Mass graves containing 140 Yazidi civilians discovered in Iraq's Sinjar

Iraqi paramilitary forces have uncovered two more mass graves containing the bodies of 140 civilians, including women and children, in an area home to the Yazidi religious minority, they said Saturday.

In 2014, Daesh killed thousands of Yazidis in Sinjar and kidnapped thousands of women and girls from the community to abuse them as sex slaves.

The Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary alliance said it had found "a mass grave with the bodies of 20 women and about 40 children in the village of Kabusi, south of Sinjar."

Elsewhere, "in the Jazira residential complex, also south of Sinjar, 80 other bodies, mostly Yazidis, were discovered," it said.

Peshmerga fighters backed by the U.S.-led coalition against Daesh captured Sinjar from the terrorists in November 2015 before Iraqi security forces took control of the region in October.

As government troops have advanced across Iraq they have uncovered dozens of mass graves holding hundreds of bodies in areas that fell under the terrorists' brutal rule.

Iraqi officials said on Nov. 22 they had found a mass grave in Sinjar containing the bodies of dozens of members of the minority killed by the Daesh terrorist group.

Sinjar mayor Mahma Khalil said that since 2015, around 40 mass graves have been discovered in the region and that "all the victims were Yazidis."

The Yazidis are Kurdish-speaking but follow their own non-Muslim faith that earned them the hatred of the Daesh terrorists.

Yazidis believe in one God who created the world and entrusted it to seven Holy Beings, the most important of which is Melek Taus, or the Peacock Angel.