Efforts to bring ISIS extremists to justice slow but progressing

BAGHDAD -- The horrors of the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" (ISIS)'s rule over northern Iraq may be in the past, but efforts to bring the extremists to justice are still gathering pace.

"A lot of work remains to be done," said United Nations (UN) chief investigator Christian Ritscher, who is looking into a slew of ISIS atrocities, from murder, torture and mass rape to slavery and genocide.

Five years after the group's defeat in Iraq, with many thousands of its members in Iraqi jails, work is ongoing to probe their crimes, said Ritscher, who heads the dedicated UN investigative team (UNITAD) seeking to promote accountability.

In a Baghdad interview, the German former prosecutor described the grim task -- undertaken with the co-operation of Iraqi authorities -- as "challenging" and diverse in scope.

"We have just opened an investigation into the destruction of the cultural heritage of Iraq by ISIS -- the destruction of mausoleums, churches, cultural sites, museums," Ritscher told AFP.

A future investigation will focus on crimes committed in Mosul, a major city in Iraq's north that ISIS occupied from 2014 until 2017, he added.

Iraq declared victory over ISIS on December 9, 2017, but the group kept its grip on territory in neighbouring Syria until March 2019, when it was defeated by US-backed, Kurdish-led forces.

The rise of ISIS and its self-proclaimed "caliphate" appeared meteoric. Its seizure of Mosul helped it to briefly hold roughly one-third of Iraqi territory, and for a time there were real fears of a major attack on the capital Baghdad.

Abuses of civilians, minorities and opponents became a hallmark of the group, whose ranks swelled with the arrival of thousands of foreign nationals.

The list of ISIS crimes is long, Ritscher said, and includes "genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes".

International justice

UNITAD has supported local authorities in uncovering mass graves and is working to prepare evidence for "any jurisdiction in the world that needs it ... even within several decades", Ritscher said.

"In 20 or 30 years, the perpetrators of international crimes will still be able to be judged. There is no limitation period. This could be done in Canada, the Netherlands, Malaysia and of course in Iraq."

Al-Khasfa -- a sinkhole south of Mosul that ISIS used as a mass grave -- is thought to contain the remains of thousands of its victims.

In a March 2017 Human Rights Watch report, eyewitnesses from the area gave accounts of victims being killed and thrown into the pit.

They said they had seen multiple mass executions conducted there, sometimes on a weekly basis, beginning in June 2014 and continuing until May or June 2015.

In its latest report, presented to the UN Security Council on Monday (December 5), UNITAD highlighted ISIS's production of chemical and biological weapons.

The programme included "the development, testing, weaponisation and deployment of a range of chemical agents", according to the report.

UNITAD also investigated the Speicher massacre -- when up to 1,700 "predominantly Shia" Iraqi army cadets were abducted from a base and executed in June 2014.

Other atrocities examined were the deaths of hundreds of detainees from Badush prison, near Mosul.

Crimes against the Yazidis, a religious minority many of whose men were executed and whose women were abducted for sexual slavery, were investigated.

In their 2014 attack on Sinjar in Ninawa province, northern Iraq, ISIS elements killed and took captive thousands of Yazidi men, women and children, many of whom are still unaccounted for.

To date, dozens of mass graves containing the bodies of hundreds of Yazidi victims have been found in Sinjar and nearby towns

The UN has described the assault on Sinjar as genocide.

In 2021, a German court sentenced former ISIS member Taha al-Jumailly, who had let a five-year-old Yazidi girl in chains die of thirst, to life in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity -- the first verdict of its kind worldwide.

The landmark trial was held under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which holds that any national court may prosecute such crimes no matter where they were committed.

"Maybe in the future there will be a tribunal on ISIS crimes," Ritscher said, adding that the idea is subject to "ongoing discussions".

'Fair trials'

Iraqi authorities do not release statistics on ISIS captives, but in 2018 the UN estimated more than 12,000 Iraqi and foreign "combatants" were being held in its prisons.

Ritscher insisted UNITAD may contribute only to "fair trials", where there is no room for "torture or any element contravening human rights".

He said trials must be "fair and evidence-based, including witnesses who can testify in court, victims who can tell the whole story and tell the court what happened to them".

"This is what we are aiming for, not trials based on confessions," he added.

He expressed hope that the work could help achieve reconciliation in Iraq, a country where many years of war and insurgency have ripped apart its diverse social fabric.

"Reconciliation is always a result of investigations and of fair trials where the victims have a voice and can tell their story," he said.