An Iraqi man, who has served in the Iraqi Army for over a decade, has been given a conditional sentence of eighteen months by the Helsinki District Court for having beheaded a Daesh terrorist and posed with human remains, Finnish national broadcaster Yle reported.
The man served as a corporal in the Iraqi Army's 24th Brigade from 2003-2015. In the final stage of his service period, his unit was fighting Daesh, whose self-proclaimed "caliphate" took control of large swathes of territory in parts of the Middle East.
In March 2015, the Iraqi Army launched an offensive operation against Daesh in the Anbar district of Iraq.
During the offensive, which resulted in a major victory for the Iraqi Army, the man, now a Finnish resident, cut off the head of a Daesh terrorist with a knife and posed with it, while brandishing a victory sign, the Finnish court established.
The action was recorded by his peers, and the video was later shared on Facebook, together with pictures of the corporal posing in front of burning corpses and their remains.
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While the victim of the barbaric act was established, one billion viewers have potentially been able to see the grisly video and the photographs.
According to the district court, the former Iraqi corporal acted in an inhumane way, degrading, humiliating and violating the honour of the victims.
The man himself denied the crime, claiming, among other things, that he didn't upload the pictures on Facebook.
The verdict left Yle readers nonplussed, with some taking to the comments section to vent their bewilderment. Some found the punishment "rather mild", calling for the penalty scale to be reviewed.
Another reader wondered what the motivation for the penalty he found exceptionally low was. "A man who is capable of cutting people's heads like this shouldn't be able to walk free", he added, wondering whether Finland had taken a cue from its neighbour Sweden, which he called a "humanitarian double-thinking nation".
Yet another reader wryly wondered whether a Finnish Army soldier would have received the same punishment for similar behaviour.
After a gruelling war over several years, in which tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, Daesh's "caliphate" was effectively obliterated. Following major territorial losses by Daesh since 2015 in both Syria and Iraq, victory over Daesh has been declared by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Russian President Vladimir Putin, former Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and most recently US President Donald Trump.
* Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS/Islamic State) is a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other countries
