SVKM’s

NMIMS SCHOOL OF LAW

A PROJECT SUBMITTED ON

ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND SYRIA (ISIS)

IN COMPLIANCE TO PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE MARKING

SCHEME, FOR SEMESTER VII OF 2018-2019,

IN THE SUBJECT OF

Human Rights

SUBMITTED TO FACULTY:

Prof. Afrin Khan

FOR EVALUATION

SUBMITTED BY:

Abhilasha Pant (A032)

Introduction

Multinational military operations in Iraq against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS)
intensified over 2017, including major operations to retake Mosul and Telafar. Iraqi armed
forces, including army, federal police, Popular Mobilization Forces, and Kurdistan Regional
Government (KRG) forces, were supported by Iran and the 73-nation Global Coalition
against ISIS, led by the United States. Fighting displaced at least 3.2 million Iraqis, over 1
million of them to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).

ISIS used civilians as human shields, carried out chemical attacks and targeted fleeing
civilians, before being defeated in most of Iraq.

In their battle against ISIS, Iraqi forces summarily executed, tortured, and forcibly
disappeared hundreds of ISIS suspects. Communities in former ISIS-controlled territory
took actions of collective punishment against families of suspected ISIS members,
displacing them and destroying their property with the complicity of government forces.

Since 2014, ISIS forces have carried out the most serious human rights abuses, war crimes
and crimes against humanity. 1The UN-mandated Independent International Commission of
Inquiry (COI) on abuses in the conflict in neighboring Syria, where ISIS is also active,
found that ISIS forces were responsible for acts of genocide. ISIS’s struggle for power since
2011 has been marked by hundreds of suicide and car bombing attacks, killing thousands of
civilians, including through the use of child soldiers.

In territory under its control in 2017, fighters continued to resort to ill-treatment, including
sexual violence, as well as public beheadings and other grotesque killings and acts of torture
as a method of governing through fear.

This paper seeks to find out the steps that have been undertaken to defeat ISIS and the
impact of their human right violations.

1
Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, OHCHR | Freedom of
religion: UN expert hails Albania, but notes new challenges and unresolved issues from the past,
https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/hrc/iicisyria/pages/independentinternationalcommission.aspx
Research Questions

1. What are the various Human Rights violations by ISIS?

2. How did ISIS come into force?

Review of Literature

Most of the cross-cultural empirical studies that have been conducted to date compared either
two or more Western industrialized countries or Western and Eastern industrial countries (with a
few exceptions). Studies that conducted cross-cultural content analysis and provide background
information for conceptual analysis were reviewed first. Other related studies that do not fall
under the umbrella of cross-cultural content analysis but are relevant and useful in understanding
the issues of cross-cultural advertising will also be reviewed.

Some books and articles include:

1. Amy Qin et al., HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS THE NEW YORK
TIMES (2018)

This article offers an overview of the literature on how the Islamic State has used
different technologies, primarily within the fields of drone technology, CBRN and
communication technology. The author argues that the primary strength of the
Islamic State, and terrorist groups in general, is not in the acquisition and use of
advanced technology, but the innovative and improvised use of less advanced, but
easily accessible, technology.

2. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, OHCHR |

FREEDOM OF RELIGION: UN EXPERT HAILS ALBANIA, BUT NOTES NEW CHALLENGES AND

UNRESOLVED ISSUES FROM THE PAST

This article talks about beheadings, mass executions, the enslavement of women and
children, and the destruction of cultural antiquities — are in the headlines every day
now. The terror group not only continues to roll through the Middle East, expanding
from Iraq and Syria into Libya and Yemen, but has also gained dangerous new
affiliates in Egypt and Nigeria and continues to recruit foreign fighters through its
sophisticated use of social media.
This list is not exhaustive and any other material or text available and related to the topic in
intended to be used.

Rise of ISIS

ISIS rose from al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a militant Sunni network, active in Iraq after the US -
led invasion of 2003, comprising Iraqi and foreign fighters opposed to the US occupation
and the Shia-dominated Iraqi government. 2 Starting in 2004, AQI conducted a wave of
attacks, often suicide bombings, that targeted security forces, government institutions, and
Iraqi civilians.

Sectarian violence in Iraq intensified between 2006 and 2008, particularly after the bomb ing
of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra: one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. This set off a
wave of Shia reprisals against Sunnis followed by Sunni counterattacks.

