Militants Claim Mass Execution of Iraqi Forces
BAGHDAD
— Wielding the threat of sectarian slaughter, Sunni Islamist militants
claimed on Sunday that they had massacred hundreds of captive Shiite
members of Iraq’s security forces, posting grisly pictures of a mass
execution in Tikrit as evidence and warning of more killing to come.
Even
as anecdotal reports of extrajudicial killings around the country
seemed to bear out the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s intent to kill
Shiites wherever it could, Iraqi officials and some human rights groups
cautioned that the militants’ claim to have killed 1,700 soldiers in
Tikrit could not be immediately verified.
But
with their claim, the Sunni militants were reveling in an atrocity that
if confirmed would be the worst yet in the conflicts that roil the
region, outstripping even the poison gas attack near Damascus last year.
In an atmosphere where there were already fears that the militants’ sudden advance near the capital would prompt Shiite reprisal attacks against Sunni Arab civilians, the claims by ISIS were potentially explosive. And that is exactly the group’s stated intent: to stoke a return to all-out sectarian warfare that would bolster its attempts to carve out a Sunni Islamist caliphate that crosses borders through the region.
The
sectarian element of the killings, and reports late Sunday that the
city of Tal Afar, west of Mosul, had also fallen, may put more pressure
on the Obama administration to aid Iraq militarily. In fact, the
militants seemed to be counting on it. A pronouncement on Sunday by the
group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had a clear message for the United
States: “Soon we will face you, and we are waiting for this day.”
The
group’s announcement was made in a series of gruesome photographs
uploaded to an ISIS Twitter feed and on websites late on Saturday night.
Some showed insurgents, many wearing black masks, lining up at the
edges of what looked like shallow mass graves and apparently firing
their weapons into young men who had their hands bound behind their
backs and were packed closely together in large groups.
The
photographs showed what appeared to be seven massacre sites, although
several of them may have been different views of the same sites. In any
one of the pictures, no more than about 60 victims could be seen and
sometimes as few as 20 at each of the sites, although it was not clear
if the photographs showed the entire graves.
The
militants’ captions seemed tailor-made to ignite anger and fear among
Shiites. “The filthy Shiites are killed in the hundreds,” one read. “The
liquidation of the Shiites who ran away from their military bases,”
read another, and, “This is the destiny of Maliki’s Shiites,” referring
to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
Many
of the captions mocked the victims. In one photograph, showing a group
of young men walking toward an apparent execution site, where armed
masked men awaited, the caption read, “Look at them walking to death on
their own feet.”
Video
Background on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Islamist group that gained control of the second-largest city in Iraq.
Credit Yaser Al-Khodor/Reuters.
So
far, Iraq’s majority Shiites were not rising to the bait. Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, their supreme religious leader, issued a
statement on Saturday calling for all groups to “exert the highest
possible level of self-restraint during this tumultuous period.” And
there was little immediate public reaction to the ISIS claims in Baghdad
or other southern Iraqi cities.
A
senior Iraqi government official, speaking on the condition of
anonymity because he was not authorized to make press statements, said
news of the executions was slow to circulate because Twitter and other
social media sites had been blocked for days. “I don’t doubt they are
real, but 1,700 is a big number,” he said. “We are trying to control the
reaction.”
Acutely
aware of the potential for retaliatory violence, some government
officials who had heard about the ISIS claims took pains to play them
down, confirming only that some executions had taken place in Tikrit,
but not on a large scale.
One
Iraqi security official claimed that no more than 11 bodies of executed
soldiers were recovered from the Tigris River downstream from the
execution site, a group of six and a group of five, although he
confirmed that 800 soldiers had been taken prisoner in the area. He also
reported finding 17 bodies washed up against a dam near Samarra,
another city the militants are fighting for. But he said, “There is no
such superstitious number as 1,700 people executed.”
An official statement posted on the Ministry of Defense’s website denied the executions had taken place at all.
Note: Before 2011, less information was
available on who was responsible for attacks, so the number of ISIS
attacks from 2004 to 2010 may be undercounted.
Sources: Global Terrorism Database, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (attack data)
Still,
other officials and human rights representatives, while cautioning that
they could not confirm the full 1,700 number being claimed, said that
ISIS had shown no compunctions against hunting Shiites. And they
reiterated that such horrific claims would go to further the group’s
intent to sow chaos.
“We’re
trying to verify the pics, and I am not convinced they are authentic,”
said Erin Evers, the Human Rights Watch researcher in Iraq. “As far as
ISIS claiming it has killed 1,700 people and publishing horrific photos
to support that claim, it is unfortunately in keeping with their pattern
of commission of atrocities, and obviously intended to further fuel
sectarian war.”
Col.
Suhail al-Samaraie, head of the Awakening Council in Samarra, a
pro-government Sunni grouping, confirmed that officials in Salahuddin
Province were aware that large-scale executions had taken place, but did
not know how many. “They are targeting anyone working with the
government side, any place, anywhere,” he said. He said the insurgents
were targeting both Sunnis and Shiites, anyone with a government
affiliation, but claiming for propaganda reasons that the victims were
all Shiites.
A
New York Times employee in Tikrit said local residents saw hundreds of
Iraqi military personnel captured when they tried to flee Camp Speicher,
a former American military base and airfield now used as an air force
training center on the edge of Tikrit. It is still in government hands.
Most
of those captured were air force cadets, the employee said. Those who
were Sunnis were given civilian clothes and sent home; the Shiites were
marched and trucked off to the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s old palace in
Tikrit, where they reportedly were executed. He added that the bodies
had been dumped in the Tigris River, which runs by the palace compound.
The
ISIS photographs appeared to have been taken at that location, the
employee said. However, he said he had not spoken to any witnesses who
claimed to have seen the executions or the victims’ bodies.
Ryan
C. Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq and a critic of America’s 2011
withdrawal from that nation after the two countries failed to sign a
mutual security pact, said the atrocity claims, proven or not, made it
more urgent than ever for Washington to become involved.
“What
this administration has to do is get John Kerry on a plane right now,
like we did when I was there, and sit down with Shia, Sunni and Kurdish
leaders and help them get to a position of declared national unity.
Iraqis have to stand together now,” Mr. Crocker said. Regarding the
massacres, he said, “Whatever it is, however many people, it’s clearly
an effort to ignite an Iraqi civil war.”
Political
analysts here mostly agreed about the militants’ intent. “The problem
now is that you are dealing with emotions and ISIS is trying to provoke
the other side to take revenge,” said Ameer Jabbar al-Sa’aedi, a
Baghdad-based analyst. “There are extremists among the Shia, too, and if
they respond, they could begin killing and not exclude anyone. It would
be just like what happened in 2006.”
Even
though Ayatollah Sistani’s statement over the weekend was intended to
call for restraint on the part of Shiites, it came after his call just a
day before for every Iraqi to take up arms to support the government.
That
appeal was expected to greatly accelerate the formation of volunteer
groups to supplement Shiite militias — nominally to fight alongside the
Iraqi Army. But during the worst of the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq,
from 2005 through 2007, some such Shiite groups were deeply involved in
violence that was killing as many as 1,000 civilians each week.
One
militia leader, Abu Bakr al-Zubaidi, from a group called Asaib Al Haq, a
hard-line offshoot of the Mahdi Army militia, said he was not surprised
to hear of the executions.
“ISIS
regards Shia as their eternal enemy, and they will kill whoever falls
in their hands who is Shia, whether they are soldiers, grocers or even
singers,” he said. “Our response to that is there will not be any living
ISIS prisoner.”
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