Iraqi forces discovered a mass grave on Sunday after retaking an area from the militant Islamic State (IS) group near Fallujah, where the militants are using thousands of civilians as human shields.
Growing numbers of families reaching camps south of Fallujah told horrific accounts of how IS shot at them as they fled, but there was still no escape for the tens of thousands believed trapped in the city centre.
In Saqlawiya, northwest of Fallujah, Iraqi forces found a burial site thought to contain the bodies of around 400 people, most of them soldiers executed by IS in 2014 and 2015.
“The security forces of the federal police, the army and the Hashed al-Shaabi found a mass grave in the Shuhada neighbourhood during a mine clearing operation,” a police colonel said.
He said most of the victims, whose remains were being transferred for identification, appeared to have been shot in the head.
“The mass grave also includes civilians executed by Daesh (IS) on various charges such as spying or breaking the organisation’s rules,” said Rajeh Barakat, a member of the provincial council of Anbar, where Fallujah is located.
Iraqi forces launched a vast operation on May 22-23 to retake Fallujah, which lies only 50 kilometres west of Baghdad and is one of the militants’ most emblematic bastions.
The first phase of the operation was aimed at sealing the siege on the city by cutting the militant group’s supply lines in outlying areas, including in Saqlawiya.
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A week ago, elite troops launched a second phase aimed at breaking through into Fallujah itself, a dense city where US soldiers in 2004 suffered some of their worst losses since the Vietnam War.
But the Iraqi forces have been moving slowly, only making some forays into some southern neighbourhoods.
The Baghdad government said concern for the fate of an estimated 50,000 civilians still inside the city was slowing the operation.
“The operation to liberate Fallujah could have been completed in days but we put the safety of civilians first,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s spokesman Saad al-Hadithi said.
Out of the approximately 18,000 people who have reached displacement camps south of Fallujah since the offensive began two weeks ago, only a handful lived in the city.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said on Sunday that those who arrived at its camps in Amriyat al-Fallujah, to the south, told of how IS would open fire on them to punish them for fleeing.
“An unidentified number of civilians have been shot and killed trying to cross the river,” it said in a statement.
“This is the worst that we feared would happen to innocent men, women and children who have had to leave everything behind in order to save their lives,” the statement quoted NRC country director Nasr Muflahi as saying.
The premier’s spokesman said that the government would also investigate claims of abuses committed against the civilian population by Iraqi forces in the course of the operation.
He said Abadi had ordered the creation of a human rights committee to examine “any violation to the instructions on the protection of civilians”.
