ISIS fighters execute Iraqi law enforcement officials in the battle for Iraq’s second biggest city
Earlier this month, Iraqi security forces discovered a mass grave less than 20 miles from Mosul, which, at the time, they believed had about 100 beheaded decomposing bodies. The corpses were not fully buried but instead were covered under scraps of clothing and garbage. Analysts now say the grave hosts some 300 bodies, with bound hands and ankles, all of whom were either Iraqi police officers or law enforcement officials who had been imprisoned before their executions by the Islamic State (ISIS).
“The area had a strong, foul smell,” researchers at Human Rights Watch (HRW), a watchdog NGO, said.
According to one Iraqi man who spoke with HRW, on the night of October 28th at around 8 pm, ISIS soldiers drove four truckloads of men, some of whom were police officers, to the area of the mass grave.
“We talked with people who had seen truckloads of people taken to this area,” Joe Stork, the deputy Middle East director at HRW, told The Media Line. “And, they didn’t have a direct line of sight, but they were close enough to hear the automatic rifle fire and the cries of distress.”
The second largest city in Iraq, Mosul has been under ISIS control since 2014. Beginning in the villages surrounding the city, over the past month, Iraqi security forces backed by the US have launched an operation to retake control of Mosul, a strategic move to eliminating the terrorist organization from the country.
When ISIS took control over the city, many of the civilians welcomed a change in governance; however, as the group began to lose control over the territory, ISIS “became paranoid and had to result to more totalitarian tactics,” Renad Mansour, a Middle East researcher at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, told The Media Line.
“The Islamic State is losing ground in both Iraq and Syria, and in Iraq in particular, they will soon revert to a group that no longer holds a sufficient body of territory,” Dylan O’Driscoll, a research fellow at the Middle East Research Institute in Iraq, told The Media Line.
Analysts say that as the campaign begins to retake the city of Mosul and as military groups head towards the city, they, along with the international community will begin to uncover the extent of terror and fear that ISIS maintained while in control of Mosul.
“We are about to find out how bad their regime was,” Mansour said.
Finding this mass grave, which is just one of dozens in Iraq, is another example of the Islamic State’s increasing paranoia and fight to maintain its grip on the strategic city.
“ISIS put itself out there as a savior or symbol as an alternative to Shia Iran and other governments,” Mansour told The Media Line. “When we see these mass graves, we find out that many people that ISIS killed are Sunni and it has run an administration of fear and terror.”
“That will change the narrative,” Mansour added.
As the campaign has trudged along, ISIS fighters have grouped up civilians from the surrounding area, forcing them to the city center to be used as “human shields.” The terrorist group has also managed to keep the number of civilians in Mosul high as they execute those who try to flee. The increase in number of civilians will make the fight to push ISIS out of Mosul much more difficult as the battle to retake the city becomes a “war on the streets.”
While ISIS has committed thousands of war crimes, some of the Iraqi forces have also recently been accused of mutilating the bodies of dead ISIS soldiers, which has worried human rights observers. According to Stork, these groups are allied with the Iraqi government and are only nominally under its generally weak control.
The battle to retake Mosul is expected to take months as moving into the city itself will prove to be problematic.
Katie Beiter is a student journalist with The Media Line