A United Nations report has supplied new evidence of what it calls a staggering list of human rights abuses by Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq. It revealed systematic violations completed since IS began its advance in July across Iraq.
The report, based on 500 interviews, supplies evidence of mass executions, the utilization of child soldiers, and the kidnapping of women and girls to utilize as sex slaves. The report detailed how soldiers Iraqi police officers and journalists were killed in a series of mass executions. It said religious and ethnic communities was surrounded and starved of food and water, while women and girls were abducted as sex slaves and children.
The UN said the violations might amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also found the Iraqi government had caused “major civilian deaths” when its air strikes on the Sunni Muslim militants strike villages, a school and hospitals in violation of international law.
A large number of civilians killed in weeks
The UN report said at least 9,347 civilians had been killed and 17,386 wounded in the nine months to September – half of them since the started seizing big parts IS insurgents of northern Iraq in early June .
It said the widening battle had compelled 1.8 million Iraqis to flee their houses.
“The array of violations and abuses perpetrated by ISIL (IS) and related armed groups is staggering, and many of these actions may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein said.
Look back at a timeline of key events leading up to the decision in Australia to join air strikes.
He called again for the authorities to join the International Criminal Court in Iraq
Could prosecute the direct targeting of civilians on the basis of the religious or ethnic group along with such enormous abuses.
Along with gross human rights violations, the 29-page report from the UN Human Rights Office along with the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq detailed how the violence by Islamist forces was of an “increasing sectarian nature” against groups including Christians, Yazidis and Shiite Muslims.
The report detailed how IS fighters had captured and killed about 1,500 Iraqi from the officers soldiers and security former US Camp Speicher military base in Salahuddin province in a single massacre on June 12.
It said unarmed Iraqi military recruits were led off the base near Tikrit and machine-gunned in their own hundreds before IS fighters into mass graves boasted of the killings on the web.
The report said women had been treated particularly harshly with IS combatants attacking and killing lawyers and female physicians, among other professionals.
It said in August, IS militants took 450-500 women and girls to the Tal Afar citadel in Iraq’s Nineveh region where “150 single girls as well as women, primarily from the Yazidi and Christian communities, were reportedly transported to Syria, either to be given to ISIL combatants as a reward or to be sold as sex slaves”.
The report also said IS and allied groups had assaulted and destroyed places of spiritual and ethnic significance in Iraq that did not conform to its “takfiri” doctrine referring to the beliefs of Sunni militants who justify their violence by branding others as apostates.
But it allied fighters and also expressed deep concern at violations perpetrated by the Baghdad government, including shelling and air strikes which could not have distinguished between military targets and civilian areas.