UN accuses Islamic State of executions, rape, child abuse in Iraq

The United Nations accused Islamic State fighters in Iraq of executing religious and other leaders as well as teachers and health workers, forcibly recruiting children and raping women among acts that amounted to war crimes.    

A UN report focused on a range of violations committed against civilians, particularly by the Islamic State, though it also said Iraqi forces and allied fighters had not taken precautions to protect civilians from violence.        

"(This)...may also amount to war crimes," the report found.       

At least 5,576 Iraqi civilians have been killed this year in violence, the U.N. said in the most detailed account yet of the impact of months of unrest culminating in advances by Sunni militants led by the al Qaeda offshot Islamic State, formerly known as ISIL, across the north.           

"ISIL and associated armed groups have also continued to... perpetrate targeted assassinations (community, political, and religious leaders, government employees, education professionals, health workers, etc.), sexual assault, rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls, forced recruitment of children, kidnappings, executions, robberies."        

The report also accused them of wanton destruction and plundering of places of worship and of cultural or historical significance.        

"Credible information on recruitment and use of children as soldiers was also received," the report noted.             

"Every day we receive accounts of a terrible litany of human rights violations being committed in Iraq against ordinary Iraqi children, women and men, who have been deprived of their security, their livelihoods, their homes, education, healthcare and other basic services," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said.         

The report also details violations committed by government forces and affiliated groups, citing "summary executions/extrajudicial killings of prisoners and detainees", which it said may constitute a war crime.          

The Iraqi Interior Ministry said this week that an investigation had revealed the Islamic State had taken 510 Shi'ite prisoners from a prison in Mosul to an agricultural area and executed them - killing all but 17 who managed to flee.       

The ministry said the its report was based on testimony of one of the prisoners who fled.

Iraq's Sistani:

Iraq's top Shi'ite Muslim cleric criticised the government and international agencies on Friday for failing to do enough to help hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by fighting between government forces and Sunni Islamist insurgents.         

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the majority sect's most influential cleric, said in a sermon delivered by an aide that the uprooted people were living under "cruel and difficult economic and humanitarian conditions".          

"The institutions concerned with this are still not meeting the scale of the hardships and suffering, despite the promises that we heard of help," his aide Ahmed al-Safi said in the Shi'ite holy city of Karbala.         

The United Nations say more than 2 million people have been displaced within Iraq, most of them forced from their homes by conflict in the western province of Anbar and last month's offensive led by the al Qaeda offshoot Islamic State.           

Most of those driven from their homes by last month's fighting have fled to the autonomous northern Kurdistan region, but many of the majority Shi'ite population have moved to Baghdad and Iraq's mainly Shi'ite southern provinces.        

Sistani said money which had been pledged to support them had not materialised, leaving the displaced dependent on the generosity of individual donors.         

"The authorities have to undertake their responsibilities fully and deal with this humanitarian issue with all seriousness - be those authorities local or international," he said.           

The 83-year-old Sistani, who hardly ever appears in public and delegates aides to deliver his sermons, reiterated his call for Iraq's politicians to end weeks of deadlock and agree on a new unity government that could tackle the Islamist insurgency.