Militants Claim Mass Execution of Iraqi Soldiers

[mystery-ak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/world/middleeast/iraq.html?_r=0

Militants Claim Mass Execution of Iraqi Soldiers
By ROD NORDLAND and ALISSA J. RUBINJUNE 15, 2014

BAGHDAD — Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria boasted on Twitter that they had executed 1,700 Iraqi government soldiers, posting gruesome photos to support their claim.

The authenticity of the photographs and the insurgents’ claim could not be verified, and Iraqi government officials initially cast doubt on whether such a mass execution took place. There were also no reports of large numbers of funerals in the Salahuddin Province area, where the executions were said to have been conducted.

If the claim is true, it would be the worst mass atrocity in either Syria or Iraq in recent years, surpassing even the chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian suburbs of Damascus last year, which killed 1,400 people and were attributed to the Syrian government.


Cars carrying people who fled Mosul lined up at a checkpoint on the road to Erbil in northern Iraq on Saturday.
The latest attack, if proved, would also raise the specter of the war in Iraq turning genocidal, particularly because the insurgents boasted that their victims were all Shiites. There were also fears that it could usher in a series of reprisal killings of Shiites and Sunnis, like those seen in the Iraq war in 2005-7.

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[Chieftain]

Small potatoes compared to some of the things the Iraqis and Iranians did to one another (and themselves) during their war.  The Iranians trained children as commandos by giving each one of them a plastic "key to paradise" before sending them to charge through Iraqi minefields to clear the way for troops. 

The Iraqis set up an ambush on the Iranians by getting them to attack in mass across what used to be the swamps in southern Iraq.  The Iraqis let the attackers get halfway across in their boats, then started hitting them with mortar fire to get them into the water, then fired up a bunch of truck-mounted generators and "fried them like eggplant".  Saddam Hussein reportedly ordered a roadbed constructed with the dead bodies.

Mass murder and executions are nothing new, and only 1500 at one time is relatively mild.

Wait till someone gets their hands on a nuclear suicide bomb.  Then we'll see some casualty records that will surpass some of the mass bombings in Europe during WWII.