bound and blindfolded Yazidi men being driven up to the lip of the sinkhole and then rolled over the edge.

Locals said the killing at Khasfa began six months after Isil took Mosul.

By June 2015 the militants had covered the hole with earth. Today the Khasfa sinkhole is just a slight depression in the parched landscape, with little visible sign of the horrors beneath.