“The judicial authorities issued severe sentences (execution and life imprisonment) against ten terrorists arrested by our agency in Nineveh province. This came after investigations and confronting them with solid evidence, which they confessed to their affiliation with terrorist ISIS gangs,” said a statement by the interior ministry’s Federal Intelligence and Investigations Agency.
The agency said that the suspects were involved in “many terrorist attacks” during the rise of ISIS in 2014, “including carrying out killings of security forces members and innocent civilians.”
ISIS seized control of swathes of Iraqi land in 2014. The group was declared territorially defeated in 2017 but it continues to carry out bombings, hit-and-run attacks, and abductions across several provinces.
Thousands of people have been detained across Iraq since 2014 for suspected links to terrorist groups, including ISIS, and hundreds have been executed. Human rights monitors have criticized the trials, saying they depend on confessions obtained through torture, they do not investigate specific charges such as genocide, and they exclude the victims, thereby denying them justice.
Iraq has also routinely been criticized for poor prison conditions and harsh treatment of detainees and suspects.
More than 8,000 are purportedly on death row in Iraq, and authorities have been repeatedly condemned for carrying out hasty trials.
