A little over a fortnight ago, Karim Khan, the lawyer heading the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability against ISIS (Unitad), gave his final briefing in that capacity to the UN Security Council. He said there was “clear and compelling evidence” that between 2014 and 2017 ISIS committed genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Iraq.
No one knows exactly how many ISIS members are currently housed in Iraq’s overcrowded prison system, but a low estimate is somewhere in the thousands. No one knows how many have been tortured or sentenced to death, but the figures are thought to be high. And no one knows how many have actually been executed, either – Iraq does not publish records.
The ambiguity might be slightly easier to accept if it were certain that every convict were guilty, and that those slated for death row were killers themselves. It’s true that ISIS was hardly ambiguous in its intention to torture, enslave and wipe out whole sections of Iraq’s population. Due legal process didn’t come into it for them. That Iraq and other countries are disinclined to apply due process in return now that their terrorisers are themselves in the dock is, perhaps, understandable.
But the way in which Iraq and the dozens of countries from which foreign ISIS fighters hail have pursued the course of justice over the past few years has created a mess. Moreover, it risks damaging prospects for a real resolution to the years of suffering ISIS caused, and extending the terrorist group’s longevity.
The burden of dealing with ISIS should never have fallen so heavily on Iraq in the first place. Although thousands of Iraqi citizens joined ISIS, as many as 40,000 fighters were foreign, including several thousand from Europe.
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