Starting in October 2005, a special tribunal called the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT) tried
defendants from former president Saddam Hussein’s government for abuses committed
during his time in office. 3 The IHT had special jurisdiction over Iraqis, and non-Iraqis
residing in Iraq, accused, among other crimes, of committing genocide, crimes against
humanity, and war crimes between July 1968 and May 2003. In its first trial, Saddam
Hussein and six other defendants were convicted for committing crimes against humanity;
Hussein and two others were sentenced to death by hanging. In a report issued in No vember
2006, Human Rights Watch concluded that the trial had not respected basic fair trial
guarantees.

The government, led from 2006 to 2014 by Nouri al-Maliki, amplified the country’s
division into warring Sunni and Shia camps that carried out bloody sectarian attacks. 4

2
Jessica D. Lewis, “Al-Qaeda in Iraq resurgent. The Breaking The Walls Campaign. Part I,” The Institute for the
Study of War, September 2013, http://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/AQI-Resurgent-10Sept_0.pdf
3
Human Rights Watch, "Iraq: Events of 2006," 2007, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2007/country-chapters-6
4
Kirk Semple, “Sectarian Attack Is Worst in Baghdad Since Invasion,” New York Times, November 24, 2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/world/middleeast/24iraq.html
Over the next decade, the government failed to address any of the major grievances of the
Sunni community, which complained there had been little meaningful participation of
Sunnis in the political process and no real reforms of the punitive, overbroad “de-
Baathification” campaign and counterterrorism laws. Sunni grievances were exacerbated by
increasingly centralized power in the hands of the prime minister; brutal policing; mass
arrests; unfair trials; and endemic torture in Iraqi prisons.

AQI was severely weakened starting in 2007 after Sunni tribes paid by the United States
began to form militias known as Awakening Councils to expel AQI from their territories.
While diminished, the AQI network continued to operate, including through detainees being
held in US-run detention facilities, notably the infamous Camp Bucca, where some of ISIS’s
future leadership met and networked.

AQI’s fortunes changed for the better in 2011, when the group used the conflict in Syria
which broke out that year as a training and recruitment ground. In April 2013, Abu Bakr al-
Baghdadi, who was head of AQI, highlighted the group’s new presence in Syria by changing
the group’s name to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 5 The Iraqi government’s lack
of inclusiveness and security failures expedited AQI’s return to prominence in Iraq.

When Sunnis in Iraq attempted to peacefully protest their marginalization in 2012 -13, they
met violent assaults by government security forces.

ISIS first captured territory in Syria, when it took over the city of Raqqa in late 2013. In
January 2014, ISIS took control of the city of Fallujah in Iraq and in the summer of 2014,
the group continued its offensive in Iraq, capturing Mosul and driving south to control parts
of Salah al-Din, Kirkuk, Diyala, and Anbar governorates. 6

Over the last three years, ISIS has ruled territory in both Iraq and Syria, publicizing its
abuses to instill fear and maintain control of a largely Sunni population. In an effort to
administer their territory effectively, ISIS kept many local administrators under the Iraqi

5
Ray Sanchez, “ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State?” CNN, October 25, 2017,
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/09/world/meast/isis-isil-islamic-state/index.html
6
Jessica Lewis Mcfate, “The Isis Defense In Iraq And Syria: Countering An Adaptive Enemy,” The Institute for the
Study of War, May 2015,
http://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/ISIS%20Defense%20in%20Iraq%20and%20Syria%20--
%20Standard.pdf
government in their jobs, for example teachers, hospital staff, and those who worked in
municipal roles like garbage collection.

However, Iraqi and Syrian forces, supported by a US-led anti-ISIS coalition, Iran, and
Russia (anti-ISIS forces) have hit back hard at the group, and by mid-2017 had stripped
away most of its territory. 7 Over the course of the last three years, the fighting has displaced
over one million civilians in Iraq alone, as well as pushed hundreds of thousands to flee the
country and seek asylum abroad.

7
US department of state, Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition To Counter ISIS,
“Update: Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS,” August 4, 2017, https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2017/08/273198.htm
Abuses by ISIS Forces

Since 2014, ISIS forces in different parts of Iraq have carried out human rights abuses, war
crimes, crimes against humanity and what the UN-mandated Independent International
Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Syrian Arab Republic found to be genocide. Most
infamously, on August 3, 2014, ISIS launched attacks on villages and towns across Sinjar,
targeting the Yezidi population.

