The Daily Beast reports: Even before it became the scene of the Islamic State’s greatest crime, the Khasfa sinkhole stood out among the crevasses that pockmark the uneven desert plains west of Mosul.

Villagers from the surrounding hamlets could not see the bottom of the pit when they peered cautiously into the abyss. In 2003, a farmer’s boy fell into sinkhole, which lies next to a road cutting through the parched landscape, a mile off the Baghdad-Mosul highway.

When the rescue services tried to retrieve the child’s body, a rope 450 meters long was not enough to reach the bottom, local legend goes.

In June 2014, when ISIS took control of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, it quickly began to use this dark place for an even darker purpose. The terror group began hunting down policemen and soldiers almost as soon as the city fell, and an orgy of killing ensued as it slaughtered anyone affiliated with government security forces. [Continue reading…]