ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — An Iraqi court sentenced 11 alleged Islamic State (ISIS) members to death on Wednesday for allegedly blowing up a bridge in the Jarf al-Sakhr district south of Baghdad back in 2014.
According to a statement from the media office of the Supreme Judicial Council, the highest judicial authority in Iraq, the Babil province criminal court examined the cases of 11 “suspects who confessed their membership in the Daesh terrorist organization”, referring to the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
“The terrorists confessed to staging an attack they named the al-Fadhilyah raid on a strategic bridge located in the Jarf al-Nassir (Jarf al-Sakhr) district in the north of the province [of Babil] in 2014, leading to it fully being blown up, martyring three and injuring 19 more security forces stationed nearby,” said the court.
The suspects also had confessed to committing “more terrorist crimes” at different locations at different times, according to the court.
“The court held a public trial in the presence of the public prosecutor, the lawyers of the convicts, and issued a sentence of execution by hanging against the 11 convicts,” the court said.
All suspects were punished based on Article 4, section 1 of anti-terror law of Iraq, according to the statement.
This isn’t the first time that Iraq has slapped ISIS suspects with death sentence en-masse, something Iraq has been criticized for before. Opponents have argued that Iraq’s courts lead trials rife with due process violations and death sentences unfounded on evidence - sometimes in trials that have spanned just minutes.
Iraq is among the top five countries in the world in terms of handing down the death penalty, according to Amnesty International.
In 2019, Iraq has reportedly already executed 100 people, with 8,000 others on death row.
In a particularly publicized ordeal, 11 French ISIS members were handed speedy death sentences in June after they had been transferred to Iraq by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
