36 ISIS Soldiers who Slaughtered 1,700 Iraqi Army Recruits Hanged in Front of their Victims' Relatives
36 ISIS Soldiers who Slaughtered 1,700 Iraqi Army Recruits Hanged in Front of their Victims' Relatives
Dozens of ISIS fanatics involved in the massacre of 1,700 Iraqi army recruits have been hanged in front of their victims' relatives.
The
36 jihadists had been found guilty of involvement in the 'Speicher'
massacre, named after a base near Tikrit in Iraq where the recruits were
kidnapped before being butchered by terrorists.
Officials say relatives of some of the extremists' victims attended the mass hanging at Nasiriyah prison.
The Speicher
massacre sparked outrage across Iraq and partially fueled the
mobilisation of Shiite militias in the fight against ISIS, a Sunni
extremist group. The militias now rival the power of Iraq's conventional
armed forces.
Iraqi
forces arrested dozens of men allegedly linked to the massacre after
retaking Tikrit in 2015 with the help of US-led airstrikes.
The men executed on Sunday were sentenced to death by an Iraqi court earlier this year.
Following
the death of more than 300 people in the worst ever single bomb attack
to strike Baghdad last month, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had said he
wanted to expedite the execution of inmates sentenced to death in
terrorism cases.
A Dhiqar governor confirmed to AFP that the executions were carried out by hanging.
His
spokesman said that around 400 of the Speicher massacre victims were
from the Dhiqar province, which is predominantly Shiite and located in
Iraq's south.
'Tens
of relatives attended the executions,' said Dawood. 'They shouted
Allahu Akbar (God is greatest), they were happy to see those people
dead.'
Among
them was Najla Shaab, a 30-year-old woman whose husband was killed in
the massacre, leaving her to raise their children alone.
'Thank
you God, it's a fair punishment for the worst crime, a triple crime of
killing, throwing bodies in the river and burying people alive,' she
told AFP by phone.
One
of the sites of the massacre was the former river police building
inside former president Saddam Hussein's palace complex in Tikrit.
Video
footage subsequently released by ISIS showed an assembly-line massacre
in which gunmen herded their victims towards the quay, shot them in the
back of the head and pushed them in the water one after the other.
The trials
that have led to Iraq's latest batches of death sentences have been
severely criticised by rights groups as failing to meet basic standards.
Amnesty
International had slammed Iraq's systematic resort to the death penalty
following the execution of 22 other people in May this year.
'The
use of the death penalty is deplorable in all circumstances, and it is
particularly horrendous when applied after grossly unfair trials marred
by allegations of confessions extracted under torture as is frequently
the case in Iraq,' the group's Iraq researcher Diana Eltahawy said.
The
United Nations had criticised Abadi's call to speed up executions,
which according to Amnesty already topped 100 for 2016 before Sunday's
hangings.
'Fast-tracking
executions will only accelerate injustice,' UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said earlier this month.
The Speicher massacre is considered one of IS's worst crimes since it took over large parts of the country in 2014.
Combined
with a call by the country's top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani for Iraqis to take up arms against them, the Speicher
massacre played a key role in the mass recruitment of Shiite volunteers
to fight the jihadists.
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