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The United States and its allies face a dilemma and opportunity in Iraq. The October 2022 parliamentary elections produced a winner in Muqtada al-Sadr, the traditionally anti-Western cleric who leads Iraqs most powerful socio-political movement and one of its most dominant armed groups. Sadr has long been at odds with the West. His militia, the Peace Brigades, fought U.S. and British troops during the occupation of Iraq, and his fighters have been complicit in wide-ranging atrocities.

But the cleric also has historic differences with the Iranian regime and is engulfed in ongoing violent rivalries with several militia groups that Tehran controls or is closely aligned with. Since his victory, Sadr has made a ferocious push to form a majority government that excludes Iranian-backed militias and their political sponsors, a bold and unprecedented move that has been met with significant pushback. These are strange times in Iraq. Sadr, who has a support base of some 2 to 3 million mostly destitute Iraqis, represents one side of a country that has long been shackled by militias and radical Shia Islamist groups. The other side of the country is represented by a burgeoning civil-society movement that yearns for good governance and reforms.

Sadrs victory presents less than ideal circumstances. Yet his triumph combined with the electoral decline of Iran-aligned militias, and the alliance Sadr has forged with moderate, U.S., and Western-aligned political actors like the Kurds in an attempt to form a majority government suggests the U.S. has a historic opportunity to support and capitalize on a credible cross-sectarian alliance. Such a partnership could reduce the space in which extremist militia groups thrive, bridge the gap between Iraq and the Arab world, and in the long-term, restore the authority of the Iraqi state.

Sadr is by no means a natural U.S. ally. His organization is complicit in a catalogue of brutalities, including sectarian violence against Arab Sunnis and the repression of activists. U.S estimates suggest the Shia militias who operated within and later left the once-heavily decentralized Sadrist movement were responsible for killing 600 American personnel. The most prominent of the commanders responsible for these deaths fell out with Sadr and formed their own factions after splintering from the movement with Iranian encouragement and backing.

Both the Sadrists and Iran-aligned militias operate under an ideological outlook that is underscored by Shia supremacism and combating Western imperialism. Both have opposed the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. But there are crucial distinguishing features that separate Sadr from his rivals, and these matter for the trajectory of Iraq and its relationship with the West.

First, Sadr, and other powerful figures like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are actively seeking to re-assert the authority of the Iraqi state against a particular group of Iranian-backed militias who are complicit in ongoing attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and in rocket and drone attacks on civilian targets in the Kurdistan region. These militias continue to engage in widespread atrocities against Iraqi civilians.

Sadr sees it as imperative that such groups are excluded from the next government or contained. The future of the Sadrist movement depends on preventing Iran-aligned militias from extending their tentacles within the state as part of the Popular Mobilization Force (PMF), the umbrella militia organization that these groups control and that oversees a $2 billion budget. Irans proxies may have stumbled in the elections so far, but these are groups whose young leadership and cadres will politically mature. Sadr does not have an indefinite window of opportunity.

The clerics own militias have also yet to submit to state authority, and present long-term challenges. But the nature, scope, and scale of the daily attacks committed by Irans proxies makes their dominance a more immediate threat, and their containment an urgent priority beyond Iraqs wider efforts to reform its security sector, a process that would be helped by the political containment of the PMF.

Second, Iran-aligned militias have struggled to make the transition from insurgents to viable social movements, not least because of their complicity in systemic human rights abuses and deference to Iran. Iranian-backed militias are the only political actors who use rocket and drone attacks to influence and pressure their rivals, and who deploy these measures as a negotiating tactic. By excluding the Iranian-backed PMF from the parameters of the Iraqi state, Sadr can remove the political cover the group relies on to carry out attacks with impunity. This will add to the woes of an organization that has already lost the support of the public.

