Iraqi forensic specialists have reportedly found the remains of some 80 victims of the June 2014 massacre by Daesh militants at an air force camp in the country’s north-central province of Salahuddin.
Fazel al-Qarawi, a human rights specialist, told Arabic-language al-Forat news agency on Tuesday that experts from the Iraqi Establishment of Martyrs and Health Ministry found 80 bodies inside former dictator Saddam Hussein’s palace compound in Tikrit, located 140 kilometers northwest of the capital Baghdad.
The remains of the victims’ bodies, which were found submerged in Tigris River under tree branches, were brought out by a group of divers and transferred to the provincial department of forensic sciences for DNA testing.
On June 12, 2014, Daesh fighters killed around 1,700 Iraqi air force cadets after kidnapping them from Camp Speicher, a former US base. There were reportedly around 4,000 unarmed cadets in the camp when it came under attack by Daesh militants.
Following the abductions, the attackers took the victims to the complex of presidential palaces and killed them. The militants also threw some of the bodies into the river.
The massacre was filmed by Daesh and broadcast on social media.
An investigation committee later revealed that 57 members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party aided Daesh fighters in the massacre.
On August 21, 2016, Iraqi judiciary officials hung 36 men convicted of involvement in the carnage.
Tikrit was recaptured from Daesh in March 2015. During clean-up operations in the northern part of the city, Iraqi forces found the location of the 2014 carnage.
Iraqi armed forces are now engaged in a large-scale military operation in Mosul to rid the extremist group of its last remaining stronghold in the Arab country.
Meanwhile, the commander of Nineveh Liberation Operation says tens of Daesh fighters have been killed in a string of airstrikes inside and on the outskirts of Mosul, located some 400 kilometers north of Baghdad.
Lieutenant General Abdul Amir Yarallah said on Tuesday that the military aircraft bombarded purported Daesh positions in the eastern and western quarters of Mosul, besides the city of Tal Afar, situated 63 kilometers west of Mosul, killing 80 militants.
Iraqi Federal Police forces also killed 93 Daesh members, when they targeted seven vehicles belonging to the fighters in the southern part of Mosul.
Government forces located and destroyed eight Daesh positions, a command center and a bomb-making workshop in the same region as well.
Furthermore, Commander of Federal Police Forces Lieutenant General Raed Shaker Jawdat said Iraqi surveillance drones have detected a mass exodus of Daesh militants from al-Wahda neighborhood in eastern Mosul, and their movement towards al-Ba’ath al-Muhazi area on the southeastern flank of the city.
Iraqi army soldiers, supported by pro-government Popular Mobilization Units (commonly known by the Arabic name Hashd al-Sha’abi) and Kurdish Peshmerga forces, launched a joint operation on October 17 to retake Mosul from Daesh terrorists.
A total of 129,642 civilians have been displaced from Mosul and neighboring areas ever since the start of the operations, according to figures released by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Tuesday.
