2. Targeting by ISIL
2.3 Targeting of individuals perceived to oppose ISIL
One of the main strategic elements of ISIL to gain control on cities and towns has been the elimination of opponents to weaken any opposition: key security personnel, politicians and government figures opposing their agenda, tribal leaders who collaborated with the Baghdad
908 Comment by the drafters of this report, Cedoca/Belgium
909 Telegraph (The), Isil attacks villages south of Kirkuk as Iraqi and Kurdish forces are distracted fighting each other, 19 October 2017, url.
910 Rudaw, ISIS sleeper cells awaken in Kirkuk. 2 February 2018, url.
911 Rudaw, Fearing ISIS, Kurds abandon homes in southern Kirkuk, 26 March 2018, url.
912 NewsRep, A growing number of villages in Kirkuk, Iraq are being evacuated, 30 July 2018, url.
913 Rudaw, ISIS threats force Kurds to evacuate village near Khanaqin, 25 July 2018, url.
914 Denmark, DIS/Norway, Landinfo, Northern Iraq: Security situation and the situation for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the disputed areas, incl. possibility to enter and access the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KR-I), 5 November 2018, url, p. 22.
government, they all risked to be assassinated or abducted by ISIL.915 Defectors or challengers to ISIL central authority were eliminated, including local leaders, activists, and religious scholars.916
When ISIL took over control of large parts of Iraq in 2014, it started immediately with the targeting of a broad array of possible opponents to their new rule, accused of committing gross human rights violations including crimes against humanity.917 ISIL attacks were carried out to systematically target civilians and civilians’ infrastructure with the intention to kill and wound as many civilians as possible. Targeting campaigns included operations targeting Iraqi security forces personnel and infrastructure. Additionally, civilian targets have included:
‘markets, restaurants, shops, cafés, playgrounds, schools, places of worship and other public spaces where civilians gather in large numbers. ISIL and associated armed groups have also continued to target systematically civilians using a range of improvised explosive device (IEDs), and to perpetrate targeted assassinations (community, political, and religious leaders, government employees, education professionals, health workers, etc.), sexual assault, rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls, forced recruitment of children, kidnappings, executions, robberies, attacks on installations with the potential of unleashing dangerous forces, and the wanton destruction or plundering of places of worship or of cultural or historical significance.’918
Sources monitoring the human rights situation in Iraq (e.g. UNAMI, Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, etc) have reported frequent examples of targeting the following profiles listed in the headings below.
2.3.1 (Former) members of the Iraqi security forces, PMU, and Peshmerga
After taking control over a town or an area in, ISIL started with the targeting of members of the ISF and police or those associating with them. Whoever did not ‘repent’ or swear allegiance to ISIL and its Caliph, had to face judgment in a court and punishment (including a possible execution). ISIL even issued ‘certificates of repentance’, and people associated with the government were asked to show this proof when captured or at checkpoints. ISIL publicly posted ‘wanted’ lists with the names of current and former ISF members or those associated with the government who refused to repent or recanted.919
The most widely known example of a mass execution is the Camp Speicher incident mentioned in the section on religious targeting, but there were numerous other cases, when groups of captured members of ISF, PMU or the Peshmerga were summarily executed. These mass killings happened in 2014 and throughout the military campaign against ISIL in 2017. During the campaign of the ISF to regain control over Mosul, numerous former members of ISF and the police were abducted, tortured, held in captivity as hostages or out of fear of later
915 Lewis, J.D., Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, The Breaking the Walls Campaign, Part I, Middle East Security Report 14, September 2013, url, p. 21; Soufan Group (The), The Islamic State, November 2014, url, pp. 20, 31.
916 Soufan Group (The), The Islamic State, November 2014, url, p. 31.
917 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Non International Armed Conflict in Iraq: 5 June – 5 July 2014, 18 July 2014, url, p. 9.
918 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Non International Armed Conflict in Iraq: 5 June – 5 July 2014, 18 July 2014, url, p. 9.
