The sites were discovered on Saturday near Rashad airbase close to the group's former stronghold, Hawijah, 45km west of Kirkuk.
Iraqi forces recaptured the town of Hawijah and surrounding areas from the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS, also known as ISIS) group in October. It was one of their last strongholds in Iraq.
Rashad airbase, located about 30km south of Hawijah, was used by ISIS as a training camp and logistic base.
Al Jazeera's Imran Khan
... aka
Taliban Khan, who isn't your heaviest-duty thinker, maybe not even among the top five...
, reporting from Baghdad, said it was a common ISIS tactic to imprison and execute anybody who was in opposition to their rule.
"The graves are a significant find, most of all for the families of the victims who have been seeking closure for years," Khan reported.
"According to locals, ISIS turned the military base into an execution ground. Iraqi authorities have been cataloguing exactly how many people died under ISIS rule and are now investigating how many victims are in these particular graves," he added.
"Authorities are relying on local people who took detailed notes during ISIS rule, handed them over, and showed authorities where these graves are located."
The discovery of the mass graves was not the first after the routing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
In August, Iraqi military Sherlocks discovered two mass graves near a former ISIS prison outside djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
that contained the bodies of 500 victims.