Watchdog Urges Iraqi Authorities to Investigate Tortures, Killing of Civilians

Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International’s Beirut Regional Office, called on Iraqi authorities to launch investigation on reports that fighters in Iraqi police uniform tortured and executed civilians in the villages located near Mosul, in order to bring those responsible to justice and to prevent repetition of war crimes.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Iraqi authorities should look into reports that fighters in Iraqi police uniform tortured and executed civilians in the villages located south of Mosul in late October, a prominent human rights watchdog said Thursday in a statement.

"Men in Federal Police uniform have carried out multiple unlawful killings, apprehending and then deliberately killing in cold blood residents in villages south of Mosul. In some cases the residents were tortured before they were shot dead execution-style," Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International’s Beirut Regional Office, said as quoted in the statement.

Maalouf added that it was important for Iraqi authorities to launch investigation in order to bring those responsible to justice and to prevent repetition of similar war crimes in other villages.

According to the statement, some ten men and a teenager from the villages of Na’na’a and al-Raseef villages in the Shura and Qayyarah sub-districts of the Nineveh province suffered torture and six of them were executed on the suspicion of having ties with Islamic State group (ISIL pr Daesh, outlawed in Russia).

The Amnesty International group earlier reported that Iraqi men, dressed as Federal police officers, involved in conducting counter-insurgency operations, executed some 16 men and male children on May 27 near the city of Fallujah, located in the Iraqi province of Anbar.

On October 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi launched the operation to retake the city of Mosul from the Daesh. The operation began with 4,000 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and 30,000 Iraqi soldiers backed by the US-led coalition against the Daesh.