The horrors of the Islamic State (IS) group’s rule over northern Iraq might be in the past, but efforts to bring the militants to justice are still gathering pace.
“A lot of work remains to be done,” said Christian Ritscher, the UN’s lead investigator into Islamic State activity.
Five years after the group’s defeat in Iraq, with many thousands of their members in Iraqi jails, work is ongoing to probe their crimes, said Ritscher, who heads the dedicated UN investigative team (UNITAD) seeking to promote accountability.
Photo: AFP
In a Baghdad interview, the former prosecutor described the grim task — undertaken with the cooperation of Iraqi authorities — as “challenging” and diverse in scope.
“We have just opened an investigation into the destruction of the cultural heritage of Iraq by IS — the destruction of mausoleums, churches, cultural sites, museums,” Ritscher said.
A future investigation would focus on crimes committed in Mosul, a major city in Iraq’s north which the Islamic State group occupied from 2014 until 2017, he said.
Iraq declared victory over the militants on Dec. 9, 2017, but the group kept its grip on territory in Syria until March 2019, when it was defeated by US-backed, Kurdish-led forces.
The rise of the Islamic State and its self-proclaimed “caliphate” appeared meteoric. Its seizure of Mosul helped it to briefly hold about one-third of Iraqi territory, and for a time there were real fears of a major attack on the capital, Baghdad.
Abuses against civilians, minorities and opponents became a hallmark of the group, whose ranks swelled with the arrival of thousands of foreign nationals.
The list of crimes is long and includes “genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes,” Ritscher said.
UNITAD has supported local authorities that uncover mass graves and is working to prepare evidence for “any jurisdiction in the world that needs it ... even within several decades,” Ritscher said. “In 20 or 30 years, the perpetrators of international crimes will still be able to be judged. There is no limitation period.”
In its latest report, presented to the UN Security Council on Monday, UNITAD highlighted the group’s production of chemical and biological weapons.
The program included “the development, testing, weaponization and deployment of a range of chemical agents,” the report said.
UNITAD also investigated the Speicher massacre — when up to 1,700 “predominantly Shiite” Iraqi army cadets were abducted from a base and executed in June 2014.
Other atrocities examined were the deaths of hundreds of detainees from Badush prison, near Mosul, and crimes against the Yazidis, a religious minority many of whose men were executed and whose women were abducted for sexual slavery.
A German court last year sentenced former Islamic State member Taha al-Jumailly, who had let a five-year-old Yazidi girl in chains die of thirst, to life in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity, the first verdict of its kind worldwide.
The trial was held under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which holds that any national court can prosecute such crimes no matter where they were committed.
“Maybe in the future there will be a tribunal on IS crimes,” Ritscher said, adding that the idea is subject to “ongoing discussions.”
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