Hudhayfah al-Badri, son of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in the central Syrian province of Homs, the ISIS propaganda agency Amaq announced Tuesday.
Al-Badri was killed in an operation “at the thermal power station in Homs,” the group said in a statement alongside a photo of a young man holding an assault rifle.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch said that a local group working to uncover mass graves in the area of northeastern Syria once controlled by ISIS needs international support and technical assistance to preserve evidence of possible crimes and identify the remains.
With an unknown number of mass graves in the city of Raqqa and surrounding areas and thousands of bodies left to be recovered, local authorities affiliated with the Raqqa Civil Council are struggling to cope with the logistical challenges of collecting and organizing information about the bodies recovered and providing it to families searching for missing or dead relatives, the U.S.-based organization said in a report.
“Raqqa city has at least nine mass graves, each one estimated to have dozens, if not hundreds, of bodies, making exhumations a monumental task,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, acting emergencies director at HRW.
“Without the right technical assistance, these exhumations may not provide families with the answers they have been waiting for and could damage or destroy evidence crucial to future justice efforts.”
Members of the international community now providing recovery and stabilization support, most prominently the United States, should support local authorities in developing and maintaining a more precise system for storing information on missing persons and identifying exhumed remains, HRW added.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
