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An AP investigation has found at least 133 mass graves left behind by the defeated extremists, and only a handful have been exhumed. Many of the missing \u2014 especially the thousands of Yazidis unaccounted for since Islamic State fighters slaughtered and enslaved the minority \u2014 may ultimately be buried there. Estimates total between 11,000 and 13,000 bodies in the graves, according to the AP tally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But not all of the missing were spirited away by the Islamic State. Some families in and around Mosul say their relatives were taken by unidentified gunmen after ISIS was defeated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was the middle of the day, 3:30 in the afternoon. A silver pickup truck drove into the village and took my brother,\u201d Elias Ahmed explained as he walked along the dusty main road leading to his home in the sprawling Bijwaniya agricultural village.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ghazwan Ahmed was taken along with four other young men in August. They have not been seen since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe men who took him didn\u2019t even identify themselves, they just said they worked in intelligence,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Elias Ahmed spent weeks shuttling between the different headquarters buildings of Iraq\u2019s disparate security services in and around Mosul. The federal police, Sunni tribal paramilitary fighters, local policemen and the Iraqi army all control different sections of Mosul and the surrounding Nineveh countryside. Each group maintains its own records of detentions and arrests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ahmed went looking for answers at a court north of Mosul in the small, historically Christian town of Tel Keif, established especially to process those charged with terrorism. Each morning, family members gather outside its gates in hope of tracking down missing relatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Inside, judges process close to 100 cases a day. Many trials last no longer than 30 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yasser Hafahdy, an attorney from Mosul working at the court, defended the practice of arresting people without informing their families where they would be held or the charges against them. He said the court was overwhelmed by the sheer number of ISIS suspects arrested and could not spare the time or resources to reach out to families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the court opened its doors in March, about a dozen judges have processed more than 15,000 cases. More than 60 percent have been found guilty, Hafahdy estimated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat we need is a Judge Dredd, you know, Sylvester Stallone,\u201d Hafahdy said, referring to a 1995 dystopian action film in which a traditional justice system is replaced by armed judges who patrol city streets acting as police, judge, jury and executioner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a nearby detention center, hundreds of men sat in cramped rooms, and dozens of women and child detainees shuffled between a windowless room and an open courtyard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Iraqi government was completely unprepared for all the people taken prisoner while fighting Daesh,\u201d said an Iraqi lieutenant colonel overseeing a different detention center just south of Mosul. \u201cHonestly we expected more field executions. But human rights organizations were monitoring the operations, so we began taking people prisoner instead.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Iraqi officer, who spoke on condition that he was only identified by his rank because he was not authorized to talk to journalists, said that during the Mosul operation hundreds of people passed through his detention center on their way to Baghdad for trials. During the height of the fighting, the small rooms used as makeshift cells were packed with prisoners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe know that this is a violation of human rights,\u201d he said. The squalid conditions were due to the backlog of cases in Baghdad, he said, and families were unable to track down arrested relatives until the detainees were processed in the capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rami Saad continues to look. The search has taken him to government detention centers and hospitals in and around Mosul and lawyers\u2019 offices in Baghdad. Rami traveled to the Health Ministry\u2019s forensic department in Mosul to look over lists of people confirmed killed by IS. If Abdulrahman Saad\u2019s death could be established, at least the wife would receive his pension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut we didn\u2019t find my father\u2019s name,\u201d Rami said, and so \u201cwe have a glimmer of hope. Perhaps he is still alive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Salar Salim in Mosul, Muhanad al-Saleh in Baghdad and Lori Hinnant in Paris contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since Mosul was declared liberated in July, residents have submitted more than 3,000 missing-persons reports to Nineveh\u2019s provincial council.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":64332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":8,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[8,12,68],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1147],"class_list":["post-64325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flashpoints","category-news","category-pentagon-congress"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"2ROJQDLHX5F5XALEIWNEV2S3XI","arc_canonical_url":"\/flashpoints\/2017\/12\/31\/thousands-remain-missing-after-iraqs-victories-against-isis\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n