36 Islamic State militants executed for 2014 massacre in Iraq
Around 1,700 Shiites were slain in Tikrit at Camp Speicher.
Hatam Kareem received the telephone call on Sunday that he had been waiting for, saying the men who killed his brother had been executed by hanging.
“It was the happiest call I have ever received,” he said.
Thousands of other Iraqis shared his happiness on Sunday over the executions of 36 men convicted and sentenced to death for taking part in the Islamic State group’s massacre of roughly 1,700 Shiite military personnel in 2014.
The massacre, carried out at the Camp Speicher air base near Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, is the deadliest atrocity to date carried out by the Sunni militants of the Islamic State group in Iraq or in Syria.
The crime galvanized Iraq’s historically oppressed Shiites, who have been in power since the 2003 U.S. invasion, and took up a place in their collective memory alongside the atrocities Saddam inflicted on them.
Video images of the massacre that were made and released by the Islamic State group showed killing on an industrial scale, with one man after another being shot in the head and pushed into the flowing waters of the Tigris River.
Other victims were killed on land and buried in mass graves.
A survivor, speaking to The New York Times in 2014, described how he heard a bullet whiz past his head, then played dead in a pile of bodies and hid out for three days among the reeds along the river.
Iraqi forces recaptured Tikrit from the Islamic State group in 2015, and the riverbank became a site of pilgrimage, visited by relatives of victims from mainly Shiite southern Iraq.
Iraqi officials said that the 36 convicts were executed Sunday at a prison in Nasiriyah in the south. The death chamber was crowded with the families of Camp Speicher victims who were invited to watch the executions.
The convicts were hanged one by one, as women wailed and howled, their tears of joy mixing with tears of sadness, and men hugged each other in celebration, according to a prison official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
After the completed executions were announced, Sabah Radhi, whose brother was killed at Camp Speicher, said: “Today is the day of victory for all of us, the day where happiness has entered our broken hearts. We have been waiting for this day since the massacre, and it’s finally come true.”
Radhi said that as soon as he heard the news, he called his uncle, who lost a son at Camp Speicher. “He was very happy,” Radhi said. “He felt that the Iraqi justice system has taken revenge for his son.”