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The United Nations on Tuesday said that over a thousand people have been killed so far this month in the militant sweep through western and northern Iraq, and that more than 75% of them civilians.
At least 1,075 people have been killed, with 658 others injured by the violence in Iraq from June 5th to June 22nd, Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN Human Rights Office, said. He added that the figures produced “should be viewed very much as a minimum”.
He also said that at least 757 civilians were killed, with 599 more injured, in the provinces of Salah al-Din, Diyala and Nineveh. Many of the deaths were because of “verified summary executions and extra-judicial killings of civilians, police, and soldiers who were hors combat”. At least 318 others, not necessarily civilians, were killed and 590 more were injured in Baghdad and in the country’s south, “many of them as a result of at least six separate vehicle-borne bombs”, he said.
Militants led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have overrun several major areas in five provinces, and are now almost a 100 kilometers away from Baghdad. Their onslaught has forced hundreds of thousands to flee, alarming world leaders and putting Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki under pressure both domestically and internationally.
Colville also said that in addition to the killings, ISIL has continued to abduct people in the affected provinces. Many foreigners are among the abducted, including 48 Turkish nationals kidnapped from the Turkish consulate in Mosul, and 40 Indian citizens working in an Iraqi construction company kidnapped on June 18th. Some of the kidnapped have since been released, like the 16 Georgians working in an Iraqi communications company. Colville has, however, decried that bodies of some of the kidnapped have been turning up, many of them with gunshot wounds to the back of their heads.