Dozens of IS militants executed for Iraq massacre
Thirty-six men hanged for their involvement in mass killing at Camp Speicher near Tikrit
Iraq has hanged 36 Islamic State militants convicted of involvement in a massacre that claimed the lives of up to 1,700 Iraqi military recruits in 2014.
"Tens of relatives attended the executions," said a government spokesman. "They shouted, 'Allahu Akbar [God is greatest]'. They were happy to see those people dead."
The 2014 massacre took place at Camp Speicher, a former US base near Tikrit in northern Iraq, after IS militants swept through the region.
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The men "posted a video displaying the mass killing of hundreds of Iraqi security officers and military students", says Kurdistan 24. It 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", says the Daily Telegraph.
Mass graves were discovered in the area more than a year after the massacre took place.
The execution comes after Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced he wanted to "speed up executions of terrorism convicts" in the wake of the Baghdad bombing that killed more than 300 people last month.
IS has also reportedly executed two of its own leaders, as well as the Emir of IS in Kirkuk.
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Iraqi News reports the men were killed after making a public appeal for IS militants to "withdraw and fall back from Hawija", which has been the scene of heavy fighting in the past four weeks.
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