The West has its own track record of working with its enemies in Iraq and elsewhere, including members of the Sunni insurgency who turned to the U.S. for support and were instrumental in defeating al-Qaida in Iraq as part of the U.S.-established Awakening Movement in 2007. The West does not have to partner with Sadr. But it should accommodate his pre-eminence as a political reality and find ways of empowering his alliance, which is the lesser of two evils.

It should not be taken lightly that Sadr has partnered with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Kurdistans ruling party led by Masoud Barzani, the former president of Kurdistan who led the Kurds historic push for independence in 2017. Sadrs alliance with Barzani will not have been entirely popular among his Shia support base, which has derided Kurdistans push for independence and has echoed Sadrs past toxic ethno-sectarian discourse towards the Kurds. Similarly, Mohammed al-Halbousi, the newly elected speaker of the Iraqi parliament who, with Barzani, completes Sadrs tri-partite alliance, has emerged as the champion of Arab Sunnis and is popular in the Arab Gulf and Turkey, both of which have come under derision within the wider Shia community.

In other words, Sadr has passed the litmus test. Western observers should look toward his actions like aligning with the Kurds and Halbousi when determining whether and how to accommodate his electoral ascension. If Sadr can form such an alliance with unconventional bedfellows, then so too can the U.S. accommodate a cross-sectarian, historic, and regionally backed alliance that includes some of the Wests most ardent allies.

Iran and the PMF are doing their utmost to derail the tri-partite alliance by launching missile and drone attacks on Erbil (the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan), assassinating rivals, and exploiting divisions amongst the Kurds to force through a coalition government in Baghdad that does its bidding. In an effort to economically pressure Kurdistan, Baghdads Federal Supreme Court, under pressure from Iran, recently decreed that Kurdish oil exports are illegal. However, the timing of the ruling and the fact that the court has no constitutional standing has rendered its ruling dubious and politically motivated.

The courts ruling has also failed to deter regional actors from forming closer ties to Erbil and they continue to back Sadrs alliance. This has been notably displayed by Kurdistans Prime Minister Masrour Barzanis energy-focused visits to Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar since the February ruling. Irans decision to attack Erbil with missiles is telling of the desperate straits in which Tehran finds itself in, but it also highlights the vulnerabilities of Americas allies. This should encourage Washington to work on maintaining the momentum generated by Barzanis regional outreach, as well as Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimis attempts to bring Iraq into the orbit of the Arab world.

The Kurdistan region, like Baghdad, must continue to reform its security sector so it can combat Irans proxies. But the U.S. must also stop being a bystander to Irans coercive tactics and find direct ways to ensure the Sadr-Barzani-Halbousi political roadmap comes to fruition. The alliance may succumb to demands for a government that includes Irans allies but it can still function as a buffer against these groups within the government and parliament.

However, Washingtons attempts to mobilize its allies in Iraq and the region will be made redundant if Iran is holding a gun to their heads. Tehran has been able to ensure political disputes, like Kurdish divisions over the Iraqi presidency, have a disproportionate impact on the Sadr-led alliances ability to push through Iraqs post-election deadlock. Washington should consider proportionate retaliatory military responses to Tehrans attacks on Erbil and consider supplying Kurdistan with comprehensive air-defense systems, a move that will be welcomed in the Arab world and could be premised on the vulnerabilities of U.S. personnel and strategic interests in Erbil.

There is now recognition across the region that both Sadrs determination to exclude Iran and its proxies from Iraqs next government, and the alliance itself, presents a unique opportunity to nullify their political reach in ways that were unimaginable in the past. Iraqis will have to undertake the heavy lifting. But there is an opening for the U.S. to empower an alliance that could be Baghdads least-worst option for managing the Iranian proxy threat and achieving some degree of stability in Iraq.

