Just this past spring, Iraqi forensic teams uncovered the remains of more than 30 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Iraqi security personnel, and Yazidi women and children in an Islamic State mass grave near Mosul. A week earlier, across the Syrian border in eastern Deir Ezzor, another mass grave was found, one of at least 18 such sites documented in Syria this year.
These discoveries follow a string of high-profile sectarian killings that threaten to unravel the post-war order. Last March, more than 1,400 Syrian Alawites, the religious minority to which former president Bashar al-Assad belonged, were massacred. In July, sectarian killings of Druze in Suwayda were reported. From Lebanon, still living in the long shadow of its civil war, to Syria and Iraq with more recent civil wars of their own, sectarian tensions now permeate the region.
Eminent Syrianist Joshua Landis has described the phenomenon as the "Great Sorting-Out" — the violent unwinding of communities along sectarian lines. The Foreign Policy analysis argues that the wounds opened by the US invasion of Iraq and the rise of ISIS remain fresh in the region, even if they feel distant in Washington.
The author notes that the violent sectarian era that peaked with ISIS more than a decade ago has not truly ended but is instead re-emerging in new forms, with mass graves and targeted massacres serving as grim reminders of unresolved grievances.