Feb. 21, 2019 | Straits Times
RAQQA, Syria (AFP) – Sixty centimetres deep, below a plot of farmland outside the Syrian city of Raqqa, lies a large and deadly legacy of the ISIS militant group: a mass grave holding an estimated 3,500 people.
First responders learned of the burial site in the Al-Fukheikha agricultural suburb last month, more than a year after US-backed forces captured Raqqa from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and as they closed in on the group’s final redoubt of Baghouz further south.
The belated discovery is the biggest example yet of how the violence ISIS sowed during the reign of its “caliphate” will be harvested for years to come, diggers and activists said.