Sep. 03, 2014 | 12:17 PM (Last updated: September 03, 2014 | 05:25 PM)
HRW: ISIS killed 770 Iraqi troops
Iraqi volunteer soldiers march after graduating from a training camp in the central Iraqi city of Kufa September 1, 2014. (AFP Photo/Haidar Hamdani)
Sinan Salaheddin| Associated Press
camp Speicher
Nouri Al-Maliki
Peter Bouckaert
Fred Abrahams
Militants from ISIS carried out a mass killing of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers captured when the extremists overran a military base north of Baghdad in June, a leading international watchdog said Wednesday.
The incident at Camp Speicher, an air base that previously served as a U.S. military facility, was one of the worst atrocities perpetrated by ISIS in its lightning offensive that seized large swath of northern and western Iraq.
According to Human Rights Watch, new evidence indicates that ISIS fighters killed between 560 and 770 men captured at Camp Speicher, near the city of Tikrit -- a figure several times higher than what was initially reported.
The grisly images, meant to sap the morale of Iraqi security forces, and the number of slain troops could not be confirmed at the time.
The Human Rights Watch statement said the revised figure for the slain soldiers was based on analysis of new satellite imagery, militant videos and a survivor's account that confirmed the existence of three more "mass execution sites".