Islamic State militants have summarily executed scores of civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul in recent days, sometimes using children as executioners, and have also used chemical weapons against Iraqi and Kurdish troops, United Nations officials said on Friday.
United Nations investigators had not identified the time of the killings, but similar reports had been circulating for weeks. Most appeared to be cases of Islamic State courts’ executing scores of people in and around Mosul, then hanging the bodies of their victims around the city — a widely reported practice that the militants have used to strike fear into those who live in the group’s strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa, Syria.
“They are showing they are still in business,” Ms. Shamdasani said of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh.
In one massacre, militants were said to have summarily shot 40 civilians in Mosul, dressing them in orange clothes adorned with words, marked in red, labeling them “traitors and agents of the I.S.F.,” the abbreviation for Iraqi Security Forces, Ms. Shamdasani said, citing witnesses who had escaped the city. Afterward, the militants strung up the bodies of their victims from electricity poles around the city.
The next day, Islamic State fighters shot 20 civilians at a military base in the north of the city and also strung up their bodies with signs carrying statements like “used cellphones to leak information to the I.S.F.,” she said.
The militants were said to have shot six civilians on Oct. 20 for keeping hidden SIM cards in defiance of an order to surrender them. A week later, a 27-year-old man was killed for keeping a mobile phone, she added.
Among the witnesses to the recent killings was the sole survivor from a group of 50 former members of Iraq’s security forces who was abducted by militants, taken to the Mosul airport and shot. Although wounded, “he pretended to be dead, escaped, and we spoke to him,” she said.
Meanwhile, a mass grave discovered on Monday by Iraqi troops near an agricultural college in the town of Hamam al-Alil was only one among numerous sites of large-scale killings, Ms. Shamdasani said. The grave contained at least 100 corpses, but Islamic State fighters were also reported to have dumped bodies down a well and at a cement factory yard in the same town, and at several other locations including the Mosul airport and in the Tigris.
On a lengthening list of atrocities reported from Mosul, militants had deployed “sons of the Caliphate,” believed to be teenagers or younger, around the old town armed with explosive belts. They had also brought abducted women, some of them members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, into the city to distribute them as slaves for their fighters.
In addition to the Islamic State’s forcibly moving civilians into Mosul for use as human shields to deter attack, the United Nations said it had credible reports of the group’s fighters’ using chemical weapons and chemical agents like chlorine gas against advancing Iraqi and Kurdish forces. Ms. Shamdasani said that Iraqi troops entering the city had found large quantities of sulfur and ammonia stockpiled in civilian areas of the city.
The discovery raised fears that the chemicals could be used as a weapon to slow advancing government forces or punish civilians left behind after militants set on fire and shelled a sulfur gas factory in a subdistrict of Mosul. Their action resulted in the death of four civilians who inhaled fumes from burning sulfur, she added. Militants had also reportedly dumped sulfur in trenches and pits in Mosul and were holding civilians nearby.
Human rights officials are also receiving accounts of revenge killings by pro-government forces, targeting local Sunni civilians they accused of aiding or supporting the Islamic State, deepening fears that sectarian strife will continue after the battle for Mosul has ended.
Voicing outrage at the “numbing and intolerable” suffering inflicted on civilians by the unfolding conflict, the United Nations human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, in a statement on Friday demanded immediate action by the Iraqi government to protect fleeing or freed residents of areas held by the Islamic State and to bring the attackers to justice.
Quick action could save lives by discouraging people from taking the law into their own hands, Ms. Shamdasani said.
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