Iraq arrests suspect in 2014 Islamic State massacre of cadets

Iraq has arrested a suspect in one of the most notorious war crimes of Daesh (the Islamic State group), the 2014 massacre of up to 1,700 captive cadets, authorities said Thursday.

After overrunning the air force academy at Camp Speicher where thousands of cadets were being trained, the Sunni extremists of IS separated out the Shiites and Christians among them and gunned them down one by one before dumping their bodies in mass graves or in the nearby Tigris River.

The Interior mMinistry identified the suspect as Abdelkhalek Khazaal Soltan and said he had been arrested in a joint operation by the federal intelligence services and counterterrorism police in Sulaimaniyah, the second city of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.

Ministry spokesman Gen. Saad Maan alleged that after joining Daesh in 2013, Soltan "took part in several operations targeting the security forces … and participated in the Camp Speicher massacre of which he was one of the perpetrators."

The massacre sparked a wave of revulsion around the world and prompted thousands of Shiite volunteers to join the fightback against the jihadists which culminated in a victory declaration in December 2017.

In a 2021 report to the Security Council, UN investigators found that the massacre of the "predominantly Shia unarmed air cadets" and their instructors involved the "war crimes of murder, torture, cruel treatment and outrages upon personal dignity."

It also found that a video of the killings released by Daesh in July 2015 constituted a "direct and public incitement to commit genocide against Shia Muslims."

The Iraqi courts have handed down dozens of death sentences against those convicted of taking part in the massacre.

In January, 14 people were sentenced to death for their part in the massacre. In 2016, Iraq hanged 36 men convicted of carrying out the killings.