U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces in Syria have handed over to Baghdad two Islamic State militants suspected of involvement in the mass killing of Iraqi soldiers in 2014, war monitors said Friday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights report was released a day after Iraq’s National Intelligence Service announced it had brought back three IS members from outside Iraq. Intelligence agencies did not provide further details.
Islamic State captured an estimated 1,700 Iraqi soldiers after seizing Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit in 2014. The soldiers were trying to escape from nearby Camp Speicher, a former US military base.
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Immediately after taking Tikrit, IS posted graphic images of IS fighters shooting and killing soldiers.
Farhad Shami, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, said U.S.-backed forces handed over two IS members to Iraq. It was not immediately clear where Iraqi authorities brought the third suspect.
A masked Islamic State soldier poses with an ISIS flag in 2015. (Photo by Getty Images from History/Universal Images Group)
The 2014 killing, known as the Speicher massacre, sparked outrage across Iraq and partially inspired the mobilization of Shiite militias to fight the Sunni extremist group Islamic State.
In recent years, Iraq has tried and subsequently executed dozens of IS members for their involvement in the Speicher massacre.
The two IS members were among 20 people recently captured in a joint operation with the US-led coalition in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, once the capital of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, the Observatory said. That’s what it means.
Despite defeats in Iraq in 2017 and Syria in March 2019, extremist sleeper cells remain active and carry out deadly attacks against SDF and Syrian government forces.
Shami said that on Friday night, a car rigged with explosives and driven by a suicide bomber crashed into the Arab-majority military council of Deir el-Zour, part of the SDF, in the eastern Syrian village of Shuhair. He said he had attempted to attack a military checkpoint. Shami said when the security guard tried to stop the car, the gunman detonated a suicide bomb, killing three U.S.-backed fighters.
No one else immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but it was similar to previous similar explosions carried out by IS militants.
The SDF holds more than 10,000 captured IS fighters in about 24 detention facilities, including 2,000 foreigners who have been refused repatriation from their home countries. The unit says fighters from around 60 countries entered Syria several years ago and were captured in battle.
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Kurdish authorities in northeastern Syria have announced they will put IS detainees on trial, but it is unclear when the trial will begin.
