Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
Iraq has sentenced 14 people to death for their role in the ISIS terrorist group massacre of hundreds of army cadets in 2014, judicial officials said Thursday.
The massacre, one of the worst committed by ISIS in Iraq, saw the terrorists in June 2014 abduct up to 1,700 mainly Shia cadets from the Speicher military base in the Tikrit region and execute them.
The Al-Rusafa Criminal Court in the capital Baghdad “issued death sentences against 14 criminal terrorists for their participation in the Camp Speicher massacre in 2014,” the judicial authority said in a statement, without specifying their nationalities.
The 14 men have 30 days to appeal the sentence. Decrees authorizing executions must also be signed by the president.
In 2016, 36 men were hanged for their participation in the massacre.
The Speicher massacre took place in the early days of the terrorist group’s offensive in Iraq when its forces seized the second city Mosul and turned it into its stronghold – until it was driven out by the Iraqi army and the PMF in 2017.
According to propaganda images released by ISIS, the terrorists executed the recruits one by one.
Some bodies had been thrown into the Tigris River, which runs through Tikrit, while others were buried in mass graves.
The massacre prompted a surge of Shia volunteers to enlist in the army fighting the terrorists.
While Iraqi authorities do not give figures, several thousand people accused or convicted of ISIS links are detained in Iraqi prisons.
The United Nations estimated in 2018 that more than 12,000 Iraqi and foreign “combatants” were being held in Iraqi prisons.