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Muqtada al-Sadrs alliance: An opportunity for Iraq, the US, and the region - Brookings Institution

In December 1998, Bill Clinton called Boris Yeltsin, pleading: The relationship between the United States and Russia that you and I have worked so hard to build is far too important and, to my mind, far too sound, to be subverted by Saddam Hussein. To Clintons dismay, Yeltsin answered that indeed, what is at stake is not just the person of Saddam Hussein but our relations with the U.S. As I have discussed elsewhere, this was but one of many tense exchanges between American and Russian officials over Iraq during the 1990s. Such quarrels between the two former Cold War rivals irrevocably damaged their relationship in the post-Cold War period, but they have been largely overlooked by history, even in the memoirs and post-hoc analyses of officials who participated in those events. Nevertheless, these disputes are worth reexamining today as they provide critical insight into what drives the deep animosity between Moscow and Washington.

The war in Ukraine has reignited decades-old debates about what went wrong in the post-Cold War Russian-American relationship. On one side of this debate, politicians and pundits ranging from Bernie Sanders on the left to Tucker Carlson on the right as well as realist international relations scholars have blamed American and Western policies in Eastern Europe for the breakdown in Russian-American relations. Hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism led to NATO expansion into Moscows traditional sphere of influence, which was a clear threat to the Russian homeland. Moscows policies in places like Ukraine, this argument goes, is a regrettable but predicted response to this provocation.

Of course, others have countered that such arguments are inconsistent, and that conflicts between Russia and the West in Eastern Europe stem from Russian pathologies and Moscows paranoia rather than Western liberalism. Yet, even these critiques have focused on Eastern Europe.

The Eurocentric fixation of the discussion has blinkered all sides to the global nature of the American disagreements with Russia since the 1990s. After all, in addition to Ukraine, Russia also intervened militarily in Syria and, less prominently, in Libya. Likewise, bringing Iraq into the conversation expands the discussion about Russian foreign policy. Doing so belies the notion that delusional American commitments to liberalism and the threatening nature of NATO forces butting up against the Russian border drove post-Cold War history.

Russian disagreements with the United States were just as intense in Iraq, which is nowhere near the Russian border. American actions there were certainly not a threat to the regime in Moscow. Rather, focusing on Iraq suggests that Russias main problem in its post-Cold War relations with the West has been its own weakness, which thwarted Moscows attempts to shape international politics as it had during the Cold War.

Iraq played as important a role in the breakdown in Russian-American relations in the 1990s as anything that occurred in Europe. Moscow went along with Washington in the Gulf Crisis of 1990 because it was powerless to stop it. As a British diplomat privately quipped in the wake of Iraqs invasion of Kuwait, it doesnt make any difference what the Soviet analysts may think since the person determining Soviet policy in the Middle East these days is [U.S. Secretary of State] James Baker. Although the Soviet Union supported the United States in the Gulf War, the Iraqi military was armed with Soviet weapons. Moscow watched with embarrassment as its military hardware proved impotent in the face of a high-tech Western onslaught in Iraq.

Following the war, the Russians tacitly supported a humanitarian intervention in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, but behind closed doors they expressed some reservations to Bush about encroachments on Iraqs territorial integrity.

Internal Iraqi archives reveal that Iraqi diplomats struggled to maintain influence in Moscow in 1991 and early 1992. However, by courting the Russian opposition they were able to transform American policies toward Iraq into a wedge issue in Moscow. By the end of 1992, the Iraqis forced a change of policy. Despite the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government increasingly fell into old patterns of treating Iraq as a client state in the fight against American hegemony.

When Iraq moved surface-to-air missiles into a no-fly-zone in January 1993, the Americans, British, and French launched airstrikes against Saddams regime. As declassified American intelligence reports show, these air strikes caught Russia by surprise. Moscow believed it was not adequately consulted and it began to question Western attempts to manage UN-authorized military actions independently. These reservations about American unilateralism in Iraq bled into suspicions about American actions in the Balkans later in 1993. American intelligence reports suggested that Russia was taking a harder line in the Balkans because of domestic reactions to the latest [American-led] military actions against Iraq. Yeltsin began pairing the two issues, accusing the US of dictating to the international community on Iraq and Yugoslavia.

