Iraqi forensic teams began on Monday excavating 12 suspected mass grave sites thought to hold the corpses of as many as 1,700 soldiers massacred last summer by Islamic State militants as they swept across northern Iraq.
The mass killings last June of Shiite soldiers from Camp Speicher, a former U.S. base outside the Sunni city of Tikrit, has become a symbol of the brutality of Islamic State fighters and their hatred for Iraq's Shiite majority.
The deaths showed Iraqis that the Islamic State fighters, who have also attacked ethnic and religious minorites as well as fellow Sunni Muslims opposing them, were a threatening new kind of foe.