Iraqi Government Confirms Over 300 Members From Single Sunni Tribe Killed By ISIS

Militants of the Islamic State group killed at least 50 members of the Sunni Albu Nimr tribe in Iraq’s western Anbar province on Sunday, according to media reports. The latest executions bring the total number of the tribe’s members killed by ISIS to over 300, including many women and children, the Iraqi ministry of human rights said, in a statement released Sunday.

“The number of people killed by Islamic State from Albu Nimr tribe is 322. The bodies of 50 women and children have also been discovered dumped in a well,” the Iraqi government said, in the statement, adding that at least 65 members of the tribe are being held hostage by ISIS.

The execution-style killings of members of the Albu Nimr tribe, which had fought against ISIS in Anbar, have reportedly become a daily affair in the territories now under the control of the Islamic State group. Nearly 200 people, most of them belonging to the tribe, were reportedly killed last week in villages in Anbar controlled by ISIS.

“The government abandoned us and gave us to ISIS on a platter,” Sheikh Naeem al-Ga’oud, a senior leader of the tribe, told BBC, referring to the recently-formed, Shia-dominated government led by Haider al-Abadi. “We asked them many times for weapons but they gave us only promises.”

Ga’oud also said the Islamic State group killed 15 high school and college students in the village of Zauiyat Albu Nimr and that, apart from an air drop, there had been no help from the U.S.-led coalition that is targeting ISIS strongholds in Iraq and Syria.

The statement by the Iraqi government, which is the first official confirmation of such a massacre by the Islamic State group, came just days after Human Rights Watch released a report describing the execution of over 600 Iraqi prisoners, most of them Shias, in Mosul, after the city fell to ISIS in June.