919 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 6 July – 10 September 2014, 02 October 2014, url, p. 6.
retaliation, or to punish or kill them for their former official functions with the ISF. These abductions started on the first day of the offensive to retake Mosul (17 October 2016). UNAMI received reports that many of these abducted former ISF and police members were subsequently killed by ISIL.920
According to a July 2018 UN Security Council report ‘mass graves continued to be discovered in areas previously under ISIL control. On 2 April 2018, a mass grave containing 51 bodies of Iraqi security forces personnel was discovered in Mosul. On 6 April 2018, a mass grave containing 22 bodies of former security personnel and Independent High Electoral Commission employees was also discovered in Mosul. Both mass graves reportedly contain ISIL victims.’921
After the collapse of the Islamic State as a territorial entity, ISIL continued to target members of the ISF outside of combat situations. According to DIS/Landinfo, ‘for the purpose of creating chaos in the Iraqi society other actors such as civilians or people collaborating with the security actors or the authorities can also be targets for ISIS’ who are accidentally or deliberately targeted as civilians, but ISIL ‘tries to disguise it as an attack against PMU members’.
DIS/Landinfo remarked that for ISIL, ‘the line between civilians and security actors is often blurry’. The primary targets for ISIL are the security forces, the PMU and ‘to some extent, government officials’.922 Examples of ISIL targeting of security personnel include:
On 1 February 2018 ISIL assassinated a former ISF general south-west of Kirkuk.923
On 19 February 2018 ISIL militants ambushed a convoy of PMU fighters near Kirkuk, killing at least 27 of them.924
On 4 March 2018, a police officer was assassinated in Tuz Khurmatu. The First-Lieutenant from the Rapid Response Force was shot by unknown gunmen.925
On 24 March 2018 ISIL killed eight security force members between Baghdad and Kirkuk.926
On 9 April 2018 ISIL has claimed a ‘commando attack’ on Sunni militiamen in al-Anbar that left two people killed and six injured.927
In April 2018 ISIL claimed responsibility for the bombing at Asdeira village in Shirqat town, north of Tirkrit that killed 17 personnel of al-Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Units) and injured 30 others.928
In May 2018, several policemen were kidnapped In Diyala Governorate by insurgents believed to be members of ISIL.929
On 2 May 2018 ISIL claimed responsibility for a gun attack near the town of Tarmiya, Salah al-Din Governorate, which killed eight unarmed civilians according to security
920 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the context of the Ninewa Operations and the retaking of Mosul City, 17 October 2016 – 10 July 2017, 2 November 2017, url, pp. 11-12.
921 UN Security Council, Implementation of resolution 2367 (2017); Report of the Secretary-General [S/2018/677], 9 July 2018, url, p. 10.
922 Denmark, DIS, Norway, Landinfo, Iraq: Security situation and the situation for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the disputed areas, 5 November 2018, url, pp. 21-22.
923 Iraqi News, Former Iraqi military general assassinated by Islamic State in Kirkuk, 1 February 2018, url.
924 Reuters, Islamic State kills 27 Iraqi militiamen near Kirkuk, 19 February 2018, url.
925 Iraqi News, Police officer assassinated by unknown gunmen in Iraq’s Tuz Khurmatu, 4 March 2018, url.
926 Iraqi News, Federal Police mourns eight personnel killed by Islamic State between Kirkuk, Baghdad, 24 March 2018, url.
927 BBC Monitoring, IS claims second 'commando' attack in western Iraq in 24 hours, 9 April 2018, url.
928 Iraqi News, Islamic State claims responsibility killing, injuring tens of people in blasts, north of Salahuddin, 13 April 2018, url.
929 Wing, J., Security In Iraq Largely Unchanged In May 2018, Musings on Iraq [Blog], 2 June 2018, url.
sources. ISIL claimed that it killed 22 people, describing them all as members of the Sunni Tribal Mobilization Forces.930
On 22 August 2018 a suicide attack in the village of Asdira, Salah al-Din Governorate, killed six Sunni militiamen that were members of the Tribal Mobilization Forces.