By the end of 1993, internal Iraqi files show that the regime in Baghdad could count on the support of every major political party in Russia from the Christian Democrats to the Communists to the Liberal Democrats and everyone in between. In their meetings with Iraqis, they all agreed repeatedly to aid the Iraqi regime and many of them visited Iraq to show their support. Moscow hesitated to break publicly with Washington, but by the fall of 1994 it clearly opposed American-backed sanctions.

Iraq owed Russia large sums of money, and the regime in Baghdad enticed Moscow further by offering lucrative oil and reconstruction contracts to Russian firms. Thus, Moscow had considerable economic interests in backing Iraq.

However, Russian condemnations of American policies were most severe when the United States failed to live up to the liberal principles that it claimed to support. The George H.W. Bush administration had sold the Gulf War and sanctions on Iraq as a means to launch a new world order in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. The Clinton administration adopted similar rhetoric. Yet, while the United Nations never authorized regime change in Iraq, both the Bush and Clinton administrations made it increasingly clear that they would settle for nothing less than that. Such hypocrisy inflamed the Russian-American relationship. As Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev argued in 1994, if Iraq adhered to U.N. resolutions, the United States and the U.N. Security Council must be ready to take Yes for an answer. The Russians were not liberals. They certainty were not immune to hypocrisy and cynicism. In Iraq, they were supporting one of the late 20th centurys most brutal dictators someone who launched two wars against his neighbors and gassed his own people. However, in this instance, it was not Americas imposition of liberal concepts like a rules-based system or international law, but rather the flouting of them which sparked Russian ire.

Disagreements over Iraq increasingly inflamed tensions between Moscow and Washington as the decade progressed. In 1996, Baghdad sent the Iraqi Army into the autonomous region of northern Iraq to intervene in a Kurdish civil war. In response, the United States and Britain launched cruise missiles at Iraq without a Security Council resolution. Russia described the attack as inappropriate and unacceptable. Its foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, condemned the United States, arguing that Washington felt there was only one superpower in the world that could dictate its terms to others.

Then, in 1997 and 1998, Iraq provoked a series of crises when it restricted U.N. weapons inspections. In August 1998, Baghdad suspended inspections until the teams were reconfigured with fewer Anglo-Saxons. The Russians could not defend Iraq in the face of such a blatant violation of a U.N. resolution and they remained uncharacteristically quiet throughout the fall. However, as it became clear that Washington and London were moving toward another military campaign in Iraq without a new U.N. Security Council resolution, Clintons relationship with Yeltsin worsened.

Yeltsin recognized that Iraqi actions were problematic, but in private, he implored Clinton not to overdramatize the situation. In December 1998, as military strikes became imminent, the relationship hit rock bottom. Internal American assessments argued that Yeltsin was under immense domestic pressure and that Russian Foreign Minister Primakov was acting very emotionally. On December 18th, Moscow recalled its ambassador to Washington for the first time since World War II. It did so not because of NATO expansion or Western intervention in the Balkans, but because of Iraq.

In the following days, the exchange that opened this article occurred. Yeltsin made clear that what was at stake in the crisis over Iraq was not just the fate of the regime in Baghdad, but the entirety of Russian-American relations. However, none of the Russian protests and threats in the 1990s, including this one, had any influence on American policies. In the following years, the Russian-American relationship deteriorated further, hitting another low point against the backdrop of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, again without clear authorization from the U.N. Security Council.

Highlighting the role of Iraq in the breakdown in Russian-American relations during the 1990s does not negate the importance of NATO expansion or Balkan interventions. However, it does challenge some of the assumptions that stem from a Eurocentric analysis. Pundits and analysts who blame the West for the breakdown in Russian-American relations often point to Western policies in Russias near abroad. Yet, expanding the scope to include Iraq suggests that threats to the Russian homeland did not necessarily drive Russian policies. By extension, a few Western policy shifts in Eastern Europe would not have changed the course of history.