Its fighters executed at least 2,000 individuals and captured another 6,417. ISIS then
imprisoned Yezidis, subjecting Yezidi women and girls to a system of organized rape,
sexual assault, sexual slavery, other forms of torture and ill-treatment, forced marriage to
ISIS forces, and forced labor. ISIS forces also forced Yezidis to convert, and conscripted
Yezidi children. A United Nations report found evidence of the intent of ISIS to destroy the
Yezidi population as a group when perpetrating these acts and concluded that “such co nduct
may amount to genocide.” 8

Fighters have also targeted other groups including Shia individuals. In one of the largest
massacres, ISIS fighters killed hundreds of Shia army recruits at Camp Speicher, outside of
Tikrit, in June 2014. In another mass killing that same month, ISIS fighters killed hundreds
of Shia inmates as well as a number of Kurds and Yezidis at Badoush prison, outside of
Mosul.

ISIS systematically targeted Iraq’s minority communites including Yezidis, Shia Shabaks,
Shia Turkmen, and Christians. It ordered Christians in the city of Mosul to convert to Islam,
pay a tax as non-Muslims (jizya), flee, or face “the sword.”

Since 2011, ISIS has deployed its fighters, including children it recruited as soldiers, to
undertake hundreds of suicide and car bombing attacks that have killed thousands of
civilians. In territory under its control, fighters resorted to ill-treatment, including sexual

8
United Nation Human Rights Council, Report of the Office of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner on
the human rights situation in Iraq in the light of abuses committed by the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant and associated groups, March 13, 2015,
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session28/Documents/A_HRC_28_18_AUV.doc
violence, as well as public beheadings and other grotesque killings and acts of torture as a
method of governing through fear. 9

ISIS’s Diwan al-Hisba (Moral Policing Administration) subjected its mostly Sunni
populated areas with severe restrictions and punishments including executions of allegedly
gay men, the stoning of individuals for alleged adultery, and prohibiting the use of cell
phones and cigarettes. It imposed severe restrictions on women and girls’ clothing and
freedom of movement in ISIS-controlled areas. Sunni women and girls told Human Rights
Watch that they were only allowed to leave their houses dressed in a full-face veil (niqab)
and accompanied by a close male relative. These rules, enforced by beating and fines on
male family members, isolated women from family, friends, and public life. 10

The fall of ISIS

For a group with such spectacular ambitions, Islamic State’s last stand took place in
surroundings of almost shocking banality: a hospital and sports stadium in Raqqa, the
Syrian town that was the political capital of its self-styled caliphate. After weeks of street-
to-street battles and bombing, these final strongholds fell to Kurdish fighters last week.
More than three years after Isis surged to global infamy with a stunning campaign of
conquest, the end came with a whimper, not a bang.

“Once purported as fierce, now pathetic and a lost cause,” 11

Brett McGurk, the US special
presidential envoy for coalition forces tweeted. Such triumphant claims have become
familiar since the 9/11 attacks. I heard them in Afghanistan in 2002, but US troops are still
engaged in the fight against the Taliban. I heard them in Iraq in 2003, 2004, and t hen year
after year until the US pulled out in 2011.

9
"Iraq: Sunni Women Tell of ISIS Detention, Torture," Human Rights Watch news release, February 20, 2017,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/02/20/iraq-sunni-women-tell-isis-detention-torture.
10
Iraq: Women Suffer Under ISIS," Human Rights Watch news release, April 5, 2016,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/05/iraq-women-suffer-under-isis; and "Syria: Extremists Restricting Women’s
Rights," Human Rights Watch news release, January 13, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/13/syria-
extremists-restricting-womens-rights.
11
Jason Burke, Rise and fall of Isis: its dream of a caliphate is over, so what now? The Guardian (2017),
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/21/isis-caliphate-islamic-state-raqqa-iraq-islamist
Yet when we recall Isis at the height of its powers, the scale of its decline is impressive. By
mid-2014 the group controlled a taxable population of some seven or eight million, oilfields
and refineries, vast grain stores, lucrative smuggling routes and vast stockpiles of arms and
ammunition, as well as entire parks of powerful modern military hardware. Its economic
capital was Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Isis was the most powerful, wealthiest, be st-
equipped jihadi force ever seen.

Its success sent shockwaves throughout the Islamic world. What al-Qaida, founded by
Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 1988, had talked about doing decades or centuries in the
future, an upstart breakaway faction had done in months. Its blitzkrieg campaign and the
refounding of an Islamic caliphate – announced from the pulpit of a 950-year-old mosque in
Mosul in a speech by its leader, Ibrahim Awwad, the 46-year-old former Islamic law student
better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – easily eclipsed the 9/11 attacks as Islamist
extremists’ most spectacular achievement.

