The Alo Antar mass grave, near the town of Tal Afar in northwest Iraq, is the last of the 68 mass graves that the U.N. team helped excavate, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

The UNITAD has only two weeks to conclude its investigation into the genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State (ISIS) against the Yazidi community. This decision was announced by the Iraqi government last September and will prevent investigators from gaining access to 32 mass graves located in the Sinjar and al-Baaj districts, located in the northwest.

“It remains up to Iraq to exercise its sovereign right to decide on the future of this mission,” said Christian Ritscher, head of the UNITAD investigative team, arguing that a premature and abrupt end to the mission would only mean “a loss for all those concerned.”

According to the investigators, these mass graves contain “tangible evidence” of the genocide committed by ISIS during its occupation of northern and western Iraq from 2014 to 2017. This crime was recognized by the Iraqi Parliament in May 2021.

At Baghdad’s request, the U.N. dispatched a team of experts after ISIS was forced out of Kurdish areas in 2017 to document the massacres committed from 2014 onwards by the jihadist group, which murdered, tortured, kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery thousands of Yazidis with the explicit aim of eliminating them as an ethnic and religious group.

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In seizing the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, and Sinjar, ISIS reportedly killed over 5,000 Yazidis and abducted 6,500 women and children, out of a total of 550,000 Yazidis present in Iraq, according to Amnesty International. The exhumation of mass graves provided access to and analysis of the victims’ mortal remains, among other material evidence, including electronic evidence, witness testimony and ballistics analysis.

Of the 2,700 Yazidis reported missing, the remains of around 700 people have been exhumed thanks to UNITAD, but only 243 bodies have been identified and returned to their families.

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The Iraqi government’s decision to end the UNITAD mission appears to be a move to turn the page on a period that has become taboo, and to avoid reawakening sectarian resentments between Sunnis and Shiites, which had been reinforced by the presence of ISIS in Iraq.

It also coincided with Baghdad’s desire to increase its national sovereignty, at a time when discussions are ongoing on the withdrawal of the U.S. troops from the country in September 2025, while they have been present since 2014 as part of the coalition fighting against ISIS.

The forced departure of the U.N. investigators could also be a move by the Iraqi prime minister, under pressure from the Iran-aligned factions, to position himself ahead of the legislative elections scheduled for 2025. According to a researcher quoted by the New York Times, the Iraqi government criticized UNITAD for refusing to hand over to Baghdad evidence gathered on ISIS’ acts of violence, while it shared it with other states. This information was denied by the investigative team, which stated that it had submitted a series of evaluation reports to the Iraqi authorities, including the legal conclusions of the investigation.

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Baghdad reportedly expressed its willingness to continue excavating mass graves after the departure of the U.N. investigators, although it is unclear whether the Iraqi authorities have the resources to do so. In March 2023, the government allocated $38.5 million to a newly created fund for the reconstruction of Sinjar and Nineveh, ravaged by the fighting, and to ensure the return of some 200,000 displaced persons, most of whom had taken refuge in displacement camps in northern Iraq.

But in July, the decision to close the camps was reversed by the Iraqi government, citing security threats in the region, where fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are present.

In last August, however, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) pointed to “the lack of adequate shelter and basic services in areas of origin, including running water, electricity, health care and education” in the Yazidi regions to ensure the return of displaced families.

This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour. It was translated by Sahar Ghoussoub.