Nearly 90 bodies exhumed at Daesh massacre site: Iraq

A provincial police source, requesting not to be identified, said experts from the Iraqi Health Ministry and Human Rights Watch activists had recently found 89 bodies inside former dictator Saddam Hussein’s palace compound in Tikrit, located 140 kilometers northwest of the capital Baghdad.

The source added that information obtained from captured Takfiri Daesh terrorists helped locate the mass grave, noting that the corpses will be sent to the forensic department in order to be identified.

On June 12, 2014, Daesh terrorists killed around 1,700 Iraqi air force cadets after kidnapping them from Camp Speicher, a former US base. There were reportedly around 4,000 unarmed cadets in the camp when it came under attack by Daesh militants.

Following the abductions, the attackers took the victims to the complex of presidential palaces and killed them. The terrorists also threw some of the bodies into a river.

The massacre was filmed by Daesh and broadcast on social media.

An investigation committee later revealed that 57 members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party aided Takfiri Daesh terrorists in the massacre.

On August 21, 2016, Iraqi judiciary officials hanged 36 men convicted of involvement in the carnage.

Tikrit was recaptured from Daesh in March 2015. During clean-up operations in the northern part of the city, Iraqi forces found the location of the 2014 carnage.