Although no group claimed responsibility ISIL militants are known to operate in the area.931
On 29 August 2018 a suicide car-bomb attack on a security checkpoint in Qaim district, Al Anbar Governorate, which was jointly manned by the army and Shi’ite militias killed five militiamen and three civilians and wounded 12 others. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack and said it killed 28 people, contradicting the official death tolls.932
On 11 September 2018 ISIL claimed responsibility for a suicide attack outside a hospital in the western Iraqi province of Anbar where it targeted a gathering Iraqi soldiers and members of Sunni militias. One person was killed and four other were injured.933
On 2 November 2018, two members of the Peshmerga were abducted in north-western Kirkuk Governorate and found killed the following day.934
In the second week of November 2018, a major attack occurred in where ISIL gunmen dressed in military uniforms entered the home of a local sheikh/tribal PMU leader and executed 19 people.935
2.3.2 (Former) members of the local police forces and (former) members of the Sahwa forces
UNAMI explained that the Sahwa refers to the National Council for the Salvation of Iraq, also known as the Sunni Salvation movement, National Council for the Awakening of Iraq, the Sunni Awakening movement, or the Sons of Iraq. These groups were coalitions of ‘tribal leaders and Sheikhs that were founded in 2005 and united to maintain security of their communities from al-Qa’eda associated groups’.936 Sahwa forces linked to tribes in Anbar, Ninewa, Salah al-Din and Diyala were supported and locally trained Sunni forces supported by the US in their fight against Al Qaeda, and they were largely successful. However, they were not subsequently integrated into the ISF under pro-Shia PM al Maliki, as had been hoped by Sahwa leaders; Maliki stopped paying and appointing the Sahwa in favour of Shia for security posts. According to GPPi, in the al-Maliki era prior to ISIL, Sunni tribal leaders who had been part of the Sahwa ‘were directly targeted by the remnants of al-Qaeda and the forerunners of ISIL’. Later on in 2014 in the fight against ISIL, a US-backed tribal forces mobilization program (TMF) was created based on the Sunni ‘awakening’ (Sahwa) model, though it was only authorised in Anbar and Ninewa, not Salah al-Din (those fighters mobilised under PMU or other tribal militia formations). TMF forces fell under the PMU officially as ‘Iraqi government program’.937
930 Reuters, Islamic State claims responsibility for gun attack north of Baghdad, 2 May 2018, url.
931 Reuters, Suicide attack kills six Sunni fighters in northern Iraq: police, 22 August 2018, url.
932 Reuters, Eight killed in car-bomb attack at Iraqi checkpoint, 29 August 2018, url.
933 BBC Monitoring, IS claims suicide bombing outside hospital in western Iraq, 11 September 2018, url.
934 Bas News, Abducted Peshmerga Found Dead in Kirkuk, 3 November 2018, url.
935 Iraq Oil Report, Islamic State incursions highlight Iraq’s counter-insurgency challenges, 15 November 2018, url;
Wing, J., Security In Iraq Nov 8-14, 2018, Musings on Iraq [Blog], 16 November 2018, url.
936 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 11 December 2014 - 30 April 2015, 13 July 2015, url, p. 11.
937 Gaston, E., Sunni Tribal Forces, GPPi, 30 August 2017, url.
Examples of ISIL targeting of local police and Sahwa forces are provided below:
On 11 June 2014, 17 civilians who worked for the police were executed close to Mosul airport.938
Also on 11 June 2014, ISIL executed 30 captured policemen in Tikrit, Salah al-Din, in front of civilians.939
On 25 July 2014, the bodies of 18 police officers were found in Abbasiyah, south of Tikrit. They were reportedly executed after being forced to ‘repent’.940
The targeting by ISIL included also the relatives of police officers: On 12 September 2014, a police officer and ten of his relatives were killed by ISIL in al-Jumasah village in Shirqat district, Salah al-Din.941
On 11 November 2014, ISIL abducted a police officer in Falluja, and executed him two days later. ISIL hung his body to a bridge.942
On 19 December 2014, ISIL blew up a house of a tribal leader, a former Sahwa member in the al-Zab area in Kirkuk. During the same period, another home of a Sahwa member was destroyed using explosives in Rashad district, Kirkuk Governorate. On 29 April, a collective grave was found in Hajeer area of Jurf al-Sakhr (Jurf al-Nasr) district; it contained six Sahwa members killed by ISIL. Sahwa members were also abducted in January 2015 in different places in Salah al-Din Governorate.943
On 27 June 2015, ISIL executed 11 former police officers (all were members of the al-Jubur tribe) from a village in Hamam al-Aleel district, south of Mosul, Ninewa. They had been abducted by ISIL in May 2015. The families received written notification of the killings.944
On 4 October 2015, 70 members of the Albu Nimr tribe from the al-Tharthar area, north of Ramadi, Anbar, were abducted and killed. According to a tribal leader, all those killed were relatives of men that had joined ISF and Sahwa groups to fight against ISIL.945
On 23 October 2016, ISIL killed 50 former Iraqi police officers in Hamam al-Alil. The victims had been abducted from other villages in the region.946
A policeman was killed and another injured in a suicide attack against a police station in Amiryat al-Falluja on 27 July 2017.947
On 25 March 2018 ISIL ambushed and killed eight police officers on the Baghdad-Kirkuk highway.948
938 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Non International Armed Conflict in Iraq: 5 June – 5 July 2014, 18 July 2014, url, p. 9.
939 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Non International Armed Conflict in Iraq: 5 June – 5 July 2014, 18 July 2014, url, p. 10.
940 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 6 July – 10 September 2014, 2 October 2014, url, p. 6 .
941 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 11 September – 10 December 2014, 23 February 2015, url, p. 7.
942 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 11 September – 10 December 2014, 23 February 2015, url, p. 8.
943 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 11 December 2014 - 30 April 2015, 13 July 2015, url, pp. 11, 15, 17, 34.
944 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq: 1 May – 31 October 2015, 11 January 2016, url, p. 10.
945 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq: 1 May – 31 October 2015, 11 January 2016, url, p. 10.
946 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on Human Rights in Iraq: July to December 2016, 30 August 2017, url, p. 9.
947 Iraqi News, Policeman killed, police station chief injured in suicide attack south of Fallujah, 27 July 2017, url.
948 Albawaba News, ISIS Ambush Attack Kills 8 Police Officers in Iraq, 25 March 2018, url.
On 21 May 2018, one policeman was killed and three were injured by an IED in Al-Qa’im district in western Anbar, near the Syrian border.949
On 30 June 2018, a policeman was killed by an ISIL sniper in the town of Abu Sayda, Diyala Governorate.950
2.3.3 Tribal leaders known to support the government, or who supported the government against AQ-I in the past
In a 2015 article for the Military Review, the Journal of the U.S. Army, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Sterling Jensen noted that many Sunni tribes in ISIL territory became internally divided. While some members aligned with ISIL others remained neutral or allied with the Iraqi government. ISIL sought to accentuate and capitalise on intra-tribal generational conflicts by promising the tribes’ younger generations advancement in the tribal hierarchy.951 Reporting for the Carnegie Middle East Center in November 2014 Frederic Wehrey and Ala’
Alrababa’h note that ISIL ‘resorted to both carrots and sticks to ensure the tribal support it needed to effectively control the areas it held’.952 For example, in several provinces (wilayat) under ISIL control, the group appointed ‘tribal affairs’ officials who coordinated with local leaders to collect taxes and ensure that people abide by its religious rules. Younger tribal members were promised a greater share of power over the territories their tribes controlled.
Despite this soft-power approach ISIL also deployed intense violence to coerce and intimidate the tribes.953
In a September 2015 report, anthropologist Hosham Dawod names a number of Sunni tribal confederations opposing ISIL: ‘Al-Bu Nimr, Al-Bu Fahd, Al-Bu Alwan, Al-Bu Daraj, Jubur, ‘Ubaid, etc.’; ISIL targeted hundreds of men from these tribes for beheading.954
Tribal leaders who refused to pledge allegiance to ISIL, were put on the kill-list of the organisation. In summer 2014, ISIL had issued a statement listing 19 of those tribal leaders.955 Tribal leaders risked abduction or assassination if they opposed ISIL.956 Relatives of tribal leaders were equally targeted.957 Tribal leaders who accused of being members in the al-Hashd al-Watani (National Gathering), a predominantly Sunni resistance movement against ISIL, were also targeted: in February 2015, ISIL abducted 26 Sunni Arab tribal leaders from different places south of Mosul under accusation of membership of the Al-Hashd al-Watani.958
949 Iraqi News, Four Iraqi policemen killed, injured in bomb blast near Syrian borders, 21 May 2018, url.
950 Iraqi News, Policeman killed by Islamic State sniper in Diyala, 30 June 2018, url.
951 Garterstein-Ross, D. and Jensen, S., The role of Iraqi tribes after the Islamic State’s ascendance, July 2015, url, pp. 107-108.
