10 terror convicts hanged in Iraq: sources reveal

BAGHDAD:

Iraq hanged 10 people convicted of “terrorism” on Monday, officials said, in the fourth such execution in three months, prompting a rights group to call for an end to the death penalty.

Courts have handed down hundreds of death sentences and life sentences in recent years to Iraqis convicted of “terrorism” in trials that rights groups have denounced as rushed.

Under Iraqi law, terrorism and murder offenses are punishable by death, and executive orders must be signed by the president.

A health official said 10 Iraqis “convicted of terrorist crimes and members of the Islamic State group were executed by hanging” at Al-Hut prison in the southern city of Nasiriyah.

A security source confirmed the executions.

They were hanged under Article 4 of the anti-terror law and the health department received their bodies, the health official told AFP.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Al-Hut is a notorious prison in Nasiriyah whose Arabic name means “the whale” because Iraqis believe that those imprisoned there never leave alive.

Iraq has been criticized for the trials, with the offense of “terrorism” carrying the death penalty regardless of whether the defendant was an active combatant.

On May 31, Iraq executed eight people convicted of “terrorism.” Eleven people were hanged on April 22 and another such group was executed on May 6, security and health sources said.

In June, UN experts said they were “alarmed by the high number of publicly reported executions since 2016, nearly 400, including 30 this year”.

Read: Four policemen killed in clashes with Daesh in Iraq

“When arbitrary executions are on a widespread and systematic basis, they may amount to crimes against humanity,” said the special rapporteurs, including the expert on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

They added that according to official records there are 8,000 prisoners on death row in Iraq.

Experts urged Iraqi authorities to “stop all executions”.

They also said they were “appalled” by the high number of reported deaths in Nasiriyah prison due to “torture and squalid conditions”.

The experts, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, do not speak on behalf of the United Nations.

Human rights groups have also denounced the proceedings as hasty, with cautionary confessions sometimes believed to have been obtained under torture.

“Iraq’s continued implementation of the death penalty — despite national and international outcry — means we could be standing in the way of a human catastrophe unfolding on its death penalty,” said Amnesty International Iraq researcher Razaw Salihy .

He said Iraqi authorities “must immediately halt the executions to address the gross injustices that have resulted in thousands of death row inmates and the appalling conditions in which they languish.”

The Islamic State group overran large swaths of Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014, declaring its “caliphate” and launching a reign of terror.

It was defeated in Iraq in 2017 by Iraqi forces backed by a US-led military coalition, and in 2019 lost the last ground it held in Syria to US-backed Kurdish forces.

But its remnants continue to carry out deadly attacks and ambushes, particularly from remote areas and desert hideouts.