Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations accused the Islamic State (ISIS, IS, or ISIL) of committing genocide against Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities.
The envoy, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, also said that the jihadist group may be peddling human organs to fund their operations.
Alhakim made those comments on Tuesday, a day ahead of an emergency U.N. Security Council session that was convened in the wake of ISIS beheading 21 Christian Egyptians in Libya.
“These terrorist groups have desecrated all human values. They have committed the most heinous criminal terrorist acts against the Iraqi people, whether Shi’ite, Sunni, Christians, Turkmen, Shabak or Yazidis,” Alhakim told the council. “These are, in fact, crimes of genocide committed against humanity that must be held accountable before international justice.”
When speaking to reporters on Tuesday, the Iraqi ambassador to the U.N. warned that ISIS may be selling human organs to pay for their terrorist campaign.
The Iraqi government has “discovered evidence” of “possible organ trafficking in recent weeks in shallow mass graves containing 10 to 20 bodies each,” according to Alhakim, reports Voice of America (VOA).
“When we discover mass graves, we look at the bodies,” he told reporters. “Some of those bodies are killed by bullets, some of them by knives. But when you find pieces of the back is [sic] missing and the kidneys is [sic] missing, you will wonder what it is.”
The Iraqi envoy pointed out that the airports in Mosul, Iraq, and Aleppo, Syria, are within ISIS’s reach and can be used to transport the human organs to dealers and buyers.
VOA reports that “the envoy also alleged that in recent weeks Islamic State militants had executed at least a dozen doctors in Mosul because they refused to remove organs from victims.”
Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N.’s top envoy to Iraq, acknowledged that his office is aware of the reports but said they cannot be confirmed absent until further investigation.
“Such reports are difficult to confirm, especially with a third of Iraq’s territory in the hands of the militants,” notes VOA.
On the same day that Alhakim spoke to journalists and the U.N. Security Council, reports surfaced that ISIS had burned up to 45 people in the Iraqi town of Al-Baghdadi, which is currently under the jihadist group’s control.
A video published by ISIS in February shows the terrorists burning a caged Jordanian pilot.
ISIS controls large swaths of Iraq and Syria. A U.S.-led campaign has been bombing ISIS targets in those two countries for months. ISIS has been expanding outside of Iraq and Syria.
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