Kasr Mihrab Village

Kasr Mihrab Village is in the Tal Afar district in the Nineveh governorate, about 3 km from the Tal Afar military airport. As ISIS militants took control of Tel Afar and most of the Nineveh governorate in mid-2014, the Shiite Turkmen people of the village were fleeing their homes. ISIS began to use the village to detain hundreds of Yazidi families and commit the worst of crimes against them.  ISIS may have also, according to some sources, detained families from the Syrian Arab Shaitat tribe opposed to it in Syria.

When ISIS lost the city of Tal Afar in 2017, they killed 17 Yazidi people in a single day and buried them in a mass grave in the Kasr Mihrab village. Later, the mass grave was excavated by families of the victims who were residents of the Yazidi village of Kocho, whom the criminal organisation executed during its control of Nineveh governorate. Yazidi women and children could only have contact with ISIS militants who treated women in an inhumane manner, exploiting them sexually.  They recruited children to be ‘Lions of the Caliphate,’ forcing them into military training camps inside the schools in the city of Tal Afar. The village of Kasr Mihrab became witness to the brutality and cruelty of the ISIS militants who caused the loss of so many lives and the continuous suffering of unarmed civilians.