New York : According to a report published in CNN, the United Nations were looking into claims that ISIS was engaged in “harvesting organs from slain civilians and gaining financial benefits by trafficking the body parts.”
“Some of the bodies we found are mutilated … that means some parts are missing,” Iraq’s ambassador to the UN, Mohamed Alhakim was quoted as saying by CNN.
“These terrorist groups have desecrated all human values. They have committed the most heinous criminal terrorist acts against the Iraqi people whether Shia, Sunni, Christians, Turkmen, Shabak or Izadis,” he stated. Alhakim further added that there were openings in the back of the bodies where the kidneys would be located.
“This is clearly something bigger than we think,” Alhakim said.
“These are in fact crimes of genocide committed against humanity that must be held accountable before international justice,” Alhakim added.
“Organ theft during wars, civil wars, dirty wars, wars involving undisciplined armies is not uncommon,” Scheper-Hughes, chair of Berkeley’s doctoral program in medical anthropology, wrote in an email.
Earlier, the outgoing UN envoy to Iraq, Nikolay Mladenov, told the council that 790 people were killed in January alone by terrorism and armed conflict.
Mladenov noted the increasing number of reports and allegations that the Islamic State group is using organ harvesting as a financing method, but he said only that “it’s very clear that the tactics ISIL is using expand by the day.” He used an acronym for the group.
He said Iraq’s most pressing goal is to win back the vast territory that the Islamic State group has seized in the past year. The Sunni militants seized a third of both Iraq and neighboring Syria and imposed strict Sharia law.
“Especially worrying is the increasing number of reports of revenge attacks committed particularly against members of the Sunni community in areas liberated from ISIL control,” Mladenov said.
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