Iraqi government forces killed and tortured civilians south of Mosul, rights groups said yesterday, the first such reports of alleged abuse in a US-backed campaign to retake the city from the Islamic State group.
Amnesty International said “up to six” people were found dead last month in the Shura and Qayyara sub-districts, who security forces suspected of ties to the militant group which seized a third of Iraqi territory in 2014.
“Men in federal police uniform have carried out multiple unlawful killings, apprehending and then deliberately killing in cold blood residents in villages south of Mosul,” Amnesty International Beirut office deputy director for research Lynn Maalouf said.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said at least 37 men suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State group had been detained by Iraqi and Kurdish forces at checkpoints and in villages, screening centers and camps for displaced people near Mosul and Hawija, further south.
Relatives said they did not know where most of the men were being held and had not been able to contact any of them while they were in detention, the report said.
HRW warned that such conduct “significantly increases the risk of other violations,” including torture.
An Iraqi Ministry of the Interior spokesman denied there had been any violations and said Iraqi forces respect human rights and international law.
A spokesman for the Iraqi federal police could not be reached for comment.
A spokesman for the Kurdish regional government denied the HRW report, saying any delays in informing families was due to limited resources.
“Nobody has been kept in unknown facilities. They are kept in identified facilities,” Dindar Zebari said.
The Mosul operation, involving a 100,000-strong alliance of troops, security forces, Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite Muslim militias and backed by US-led airstrikes, has entered its fourth week, but has so far gained just a small foothold in the city.
Amnesty International’s report described several incidents in the week commencing Oct. 20 in which separate groups of men were beaten with cables and rifle butts, before being shot to death.
In one case, a man’s head had been severed from his body, it said.
Amnesty said that, without accountability, the alleged abuses risked being repeated in other towns and villages as the Mosul offensive continues.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS