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BAGHDAD (AP) — Militants from the Islamic State carried out a mass killing of hundreds of Iraqi prison inmates when they seized the country’s second-largest city of Mosul in June, an international rights group said on Thursday.
Some 600 male Shiite inmates from Badoosh prison outside Mosul were forced to kneel along the edge of a nearby ravine and shot with automatic weapons, Human Rights Watch said in a statement based on interviews with 15 Shiite prisoners who survived the massacre.
The New York-based watchdog added that the Shiite prisoners were separated from several hundred Sunnis and a small number of Christians who were later set free. A number of Kurdish and Yazidi inmates were also killed, they said.
The prisoners had been serving sentences for a range of crimes, from murder and assault to nonviolent offenses.
Before separating them, the gunmen herded up to 1,500 inmates onto trucks and drove them to an isolated stretch of desert about 1.2 miles from the prison, the survivors said. After taking several hundred away in trucks, they forced the Shiites to form one long line along the ravine edge and then count their number in the line before showering them with machine-gun fire.
“A bullet hit my head and I fell to the ground, and that’s when I felt another bullet hit my arm,” one survivor said. “I was unconscious for about 5 minutes. One person was shot in the head, in the forehead, it (the bullet) went out the other side, and he fell on top of me,” the statement quoted him as saying.
Before the shooting started, he added, he kissed the men on each side “because we knew we were going to die” and “after we said goodbye to each other, I took my daughter’s picture and kissed it, and I prayed to God to save me for her, because I have no one else.”
Between 30 to 40 prisoners survived, most by rolling into the valley and pretending to be dead, or from being shielded by the bodies of other prisoners, they said. Several wounded men died while trying to crawl away.
