Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-sudani on Saturday pledged to manhunt the perpetrators of the Speicher massacre that saw as many as 1,700 Iraqi airforces cadets shot dead by the hands of ISIS militants in 2014.
Al-Sudani’s remarks came during a visit to the camp where the crime took place near Saladin’s city of Tikrit.
A statement by his bureau said that the prime minister ascribed the crime as a “disgrace” for the culprits, pledging that the security forces and Judicial bodies will spare no effort to pursue every last criminal involved in the massacre.
In July 2014, Iraqi military recruits were led off their dorms at the former US base unarmed and murdered in their hundreds, machine-gunned in mass graves by the Islamic State, whose fighters boasted proudly of the killings on the Internet.
The massacre of the Iraqi army detachment at Camp Speicher was unprecedented, even by the standards of Iraq’s long years of sectarian violence. It sent panic through Iraq and announced to the world that the Sunni militants of Islamic State were a new kind of foe, determined not only to seize and hold territory but to exterminate sectarian enemies who fell into their hands.