News - Middle East: Iraqi authorities have arrested a suspect in the June 2014 massacre by Daesh Takfiri terrorists at an air force camp in the country’s north-central province of Salahuddin.

The Interior Ministry identified the suspect as Abdelkhalek Khazaal Soltan, and announced in a statement that he had been arrested in a joint operation by the federal intelligence services and counterterrorism police in Sulaymaniyah, the second largest city in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.

The ministry spokesman General Saad Maan stated that Soltan “took part in several operations after joining Daesh in 2013, targeting the security forces... and participated in the Camp Speicher massacre of which he was one of the perpetrators.”

On June 12, 2014, Daesh terrorists killed around 1,700 Iraqi air force cadets after kidnapping them from Camp Speicher, a former US base. There were reportedly around 4,000 unarmed cadets in the camp when it came under attack by the terrorists.

Following the abductions, the attackers took the victims to the complex of presidential palaces and killed them. The terrorists also threw some of the bodies into the river. 

The massacre was filmed by Daesh and broadcast on social media.

An investigation committee later revealed that 57 members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party had aided the Takfiri Daesh terrorists in the massacre.

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

Iraqi judiciary officials 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 role in the massacre.

On August 21, 2016, Iraqi officials hung 36 men convicted of involvement in the carnage.

Tikrit was recaptured from Daesh in March 2015. During clean-up operations in the northern part of the city, Iraqi forces found the location of the 2014 carnage.

Iraq declared victory over the terrorist group in December 2017 after a three-year counterterrorism military campaign, in which Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), better known as Hashd al-Sha’abi, also played a major role.

However, Daesh’s remnants keep staging sporadic attacks across Iraq, attempting to regroup and unleash fresh violence in the Arab country.

The Takfiri terrorist group has managed to intensify its attacks in Iraq, particularly since January 2020, when the United States assassinated General Soleimani and PMU’s deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport.

Anti-US sentiments sharply increased in Iraq in the aftermath of the assassination, prompting Iraqi lawmakers to pass a bill – only two days after the assassination – that required the Baghdad government to end the presence of all foreign military forces led by Washington.

The US was finally forced to end its “combat mission” in Iraq by the end of 2021, but Iraqi resistance groups say the Pentagon’s so-called advisory role must also end.

Source: Press TV