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Kurdistan
A man in the Debaga displaced persons camp in the Erbil province. Photo: Barzai Charity Foundation
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Kurdish security forces known as Asayesh say they arrested an Islamic State (ISIS) fighter who “beheaded” a male at a displaced people camp on Sunday.
The Asayesh said that a man from the Shargat area about 100 kilometers south of Mosul was found decapitated in the Debaga camp for displaced Iraqis in the southern Erbil province early Sunday morning.
“Early Sunday, a murder incident took place in Debaga refugee camp where a resident of the camp...who was originally from the Shargat district, was found beheaded,” read a statement from the Asayesh Erbil directorate’s media office.
After an investigation, the Asayesh determined the alleged killer, who is only 15-years-old and a resident of the camp, was a member of ISIS.
“The perpetrator confessed to being a member of Daesh [Islamic State] and carried it out along with four other terrorists, directed by Daesh,” added the statement, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
The Asayesh did not give information about the other four suspects and their whereabouts, nor about a precise motive for the murder in the statement.
Some rights groups have accused Kurdistan Region security officials of torturing minors until they confess to being part of ISIS. In January, Human Rights Watch released a report based on interviews with boys under the age of 18 who said the Asayesh had beaten and electrocuted them while they were in custody to extract admissions they were part of the group. The KRG has denied the report and torturing children ISIS suspects it has in detention, however.
Incidents like the beheading are rare in Kurdistan Region, but in the disputed Kurdish-Iraqi territories and areas near Mosul, ISIS fighters and sleeper cells are active, benefiting from the security vacuum between Kurdish and Iraqi forces’ positions. The Kurdistan Region was spared ISIS occupation in 2014 due to victories by Kurdish Peshmerga forces against the group and aerial support from the US.
However, the Kurdistan Region faced a wave of migration from other parts of Iraq due to the ISIS crisis, mostly from Iraq’s northern provinces like Nineveh and Kirkuk. There are roughly a million internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees in the Kurdistan Region, of which about 327,000 are in the Erbil province. The Duhok province takes the lion’s share with nearly half a million refugees and IDPs, according to the Kurdistan Region’s Joint Crisis Coordination Centre (JCC).
The detained perpetrator’s age is of note as an aide to Iraq’s national security advisor warned last week that the children and wives of ISIS fighters are a “ticking time bomb.”
"Daesh has ended, but the extremists’ thoughts remain, thoughts that could lead to terrorism, through which Daesh could resurge,” Ali Nassir Binyan, aide to Falih Fayyadh, told Rudaw last month. “We believe that some of these thoughts persist in the IDP camps.”
There are more than 45,000 children born under ISIS rule in Iraqi IDP camps, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
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