Iraq executes 31 IS militants over role in 2014 Saladin massacre

Iraqi authorities have executed a total of 31 people for involvement in the 2014 mass killing in which hundreds of Iraqi military personnel were killed by the Islamic State (IS) group in northern Iraq’s Saladin province in 2014, said Iraqi government official on Tuesday.
On June 12, 2014, IS terrorists overran Saladin before positing a video online purporting to show the mass killing of hundreds of security officers and army cadets in the province.
"They had been convicted of taking part in the Camp Speicher Massacre," Mahmoud Khalaf, mayor of the Samarra district in Iraq’s north-central Saladin province, told Anadolu Agency on Monday.
The slain officers were alleged to have been affiliated with Saladin’s U.S.-run Speicher military base.
At the time, Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry put the number of those killed at 2,398.
According to Khalaf, the bodies of those executed on Sunday were being held at hospitals in Samarra for eventual delivery to their families.
Those executed on Sunday were arrested in 2015 after Iraqi forces recaptured Saladin. Last year, an Iraqi court sentenced them to death.
Iraq has remained in a devastating security vacuum since mid-2014, when IS overran the northern city of Mosul and captured a number of other provinces in Iraq and neighboring Syria.