BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s government is reportedly preparing to execute 36 captive Islamic State (ISIS) militants this week for their suspected role in the massacre of an estimated 1,700 Shiite cadets at Camp Speicher in Tikrit back in June 2014. Iraq’s President Fuad Masum has approved the executions with mass hangings. This has led to rights groups voicing concern over whether the militants were tried in accordance with international standards of were forces to confess under duress. The families of the victims, who stormed the court and flung shoes and water bottles at the defendants, applauded Masum’s decision, according to the UK's Times newspaper. There were a total of 47 defendants on trial for suspected involvement in that infamous massacre. Forty were already sentenced to death last February at the central criminal court in Baghdad. The upcoming execution comes a mere two weeks after the United Nations urged Iraq not to speed up the execution of terrorist suspects currently in its jails in the wake of a more recent atrocity, the massive bombing of the Karrada shopping district in Baghdad, which killed over 320 people on July 3. “(It is) all too easy to permit such atrocities to stoke the fires of vengeance,” the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said earlier this month. “But vengeance is not justice.”
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