Yet this vast and ambitious project has been reduced to rubble. As many as 60,000 Isis
fighters have died since 2014, according to senior US military officials. Th e leadership has
shrunk to a rump – although al-Baghdadi survives. The administration is no more. The
training camps are gone. The flow of propaganda so instrumental in prompting attacks such
as those in the UK this year has ceased. One recent analysis noted that, after the fall of
Mosul in July 2017, the Isis distribution of governance-related media, which long
constituted the bulk of its propaganda output, dropped by two-thirds. In mid-September it
ended entirely.

12
If the defeat of Isis did not come easily, three inherent weaknesses of its project always
made it likely in the long term. First, Isis needed continual conquest to succeed: victory was
a clear sign that the group was doing God’s work. Expansion also meant new recruits to
replace combat casualties, arms and ammunition to acquire, archaeological treasures to sell,
property to loot, food to distribute and new communities and resources, such as oil wells
and refineries, to exploit.

12
Amy Qin et al., Human Rights and Human Rights Violations The New York Times (2018),
https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/human-rights-and-human-rights-violations
But once it had occupied its Sunni-dominated heartlands, further expansion was unlikely. If
it was easy to sweep aside a border of a shattered state such as Syria, the frontiers of
stronger states such as Turkey, Israel and Jordan proved resistant. There was no way even
Isis, a Sunni Arab Muslim force, was going to fight its way deep into Shia-dominated
central and southern Iraq.

Second, the violent intolerance of dissent and brutality by Isis towards the communities
under its authority sapped support. One reason for the rapid expansion of Isis was that Sunni
tribal leaders and other power brokers in Iraq and Syria could see significant advantages in
accepting the group’s authority. Its rule brought relative security, a rude form of justice, and
defence against perceived Shia and regime oppression. And assent to Isis takeove r also
ensured, or at least made more likely, their own survival.

In 2015, with a weakened Isis unable to offer anything other than violence, the defections
started and rapidly snowballed. A collective yearning to restore the military, political and
technological superiority over the west enjoyed by Islamic powers a millennium ago – or the
conviction that the end times are near – proved insufficient to convince communities to fight
and die for the Isis cause. At the very end, the hospital and stadium in Raq qa were defended
by foreign Isis fighters. Any remaining Syrian militants had surrendered days before.

Third, Isis took on the west. This was a conscious decision, hard-wired into the movement,
and not taken in self-defence as some have suggested. The first terrorist attackers were
dispatched by Isis to Europe in early 2014, before the US-led coalition began airstrikes. The
combination of western firepower and funding for local forces has repeatedly proved a
potent one in Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Libya, Mali and elsewhere. Outright victory
against jihadis is difficult to achieve, but militant organisations targeted by the west are
usually forced at the very least to abandon territorial gains, particularly urban centres.

It is clear that any victory over Isis is partial. The recent military offensive has not been
accompanied by a parallel political effort. There are still deep wells of resentment and fear
among Iraqi Sunnis, and the Syrian civil war grinds on. Isis will now return to the vicious
and effective insurgency it ran before the spectacular campaigns of 2014. The project of
constructing an Islamic state has been defeated, but the organisation has not.

Yet there is still cause for optimism. The three key challenges that undermined the Isis
state-building project also face every other militant group, and always will.

Legal Aspects

Iraqi and KRG forces are screening people leaving ISIS-controlled areas in order to arrest
ISIS suspects. The screening process relies on official wanted lists or identifica tion by
community members.

As part of this process, KRG forces have stopped hundreds of families fleeing ISIS -
controlled areas, for weeks or even months at a time, citing security concerns about ISIS
fighters present among them or their affiliation with ISIS. In many cases they stopped
families at checkpoints on the frontlines of fighting, preventing their access to more secure
areas and to humanitarian assistance.

13
The judicial systems of both the federal Iraqi and the KRG authorities are prosecuting
thousands of ISIS suspects under their respective counterterrorism legislation, primarily for
membership in or providing support to ISIS, as well as for killings and other acts enshrined
in counterterrorism legislation. Authorities have made no efforts to soli cit victims’ or
witnesses’ participation in the trials.

Authorities are detaining ISIS suspects in overcrowded and in some cases inhumane
conditions.

They are failing to segregate some detained children from adult detainees. Authorities are
also systematically violating the due process rights of ISIS suspects, such as guarantees in
Iraqi law for detainees to see a judge within 24 hours, to have access to a lawyer throughout
interrogations, and to have families notified of their detention and to able to com municate

13
Report: ISIS Human Rights Abuses in 2017, Wilson Center (2018), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/report-
isis-human-rights-abuses-2017
with them. Numerous detainees have alleged that authorities forced them to confess through
the use of torture.

