BAGHDAD (Dispatches) – A court in Baghdad has sentenced nine criminals to death for complicity over the 2014 Camp Speicher massacre of 1,700 Shia air force unarmed cadets.
The Central Criminal Court of Iraq passed the ruling against nine defendants on Sunday, after the court found sufficient evidence to criminalize them, Arabic-language Baghdad Today news website reported.
The convicts confessed to their involvement in the manslaughter as well as various acts of terror when Daesh was in control of Salahuddin.
Daesh terrorists executed an estimated 1,700 Shia air force recruits at Camp Speicher, a former U.S. base, near Tikrit on June 12, 2014. The cadets had been undergoing training at Camp.
At the time of the massacre, there were between 5,000 and 10,000 unarmed cadets in the camp, and Daesh terrorists selected the Shias and non-Muslims for execution.
The Iraqi Ministry of Health has put the official death toll at 1,907. After killing the victims, Daesh terrorists threw them into the river or buried them in mass graves. According to some sources, a group of Shia air force recruits was buried alive. This was one of the ten deadliest terrorist acts in the world in the last two decades.
Daesh released footage of the massacre as part of its propaganda video in order to intimidate Iraqis, especially Shias.
An investigation committee later revealed that 57 members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party aided Daesh terrorists in the massacre.
On August 21, 2016, Iraqi judiciary officials hanged 36 men convicted of involvement in the carnage.
This human tragedy was one of the main motives of the Iraqis along with the fatwa of the jihad by Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali al-Sistani, which led to the formation of the forces of the Iraqi People’s Mobilization Organization, also known as Hashd al-Sha’abi in Arabic.
In 2014, the Daesh terrorist group, with the financial and military support of the United States and its Western and Arab allies, including Saudi Arabia, invaded Iraq, occupying large parts of the northern and western parts of the country and committed countless crimes.