Neither was American liberalism necessarily at the heart of the dispute. Russias fury with American policies in Iraq were most acute when Washingtons propensity for unilateralism led it to defy liberal principles such as commitment to a rules-based system and international law.

That type of unilateralism was at the heart of Moscows disagreement with the United States both in Iraq and in the post-Cold War world more generally. After winning the Cold War, the United States dominated the post-Cold War order. Moscow did not like how decisions were being made, or who was making them. As the case of Iraq shows, the Russians could complain and protest, yet they were not powerful enough to shape events in the manner that they saw fit. In the end, Moscows dissatisfaction with its own weakness was and remains a much more fundamental issue than NATO expansion. But addressing it would require more than simply changing a few American policies in Eastern Europe.

Samuel Helfont is an assistant professor of strategy and policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is the author of Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018). His next book, Iraq against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order, is currently undergoing peer review.

Image: Department of Defense

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From Iraq to Ukraine: A New Perspective on the Russian-Western Confrontation - War on the Rocks

Iraq's vast swamplands are the reputed home of the biblical Garden of Eden, but the waterways are drying out and becoming so clogged with waste their very existence is at risk, activists warn.

"For 6,000 or 7,000 years the inhabitants have protected the marshes," said Raad al-Assadi, director of Chibayish Organisation for Ecotourism, who this week began work on a boat to try to clear some of the worst areas of trash.

"But we have reached a stage where the marshes are threatened with extinction."

The swamps, nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, are one of the world's largest inland deltas.

The wetlands barely survived the wrath of dictator Saddam Hussein, who ordered they be drained in 1991 as punishment for communities protecting insurgents and to hunt them down.

But after Saddam was toppled, Iraq pledged to preserve the ecosystem and provide functional services to the marshland communities, and they were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016 both for their biodiversity and their ancient history.

Tourists have returned, but one of the main visible sources of pollution in the area are visitors who throw away their "plastic waste", said Assadi.

- 'Respect our land' -

After decades of brutal war, Iraq lacks structures for the collection and disposal of waste, and 70 percent of its industrial waste is dumped directly into rivers or the sea, according to data compiled by the United Nations and academics.

A team of 10 joins the boat, cruising the maze of narrow waterways to collect the piles of plastic bottles filling the channels, and erecting signs urging people to "respect our land", and not to litter.

But it is far from the only threat: Iraq's host of environmental problems, including drought and desertification, threaten access to water and livelihoods across the country.

The UN classifies Iraq "as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world" to climate change, having already witnessed record low rainfall and high temperatures in recent years.

The water level of the marsh is falling, a phenomenon accentuated by repeated droughts and by the dams built upstream of the two rivers, among Iraq's upstream neighbours, Turkey and Iran.

"There is a threat to this ecosystem, which has significant biodiversity", said French ambassador Eric Chevallier, at the launch Thursday of the French-funded boat project.

Chevallier called for "much greater mobilisation, Iraqi and international, to meet all the challenges" that a heating planet is causing.

A string of sandstorms in recent weeks have blanketed Iraq, with thousands needing medical care due to respiratory problems.

The Middle East has always been battered by dust and sandstorms, but they have become more frequent and intense in recent years.

The trend has been associated with overuse of river water, more dams, overgrazing and deforestation.

The rubbish collectors are not the only unusual team in the marshes: earlier this year, the Iraqi Green Climate Organization launched a veterinary ambulance to help farmers treat their water buffalo.

Read more here:
Trawling Iraq's threatened marshes to collect plastic waste - Al-Monitor

A British and a German tourist accused of smuggling ancient shards out of Iraq have appeared in yellow detainees uniforms in a Baghdad court

By SAMYA KULLAB Associated Press

May 15, 2022, 4:37 PM

3 min read

BAGHDAD -- A British and a German tourist accused of smuggling ancient shards out of Iraq appeared in a Baghdad court in yellow detainees' uniforms Sunday, telling judges they had not acted with criminal intent and had no idea they might have broken local laws.

