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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 Shi’ite 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 Shi’ite majority.
The deaths showed Iraqis that the Islamic State fighters, who have also attacked ethnic and religious minorities as well as fellow Sunni Muslims opposing them, were a threatening new kind of foe.
The images of Shi’ite soldiers being machine-gunned in their hundreds, posted online by the jihadists, could rank as the deadliest single act of bloodshed during a decade of periodic sectarian war in Iraq.
The exhumation of burial sites on the late Saddam Hussein’s presidential compound came days after Islamic State militants were driven from the city by Iraqi forces and Shi’ite paramilitaries.
“We dug up the first mass grave site today. Until now we’ve found at least 20 bodies. Initial indications show indisputably that they were from the Speicher victims,” said Khalid al-Atbi, an Iraqi health official working with the forensic team sent to Tikrit.
“It was a heartbreaking scene. We couldn’t prevent ourselves from breaking down in tears. What savage barbarian could kill 1,700 persons in cold blood?” he asked.
Survivors of Speicher have described to Reuters their ordeal last June as the Iraqi military chain of command unraveled and Islamic State’s Sunni fighters descended on Tikrit, rounding up Shi’ite soldiers for slaughter.
The victims’ families, who often grow angry at Iraq’s political class for failing to provide them proper answers, have wondered for months about the fate of their friends and loved ones.
“The only positive thing is the victory in Tikrit,” said, Ali Hamad, whose cousin Kamal went missing at Speicher. We’re happy. At least the families will soon know the fate of their sons and cousins,” he said.
Meanwhile, ISIS has beheaded four men for armed robbery and murder in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh, according to an online propaganda video seen by AFP yesterday.
The undated video portrays the group, which has been steadily retreating recently from Iraqi forces backed by Iran and a US-led coalition, as still capable of maintaining law and order and dispensing justice.
A masked militant in front of a large crowd reads out over a loudspeaker the charges of which the men were convicted by the “Islamic Court in the State of Nineveh.”
A masked executioner is then shown beheading four men with a sword, after which their bodies are hung on crosses in the back of a small pickup truck.
Earlier in the video, allegedly stolen money is shown being returned to its owners, who make thumbprints in a receipt book.
An IS offensive overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in June, but security forces and allied paramilitaries have succeeded in driving the militants out of much of two provinces north of the capital.
Nineveh, where the video was said to have been shot, was the first to fall to the IS-led drive and is still the jihadist group’s main stronghold in the country.
The militants have carried out a wave of abuses in areas they control in Iraq and Syria, including public beheadings, mass executions, enslavement and rape. — Reuters/AFP..
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