When Dhorgham Abdelmajid first arrived at the 20-metre-deep hole in Tal Afar district, in northern Iraq, in June, he says he saw something he had never witnessed in his 15 years working as an excavator of mass graves.
“It was unlike other mass graves where bodies are buried underground. Here the corpses, piled eight metres high, were clearly visible and also well preserved because it’s very dry.”