The trial of Jim Fitton, 66, is grabbing international attention at a time when Iraq seeks to open up its nascent tourism sector. The session also revealed first details about a second defendant, identified as Volker Waldmann of Germany.

The three-judge panel in Baghdads felony court scheduled the next hearing for May 22. The court must determine whether the defendants had sought to profit by taking the 12 items, which were found in their possession as they attempted to fly out of Baghdad airport on March 20.

Fitton and Waldmann appeared in court in detainees' yellow and were asked to explain their actions.

Waldmann said the two items found in his possession were not his and instead had been given to him by Fitton to carry. But did you put them in your bag?" asked head judge Jaber Abdel Jabir. "Didnt you know these were Iraqi antiquities?

Waldmann said he didn't pick up the items from the site, only agreed to carry them for Fitton.

Fitton said he suspected the items he collected were ancient fragments, but that at the time I didnt know about Iraqi laws, or that taking the shards was not permitted. Fitton said as geologist he was in the habit of collecting such fragments as a hobby and had no intention to sell them.

He said it was not clear to him at the time that picking them up from the site was a criminal offence. There were fences, no guards or signage, at the sites he told the court.

These places, in name and by definition, are ancient sites," Jabir responded. One doesnt have to say it is forbidden.

When Fitton said some of the shards were no larger than my fingernail , Jabir said this was not relevant. Size doesnt matter, he told him.

Based on the law both men could face the death penalty, an outcome that legal experts said was unlikely. British and German embassy officials were present at the court but have not issued detailed public statements about the case in order not to jeopardize the proceedings, they said.

The defense plans to submit more evidence to clear the men, Fittons defense lawyer Thair Soud told The Associated Press. This includes testimony from government officials present at the site where the fragments were collected, he said.

(Their testimony) is pending approval from their official directorates, he said.

Link:
British, German deny smuggling antiquities in Iraq court ...

"My brother was arrested by Daesh," explained Abdullah Ramadan Mohammed, using the colloquial name of the extremist group known as the "Islamic State."

Mohammed lives in the central Iraqi city of Hawija and his brother had worked for the Iraqi government. The extremists accused him of spying when they took over the city by force in early summer 2014. "That was such nonsense," Mohammed told DW.

But after the nighttime arrest, his brother disappeared. Mohammed tried for months to get information, visiting different prisons run by the "Islamic State", or IS, group, but he found out nothing.

By the end of 2017, the Iraqi army had pushed the IS group out of Hawija but Mohammed's brother had still not been found. "And now there is nobody left here who I can ask," Mohammed sighed. "I won't forget him ever. But what can I do?"

A group of Hawija locals, including Abdullah Ramadan Mohammed (seated closest, left), meet to discuss missing relatives

The Hawija man is just one of thousands of people in the city who is still looking for a family member taken away by the militant group, during the three years it managed to control the area here. By the time the IS group left Hawija, the city counted around 7,000 dead and 5,000 missing persons.

Unfortunately, it seems increasingly likely that his brother's body is in one of the mass graves near the city. But Mohammed and his family will have to wait to find out if it is, or not.

For now, the Iraqi government's MassGravesDirectorate, or MGD, which is tasked with identifying the remains found in large burial sites, has only scheduled the exhumation of graves at a location at the foot of the Hamrin mountains in northeastern Iraq. This is supposedly where Yazidi women who tried to escape the IS group and were killed, are buried.

In Baghdad, forensics specialists try to identify remains from a mass grave

The United Nations said that over 200 mass graves linked to IS have been found in Iraqto date, which may well contain as many as 12,000 bodies.

Dia Karim Saidi, head of the MGD, explained that so far his team has only managed to exhume sites at 29 out of the 114 locations where victims of IS are known to be buried.

