Iraq sentences 40 to death over Camp Speicher massacre
19 February 2016
A court in Baghdad has sentenced 40 men to death for their involvement in an Islamic State (IS) attack on Camp Speicher in Tikrit, in which as many as 1,700 army cadets were slaughtered.
All 40 men sentenced to death were Iraqi nationals, the BBC reports, as were seven others arrested but released due to insufficient evidence. Twenty-four of the defendants had appealed against sentences for the same crime handed down last year, but they were all rejected.
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The massacre was carried out by IS militants as they seized territory across northern Iraq in 2014. Fighters captured hundreds of unarmed cadets heading out on leave from the former US base, which was being used for training by the Iraqi national army.
Videos and photos released by the terrorist group document the massacre that followed, with the cadets made to lie on the ground in rows before being shot.
IS then carried out further attacks on Iraqi soldiers in the area around the city and also took thousands of prisoners.
There are conflicting reports of the total number of victims. The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry put the figure at 1,095, while IS sources have claimed 1,700 were killed in and around the camp.
The majority belonged to the Shia sect, which IS denounces as being a deviation from the true form of Islam. Commanders have called for the Shia to be forcibly "converted" to the militia's extreme Wahhabist form of Sunni ideology or else exterminated.
Shia communities were inflamed by the discovery of the mass graves around Camp Speicher last year, after Iraqi national forces recaptured the area. Since then, the Iraqi government has been under pressure to identify the killers and bring them to justice, with the investigation hindered by the difficulty of tracking down the suspects.
Human rights groups have raised concerns about the trials, as some of the defendants claim they were tortured, forced to confess or denied legal representation.
