Iraq begins to excavate the location of the Camp Speicher massacre. Yahoo/Reuters.

An Iraqi forensic technician recovering a body from the massacre. Yahoo/Reuters.

Iraq has begun to recover the bodies from last years Camp Speicher massacre where ISIS killed 1700 people. Yahoo/Reuters. The forensic teams have begun to excavate 12 mass graves. The massacre involved the murder of hundreds of Iraqi Shiite soldiers, many of which were machine gunned to death on video. The attack came after the collapse of the Iraqi military in the wake of the battle for Tikrit. The videos of these killings were released as propaganda for ISIS, and is widely considered the worst atrocity during the Iraq War in terms of deaths. One of the mass graves was located on the site of Saddam Hussein's presidential compound. With ISIS finally driven out of the Tikrit area, the families of the victims are hoping to get closure. 

My Comment:

The above video is from Reuters as well. It shows some of the excavations and gives an account from one of the survivors of the massacre. Just a fair warning the rest of this post is going to be rather graphic...

I've actually watched some of the video from the massacre and it is probably one of the worst things I have ever seen on the internet. ISIS tends to be incredibly casual in the way they kill people and in this case it was no exception. It was almost an industrial operation, with dozens of men being led to a river and executed one by one with a single pistol shot to the back of the head. before their bodies were dumped. That video was part of the same event but in other cases entire groups of men were machine gunned. The part that really struck me is how they slapped and hit the prisoners before they executed them. It wasn't enough to kill them, they had to humiliate them first... 

The fact that this mass killing is the worst in the history of the 2nd Iraq War (or 3rd if you consider the ISIS offensive to be the start of a separate war) is really saying something. Given how horrible the insurgency was during the Iraq War and all the bombings and major battles, it is amazing that something could top it. But no doubt the massacre at Camp Speicher was worse. 

It is important to note that though the men killed were soldiers they were not armed and they did not resist ISIS in anyway. They were killed not because they had fought against ISIS but because they were Shiite Muslims. Camp Speicher was a former American base that the Iraqis took over after the withdrawal. The men who were killed were largely air force cadets. Their officers abandoned them in the wake of the battle for Tikrit and they were left to fend for themselves. They tried to return to Baghdad but were intercepted by ISIS. The massacre didn't happen at Camp Speicher but almost all of the people killed were from there. 

So why care about this massacre? It shows how far ISIS is willing to go. They have no problem in killing non-combatants based on nothing more then their religion. They also have no problem in using those deaths for propaganda purposes. In terms of evil acts that ISIS has done, the massacre is among the worst. 

It also shows how sectarian the conflict in Iraq really is. Any sane person would have left ISIS after what they did but many Sunni Muslims in Iraq still to this day support them. Why? Because they fear the Shia Muslims and Iran even more then they fear ISIS. Regardless of their political beliefs and the obvious cruelty, Sunni Muslims still believe they have a better chance of survival with ISIS then with Iran. That's all you really need to know about the Middle East and it goes a long way in explaining Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and all the other sectarian conflicts in the region. In short, the fight between Sunni and Shiite is getting very close to the edge genocide. 

And it is not like the Shiite Muslims in Iraq have forgotten about this massacre. I just recently posted that after Tikrit was recaptured from ISIS, the Shia militias and Iraqi military have committed some atrocities of their own, including the execution of prisoners, arson and looting. One of the justifications for those attacks, as if such things could ever be justified, is revenge for Camp Speicher. One wonders when Mosul finally falls, if it finally falls, there won't be a Shiite version of the massacre as payback...