952 Wehrey, F. and Alrababa’h, A., An elusive courtship: The struggle for Iraq’s Sunni tribes, Carnegie Middle East Center, 7 November 2014, url.
953 Wehrey, F. and Alrababa’h, A., An elusive courtship: The struggle for Iraq’s Sunni tribes, Carnegie Middle East Center, 7 November 2014, url.
954 Dawod, H., The Sunni tribes in Iraq, September 2015, url, p. 4.
955 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 6 July – 10 September 2014, 02 October 2014, url, p. 8.
956 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 6 July – 10 September 2014, 02 October 2014, url, p. 8.
957 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 6 July – 10 September 2014, 02 October 2014, url, p. 9; UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the context of the Ninewa Operations and the retaking of Mosul City, 17 October 2016 – 10 July 2017, 2 November 2017, url, p. 12.
958 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 11 December 2014 - 30 April 2015, 13 July 2015, url, p. 15.
On 2 or 3 November 2016, ISIL allegedly abducted about 30 tribal leaders in Sinjar district, 18 of them were executed at an unknown place. According to UNAMI ‘ISIL was reportedly wary that the victims would fight the group’ when ISF started operations to reclaim the territory.959 Tribal leaders who are opposed to ISIL continue to be targeted, as pointed out in a security analysis of Ninewa by Julie Ahn, Maeve Campbell and Pete Knoetgen, commissioned for the US Department of State, published in May 2018:
‘The province has also begun to witness a rise in “quality attacks”—those which accurately target ISF and anti-ISIS political leaders. In February and March 2018, ISIS accelerated its attempts to assassinate and kidnap tribal sheikhs from the Jabour tribe, one of the most prominent sources of local resistance to ISIS. An attack conducted on March 12, during which ISIS militants stormed the home of a tribal sheikh near Qayyara, killing him and six other guests, serves as a good example of such incidents. These attacks are indicative of an insurgency increasingly capable of conducting refined targeting and pattern of life analysis. Specifically targeted attacks, rather than those that simply killed civilians, were the type of violence most responsible for demoralizing the ISF and intimidating ISIS opposition during previous insurgent periods.’960
Derek Henry Flood noted in his article in CTC Sentinel from September 2018 that ISIL regularly attacked pro-Baghdad Sunni Arab tribal militias in Kirkuk, Diyala and Salah al-Din.961
A 2018 article by the Independent reported that members of the ‘pro-government Sunni tribe’
Albu Nimr in Hit (Anbar) claim that ISIL had killed 864 members of their tribe, and that there remains significant intercommunal tensions and divisions regarding those families who did and did not support ISIL there; some members of the Albu Nimr tribe said they were not worried about a renewed ISIL counteroffensive in Anbar, while others said that people with ISIL members in their families were returning to the area and worries about local support for ISIL returning.962 In the first half of 2018, ISIL reportedly killed an average of three and a half mukhtars (village heads) each week, according to Michael Knights.963
2.3.4 Local and national politicians, candidates in local or regional elections, council members who opposed to ISIL or AQ-I
Candidates for elections, parliamentarians, local council members and (former) employees of the Independent Central Election Commission (IHEC) were ‘frequently targeted’ and became victims of abduction, torture or execution by ISIL, most often in Ninewa.964 A few examples:
959 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the context of the Ninewa Operations and the retaking of Mosul City, 17 October 2016 – 10 July 2017, 2 November 2017, url, p. 12.
960 Ahn, J. et.al., The Politics of Security in Ninewa: Preventing an ISIS Resurgence in Northern Iraq. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, 7 May 2018, url, p. 3.
961 Flood, D.H., From Caliphate to Caves: The Islamic State’s Asymmetric War in Northern Iraq, September 2018, url.
962 Independent (The), For this Iraqi tribe massacred by Isis, fear of the group's return is a constant reality, 4 July 2018, url.
963 Atlantic (The), ISIS Never Went Away in Iraq, 31 August 2018, url.
964 UNAMI/OHCHR, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq: 1 May – 31 October 2015, 11 January 2016, url, p. 32.