ISIS convicts may be entitled to release in federal Iraq under the General Amnesty Law
passed in August 2016 . The law offers amnesty to those who can demonstrate they joined
ISIS or another extremist group against their will and did not commit any serious offense
before August 2016. According to the Justice Ministry, by February 2017 authorities had
released 756 convicts under the Amnesty Law, but it is unclear whether judges are
consistently applying this law and the percentage of those convicted for ISIS affiliation
among the released. The KRG has not passed any amnesty law, and a KRG spokesperson
said none was under consideration.

Local officials have forcibly displaced hundreds of families of suspected ISIS -members in
Anbar, Babil, Diyala, Salah al-Din, and Nineveh governorates. Iraqi forces have done little
to stop these abuses, and in some instances participated in them, moving the fa milies to
open-air prison camps.

In May, local communities in Nineveh carried out grenade and other attacks on ISIS
families, and issued threatening letters and demands to deny the families humanitarian
assistance.

As a result, many of these families were forced to move to nearby camps housing families
displaced by the fighting in Mosul. At the time of writing, Iraqi authorities were detaining
around 1,400 foreign women and children who had been in Iraqi custody since they
surrendered with ISIS fighters in late August

There is no national strategy for ISIS prosecutions and that the charges against ISIS
suspects fail to capture the broad range of crimes ISIS has committed. Iraqi and KRG judges
14
say that the Iraqi and KRG counterterrorism courts are operating in parallel. However,
when asked about the overall plan to prosecute ISIS crimes, the judges told Human Rights
Watch there is no national strategy to coordinate these prosecutions or to prioritize the
prosecution of those responsible for the most serious crimes. Instead, both the Iraqi and the

14
Flawed Justice | Accountability for ISIS Crimes in Iraq, Human Rights Watch (2017),
https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/12/05/flawed-justice/accountability-isis-crimes-iraq
KRG authorities appear to be prosecuting all ISIS suspects under their respective
counterterrorism laws primarily for their membership in ISIS, without any distinction or
prioritization based on the gravity of the offenses they are accused of committing.

Conclusion and Suggestions

A number of international actors, including the criminal-investigative group: the

Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), third countries, and most
recently a UN Security Council mandated investigative team, have attempted to launch
various initiatives aimed at seeking justice for some ISIS victims, but have no apparent
interaction with the fast-proceeding ISIS prosecutions underway in Iraq; such prosecutions
may well be concluded by the time the international initiatives are under way. International
actors should support a range of activities to improve detention and prosecution practices
and address due process and other violations documented in this report. Such activities
should include human rights and trial monitoring at the prisons and courthouses holding
ISIS suspects.

The partners of the Iraqi government and KRG should work to convince their judiciaries of
the need at minimum to document crimes under the criminal code during the investigative
process, even if suspects are charged only under counterterrorism laws, and to abolish
and/or suspend the death penalty. They should also fund and facilitate the transport of
victim families to participate in the trials.

Iraqi authorities at minimum should be urged to suspend the application of the death penalty
in these prosecutions, for which there is recent precedent; the Lebanese government agreed
to such a suspension of the death penalty in connection with the proceedings of the Special
Tribunal for Lebanon as part of the government's agreement with the United Nations.

Recommendations

 All relevant Iraqi government and KRG authorities should engage in discussions to
develop a national strategy for ISIS prosecutions and a range of other initiatives,
including truth-telling and reparations, to address ISIS crimes;
 The strategy should include public communications on all justice processes, and
advocate for victims’ participation;
 The authorities should urgently develop a coordinated strategy to prioritize the
prosecution of those who committed the most serious crimes by bringing charges for
the full range of crimes committed, and with a clear role for victim engagement;
Bibliography

Articles

3. Jason Burke, RISE AND FALL OF ISIS: ITS DREAM OF A CALIPHATE IS OVER, SO WHAT

NOW? THE GUARDIAN

4. Flawed Justice | Accountability for ISIS Crimes in Iraq, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH (2017)
5. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, OHCHR |
FREEDOM OF RELIGION: UN EXPERT HAILS ALBANIA, BUT NOTES NEW CHALLENGES AND

UNRESOLVED ISSUES FROM THE PAST

6. Amy Qin et al., HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS THE NEW YORK
TIMES (2018)
7. UN report concludes ISIL committed 'international crimes' during Mosul battle | UN
News, UNITED NATIONS