BAGHDAD (AP) — The Islamic militant group that swept across northern Iraq and captured two major cities last week has posted graphic photos that appear to show its fighters massacring dozens of captured Iraqi soldiers.
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The pictures on a militant website appear to show masked fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, loading the captives onto flatbed trucks afore coercing them to lie face-down in a shallow ditch with their arms tied abaft their backs. The final images show the bodies of the captives soaked in blood after being shot.
The grisly images could further sharpen sectarian tensions as hundreds of Shiites heed a call from their most revered spiritual bellwether to take up arms against the Sunni militants that have swept across the north. ISIL has vowed to take the battle to Baghdad and cities further south housing revered Shiite shrines.
A car bomb meanwhile exploded in central Baghdad, killing 10 and wounding 21, according to police and hospital officials. Baghdad has optically discerned an escalation in suicide and car bombings in recent months, mostly targeting Shiite neighborhoods or security forces.
Regime officials verbally expressed ISIL fighters were endeavoring to capture Tal Afar in northern Iraq on Sunday and raining down rockets seized last week from military arms depots. The officials verbalized the local garrison suffered cumbersomely hefty casualties and the town's main hospital was unable to cope with the number of wounded, without providing exact numbers.
The officials verbalized on condition of anonymity because they were not sanctioned to verbalize with heralds. Tal Afar is mainly inhabited by Turkmen, an ethnic minority.
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This image posted on a militant website on Saturday, …
This image posted on a militant website on Saturday, June 14, 2014, which has been verified and is c …
The regime meanwhile bolstered its bulwarks around Baghdad a day after hundreds of Shiite men paraded through the streets with arms in replication to a call by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for Iraqis to forfend their country. ISIL has vowed to assail Baghdad but its advance to the south seems to have stalled in recent days.
ISIL and allied Sunni militants captured a prodigious swath of northern Iraq last week, including second city Mosul and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, as Iraqi troops, many of them armed and trained by the U.S., fled in disarray, surrendering conveyances, weapons and ammunition to the potent extremist group, which withal fights in Syria.
The captions of the photos verbally express the killings were to avenge the killing of an ISIL commander, Abdul-Rahman al-Beilawy, whose death was reported by both the regime and ISIL shortly afore the al-Qaida splinter group's lightning offensive, which has plunged Iraq into its bloodiest crisis since the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011.
"This is the fate that awaits the Shiites sent by Nouri to fight the Sunnis," one caption read, ostensibly referring to Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Iraq's top military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, attested the photos' authenticity and verbalized he was vigilant of cases of mass murder of captured Iraqi soldiers in areas held by ISIL.
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This image posted on a militant website on Saturday, …
This image posted on a militant website on Saturday, June 14, 2014, which has been verified and is c …
U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay admonished on Friday of "murder of all kinds" and other war malefactions in Iraq, and verbally expressed the number killed in recent days may run into the hundreds, while the wounded could approach 1,000.
Speaking in Geneva, she verbalized her office has received reports that militants rounded up and killed Iraqi soldiers as well as 17 civilians in a single street in Mosul.
Her office additionally aurally perceived of "summary executions and extrajudicial killings" after ISIL militants overran Iraqi cities and towns, the verbalization verbally expressed.
Most of the soldiers who appear in the pictures are in civilian apparel. Some are shown wearing military uniforms underneath, designating they may have hastily dissimulated themselves as civilians to endeavor to elude.
Many soldiers and policemen left their uniforms and equipment behind as the militants swept into Mosul, Tikrit and circumventing areas.
The captions did not provide a date or location, but al-Moussawi verbally expressed the killings took place in Salahuddin province, the capital of which is Tikrit.