Some locations have several mass graves, Saidi explained, and in the 81 communal graves found at those 29 sites, the remains of around 3,000 people were collected. The MGD also works with investigators at UNITAD, the UN's Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by the IS group, and the International Commission of Missing Persons, or ICMP.

Most of those exhumed graves contained bodies of Yazidis, the ethno-religious minority that the IS group has been accused of committing genocide against. They are mostly located in the northern Iraqi province of Sinjar, the traditional Yazidi homeland. Many of those remains have been identified and some given a ceremonial burial.

The remains of 104 Yazidi men from Kojo village were exhumed and re-buried in 2021

Back in Hawija, family members of those still missing complain that the Yazidi graves have been prioritized.

The MGD's director Said blamed finances. His team has only 45 members and lacks resources. "We need the UNITAD and ICMP funding to be able to work," he said, implying that the UN organizations decided which mass graves receive priority.

However, ICMP spokespersonDima Babilidenies this is how it works. "It is the local authorities that set the agenda for conducting excavations," she said.

"Our goal is to help Iraq create a sustainable process to find all of its missing persons, regardless of their background, when they disappeared or the circumstances of their disappearance."

The Iraqis must also deal with a long-standing backlog. Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Husseinwas responsible for mass graves at 98 locations in the country, 22 of which are yet to be exhumed. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Iraq has the highest number of missing persons in the world, somewhere between a quarter of a million and a million.

Additionally, the MGD team often cannot do planned work for various reasons for example, the weather prevents it or small cells of IS group members are still active in an area and it is simply too dangerous.

Many of the victims of Saddam Hussein remain unidentified in mass graves, such as this one in Muthanna province

At his family home in Hawija, local tribal leader Ahmed al-Muhairi explains how paralyzing it is not to know what happened to missing relatives. His father and uncles are still missing.

"The family still hopes they will return," he said. But he thinks the chance of this happening is almost zero. "Therefore we cannot openly discuss what happened with them. It has become taboo."

Because his father was a community leader, his body is unlikely to be in a mass grave and al-Muhairi fears his relatives may never be found.

He has asked various government departments but he doesn't think anybody cares much. "They prefer to forget what happened," he argued. This is despite the fact that almost as many Hawija locals were kidnapped and killed as Yazidis, he pointed out.

"Our whole town is stigmatized," al-Muhairi said. He is referring to the fact that IS group based its rules and behavior on an extremist version of Sunni Islam. Most of the inhabitants of Hawija were Sunni Muslims and some initially saw the IS' rise as a way to become more powerful themselves.

Many quickly realized that they were mistaken but by then they had no choice but to live under the extremists' control. Although it is barely acknowledged in Iraq, many Sunni Muslims were also punished and killed by IS.

Many of the mass graves that have not been investigated are located in Sunni areas previously occupied by the IS group. Critics say these don't seem to be a priority for the Iraqi government which was, until recently, dominated by Shiite Muslim politicians.

Several mass funerals have already been held for Yazidi victims of the IS group whose remains were exhumed

Meanwhile, the mass graves likely containing Shiite Muslim victims have been exhumed, they argued. The exception is a mass grave containing over 200 members of the Sunni Muslim tribe, Al Bu Nimr, in the Anbar province. It was exhumed last October with help from UNITAD. The IS group had killed the tribe's members for resisting it.

The long wait for a final answer has consequences for victims' families. For example, Mohammed's sister-in-law has returned to her parents' home with the couple's children but she is still waiting for a widow's pension, something she cannot get from the government until she has proof of her husband's death.

"There are hundreds, if not thousands, of families with missing members," the governor of Ninawa province, Najm Jibouri, said recently. Ninawa's provincial capital, Mosul, was the IS group's base in Iraq and also has mass burial sites. Jibouri wants more international help investigating them..

"They [the survivors] continue to worry and that is why we must promptly identify all the corpses in those mass graves," he concluded.

Edited by: Cathrin Schaer

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In Iraq, sectarian prejudice goes beyond the grave - DW (English)