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U.N. Rights Council Looks at ISIS Abuses in Iraq U.N. Rights Council to Investigate ISIS Abuses in Iraq
(about 5 hours later)
UNITED NATIONS — The top United Nations advocate for children afflicted by war said Monday that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was using them as informers, checkpoint sentries and, in some cases, suicide bombers. GENEVA — The United Nations Human Rights Council decided Monday to send a fact-finding team to Iraq to investigate possible war crimes by Islamic extremists after hearing senior human rights officials detail mass killings and other atrocities committed “on an unimaginable scale.”
The advocate, Leila Zerrougui, the special representative of the secretary general for children and armed conflict, also said that the United Nations had received reports that ISIS had abducted girls from minority communities and forced them into marriage, but that it had been unable to verify those reports. Basically putting aside its politically fractious disputes in the face of the new depravities in Iraq, the Geneva-based council adopted, without a vote, a resolution sponsored by more than 100 states calling for the urgent dispatch of a fact-finding mission and required it to report back in March.
Ms. Zerrougui made the assertions at a special session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on ISIS’s actions in Iraq. The group, which has proclaimed a strict Sunni Islamic state that spans the Syria-Iraq border, has imposed severe rules on behavior and has been accused of a litany of brutalities against non-Sunni groups, including summary mass executions. Of the council’s 47 members, only South Africa withheld support, saying the resolution was ambiguous and lacked balance.
The United Nations deputy high commissioner for human rights, Flavia Pansieri, told the Human Rights Council that ISIS had ordered strict rules for women living in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and other areas in its control. “Women are not allowed to walk in the street without the presence of a male guardian, and there are more and more reports of women being beaten” for infractions, she said. The United Nations already has a 42-person team monitoring human rights in Iraq, working from Baghdad and other cities. But officials said the human rights council will now send an 11-person team that will operate separately, focusing on abuses arising from the behavior of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Sunni extremist group that has seized parts of northern Iraq and has boasted about its brutalities against nonbelievers.
Ms. Pansieri also spoke of specific targeted killings, including what she described as the July 10 executions of 650 prisoners in Mosul. Those who claimed they were Sunni were taken away, while Shiites and others were forced into ditches and shot. “The bodies were then examined and any men that appeared to be alive were shot in the head,” she said. More than a million people have fled the ISIS onslaught in recent weeks, Flavia Pansieri, the deputy high commissioner for human rights, told the council. She reported summary mass executions, forced conversions, abductions, slavery, sexual abuse, torture and the besieging of entire communities.
She cited suspected atrocities by Iraqi security forces and militias fighting ISIS as well, including the Aug. 22 shootings of dozens of men and boys at a Sunni mosque in central Iraq’s Diyala Province. The speaker of Iraq’s Parliament has ordered an inquiry, which Ms. Pansieri said she welcomed. “The reports we have received reveal acts of inhumanity on an unimaginable scale,” Ms. Pansieri told diplomats as she opened the emergency session.
ISIS fighters killed at least 650 non-Sunni inmates of a Mosul prison, forcing them into ditches and shooting them, Ms. Pansieri said. Afterward, she said, “the bodies were then examined and any men that appeared to be alive were shot in the head.”
Detailing other atrocities, Ms. Pansieri said that 1,500 young conscripts were missing after ISIS captured their base, and videos confirmed by witnesses showed hundreds of handcuffed men systematically shot. ISIS forces also killed at least 1,000 members of the Yazidi minority and kidnapped or enslaved 2,750 others, she said.
Ms. Pansieri told the council that ISIS had ordered strict rules for women living in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and other areas in its control. “Women are not allowed to walk in the street without the presence of a male guardian, and there are more and more reports of women being beaten” for infractions, she said.
ISIS and its allies were taking boys as young as 13 on patrol “carrying weapons sometimes bigger than themselves” and using children as checkpoint sentries, informants and sometimes as suicide bombers, Leila Zerrougui, the top United Nations advocate for children who are afflicted by war, told the council. Ms. Zerrougui also spoke of reports about sexual violence and abductions of young girls from minority groups for forced marriages that the United Nations had yet to verify.
Iraqi security forces also committed abuses that may amount to war crimes, Ms. Pansieri said, reporting killings of detainees and citing an attack by Shiite militia fighters on a Sunni mosque killing at least 73 men and boys and wounding 38 others.
The council resolution, however, called for an investigation only of ISIS violations. Iraq’s minister of human rights, Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, speaking to reporters after the session, said instances of abuses by Iraqi forces would be investigated by Iraq’s government, not the fact-finding mission.
Still, defeating ISIS “begins with a united Iraqi government committed to justice for all of Iraq’s communities,” Keith Harper, the American ambassador to the council, said, calling, like many other states, including Iran, for strong international support to the new government formed by the prime minister-designate, Haider al-Abadi.
Russia already demonstrated support for Iraq by delivering advanced attack fighter aircraft, its ambassador, Alexey Borodavkin, said. In a criticism of American and Arab support for antigovernment armed groups in Syria, he asserted that “all this could have been avoided” if states had cooperated with President Bashar al-Assad’s armed forces in Syria.