NEW YORK— The US State Department condemned Islamic State (ISIS) for a brutal wave of executions across Iraq on Friday, amid reports of discoveries of mass graves and the slaying of Sunni Muslim tribesmen in Anbar province.
“The depravity of the reported executions of the Sunni tribesmen from the Albu Nimr tribe, and other Anbar tribes, reports of mass executions of Shiite prisoners in Mosul, the reports of a mass grave outside of Ramadi, and the continued persecution of other Iraqi minority groups, are further evidence of ISIL’s campaign of terror,” said spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
The bodies of more than 200 members of Iraqi Sunni tribes which had been challenging ISIS were discovered in two mass graves on Thursday. One, near Hit, the site of a recent ISIS victory in Anbar, contained the corpses of some 70 members of the Albu Nimr tribe.
ISIS fighters typically use targeted assassinations of local leaders and executions to take control of an area. Most of the victims found near Hit were members of the police or a US-backed anti-ISIS Sunni force called Sahwa, meaning Awakening.
“One of the primary goals of ISIL is to sow fear into the hearts of all Iraqis and drive sectarian division among its people,” said Psaki, using an alternate name for the al Qaeda-inspired group that controls a vast Sunni-majority area straddling the Iraq-Syria border.
The US-based watchdog Human Rights Watch said that ISIS gunmen had executed some 600 mostly Shia inmates of Badoush Prison, near Mosul, after taking the city in June. Militants also killed the prison’s Kurdish and Yezidi detainees, according to the group’s researchers.
“The gruesome details of ISIS’ mass murder of prison inmates make it impossible to deny the depravity of this extremist group,” said researcher Letta Tayler. “People of every ethnicity and creed should condemn these horrific tactics.”
US-led airstrikes continued to hit ISIS in Iraq on Thursday and Friday, striking small units near Fallujah and Bayji, a checkpoint near Qaim and buildings and fighters near Tikrit. In northern Syria, four airstrikes helped the Kurdish defenders of Kobane, a besieged town on Turkey’s border.
On Thursday, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told journalists that the 1st Infantry Division's headquarters will use a command post in Baghdad to coordinate all US forces in Iraq – part of efforts to bolster the Iraqi army and challenge ISIS.
Gen Martin Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the ISIS fighters had been closer to taking the Iraqi Kurdish region’s main city, Erbil, during its lightening advance across northwest Iraq this summer, than was previously known.
“It was close in the sense that there was one defensible terrain feature,” Gen Dempsey said. “There was a river on which the Kurdish forces were defending. And if that river had been breached then the issue would have been much more difficult to resolve.”
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