Iraqi forensic teams uncovered the bodies Tuesday of at least 40 victims of last year’s massacre near Tikrit of government soldiers captured by the Islamic State group in the early days of its onslaught across northern and central Iraq.
And those graves are only the beginning. More than 1,000 Shiite Muslims are thought to have been killed after they were captured last year; the bodies of many now can be unearthed from the unmarked graves where they were dumped.
But the recapture of Tikrit last week after a bloody monthlong campaign also has revealed new abuses by the mostly Shiite Muslim Iraqi security forces and their Shiite militia allies, and even by Sunni Muslim allies of the government, against Sunni residents they accuse of backing the Islamic State.
All those whose bodies were found Tuesday had been bound and shot in the head. An officer at the Salahuddin provincial command center outside Tikrit said the process of uncovering the victims of last year’s killing will take “weeks or even months.”
“We’re not sure how many sites there are yet to be discovered,” he said, speaking only anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject.
So far, government investigators have found at least three mass graves holding victims slain after the Islamic State captured hundreds if not thousands of members of the government security forces as well as poorly trained volunteer Shiite militias. The prisoners were forced to lie on the ground and were summarily executed at Camp Speicher, a one-time American military base, or shot in the head and tossed in the nearby Tigris River.
The Islamic State proudly documented the killings in online videos and magazine articles. The advocacy group Human Rights Watch later determined that at least 1,000 men were taken prisoner and at least 800 were quickly executed in what is considered the single worst mass killing of the current Iraqi civil war.
With Tikrit back in government hands, however, now it’s the government’s allies who are under investigation, accused of widespread looting and prisoner executions.
As security forces took control last week, journalists and civilians returning to the area witnessed widespread looting by both security forces and militias.
Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, announced Tuesday it was investigating reports that government forces and their militia allies had committed abuses as the city fell.
One major Sunni tribe, the Jabour, also has been implicated in alleged abuses. Members of the tribe, among the first, if not the only, major Sunni clans to have joined the government offensive, are accused by some witnesses of having committed abuses as they helped the government retake their hometown of al Alam, a Tikrit suburb.
The officer at the Salahuddin command center said that allegations against the Jabour tribe involve local police who burned dozens of homes in both Tikrit and al Alam when they were able to return.
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