ISIL may have committed war crimes, crimes against

humanity and genocide: UN report

GENEVA (19 March 2015) – The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) may have
committed all three of the most serious international crimes – namely war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide – according to a report issued by the UN Human Rights Office on Thursday.

The report, compiled by an investigation team sent to the region by the UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights late last year, draws on in-depth interviews with more than 100 people who witnessed
or survived attacks in Iraq between June 2014 and February 2015. It documents a wide range of
violations by ISIL against numerous ethnic and religious groups in Iraq, some of which, it says, may
amount to genocide.

It also highlights violations, including killings, torture and abductions, allegedly carried out by the Iraqi
Security Forces and associated militia groups.

The report finds that widespread abuses committed by ISIL include killings, torture, rape and sexual
slavery, forced religious conversions and the conscription of children. All of these, it says, amount to
violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some may constitute crimes against
humanity and/ or may amount to war crimes.

However, the manifest pattern of the attacks against the Yezidi “pointed to the intent of ISIL to
destroy the Yezidi as a group,” the report says. This “strongly suggests” that ISIL may have
perpetrated genocide.

The report, requested by the UN Human Rights Council at the initiative of the Government of Iraq,*
cites the brutal and targeted killings of hundreds of Yezidi men and boys in the Ninewa plains last
August. In numerous Yezidi villages, the population was rounded up. Men and boys over the age of 14
were separated from women and girls. The men were then led away and shot by ISIL, while the
women were abducted as the ‘spoils of war.’ “In some instances,” the report found, “villages were
entirely emptied of their Yezidi population.”

Some of the Yezidi girls and women who later escaped from captivity described being openly sold, or
handed over as “gifts” to ISIL members. Witnesses heard girls – as young as six and nine years old –
screaming for help as they were raped in a house used by ISIL fighters. One witness described how
two ISIL members sat laughing as two teenage girls were raped in the next room. A pregnant woman,
repeatedly raped by an ISIL ‘doctor’ over a period of two and a half months, said he deliberately sat
on her stomach. He told her, “this baby should die because it is an infidel; I can make a Muslim baby.”

Boys between the ages of eight and 15 told the mission how they were separated from their mothers
and taken to locations in Iraq and Syria. They were forced to convert to Islam and subjected to
religious and military training, including how to shoot guns and fire rockets. They were forced to watch
videos of beheadings. One child was told, “This is your initiation into jihad….you are an Islamic State
boy now.”

Brutal treatment was meted out by ISIL to other ethnic groups, including Christians, Kaka’e, Kurds,
Sabea-Mandeans, Shi’a and Turkmen. In a matter of days in June, thousands of Christians fled their
homes in fear after ISIL ordered them to convert to Islam, pay a tax, or leave.

Also in June, around 600 males held in Badoush prison, mostly Shi’a, were loaded onto trucks and
driven to a ravine, where they were shot by ISIL fighters. Survivors told the UN team that they were
saved by other bodies landing on top of them.

Those perceived to be connected with the Government were also targeted. Between 1,500 to 1,700
cadets from Speicher army base, most of whom are reported to have surrendered, were massacred by
ISIL fighters on 12 June. The findings of Iraqi Government investigations into both the Badoush and
Speicher incidents have yet to be made public.

ISIL fighters are reported to have relied on lists of targets to conduct house-to-house and checkpoint
searches. A former policeman stated that when he showed his police ID card to ISIL fighters, one of
them slashed the throats of his father, five-year-old son and five-month-old daughter. When he
begged them to kill him instead, they told him “we want to make you suffer.”

The investigation team received information from numerous sources who alleged that Iraqi Security
Forces and affiliated militia had committed serious human rights violations during their counter-
offensive operations against ISIL.

During the summer of 2014, as their military campaign against ISIL gained ground, the report says,
militias seemed to “operate with total impunity, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.”

In mid-June, fleeing Iraqi forces allegedly set fire to an army base in Sinsil, in Diyala province, where
43 Sunnis were held prisoner. In another incident, at least 43 prisoners were allegedly shot dead in
the al-Wahda police station in Diyala. Villagers reported being rounded up and taken to al-Bakr
airbase at Salah-ad-Din where, the report says, torture is allegedly routine. There were also numerous
accounts of Sunnis being forced from their homes at gunpoint.

As one witness put it: “we hoped for the best when the Iraqi army and the ‘volunteers’ liberated the
area from ISIL. Instead…they pillaged, burnt and blew up houses, claiming that all villagers are part of
ISIL. This is not true; we are just ordinary poor people.”

The report concludes that members of Iraqi Security Forces and affiliated militia "carried out
extrajudicial killings, torture, abductions and forcibly displaced a large number of people, often with
impunity.” By doing so, it says, they “may have committed war crimes.”

However, it also pointed out that since the fall of Mosul last June, the line between regular and
irregular Iraqi Government forces has become increasingly blurred. It suggests that “while more
information is needed on the link between the militia and the Government,” some incidents point, at
the very least, to a failure by the Government to protect persons under its jurisdiction.

The report adds that it is the Government’s responsibility to ensure that all organized armed forces,
groups and units are placed under a command responsible for the conduct of its subordinates.

It called on the Iraqi Government to investigate all crimes outlined in the report and bring the
perpetrators to justice.

It also urged the Government to become a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court and ensure that the international crimes defined in that Statute are criminalised under domestic
law.

The report also calls on the Human Rights Council to urge the UN Security Council to address, “in the
strongest terms, information that points to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,” and to
consider referring the situation in Iraq to the International Criminal Court.

ENDS

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