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On Monday, the UN Human Rights Council unanimously agreed to quickly dispatch an emergency mission to Iraq to investigate atrocities committed by extremist group Islamic State (IS), as Baghdad warned that the country was “facing a terrorist monster”.
The 47-member UN human rights wing of the UN accepted a resolution urging an investigation presented by Iraq and supported by over 100 states. They reached their decision after listening to details of harrowing crimes and abuses attributed to the IS the entire day, including massacres,abductions, forced conversions, slavery, the use of children as soldiers, sexual violence and suicide bombers.
“We are facing a terrorist monster”, Iraqi Human Rights Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said, decrying the acts as “equivalent to genocide and crimes against humanity”.
The special session was requested by Iraq and supported by several countries, including the US, Russia, France, China and the UK – the five permanent members of the Security Council.
“The reports we have received reveal acts of inhumanity on an unimaginable scale”, deputy UN rights chief Flavia Pansieri told member states as she opened the session.
“The stories that have emerged from ISIL’s bloody assault on Iraq are the ones of nightmares”, US ambassador told the told the rights body on Monday, insisting that it was “critically important that the council responds”.
The UN has accused the group of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, including “ethnic and religious cleansing”, and has warned of a potential “genocide” in parts of Iraq.
However, Sudani has stressed that “the acts of the IS are a threat not only to Iraq but to the whole region” and warned that they posed “an imminent danger for all countries of the world”.
Iranian ambassador to the UN Mohsen Naziri Asl also urged “all member states to unite against this threat”.
The resolution adopted on Monday condemned “in the strongest possible terms systematic violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law resulting from the terrorist acts committed by ISIL (IS) and associated groups”.
