ISIS killing civilians as troops advance: UN

Islamic State militants have summarily killed scores of civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul in recent days, sometimes using children as executioners, and have used chemical agents against Iraqi and Kurdish troops, United Nations officials said on Friday.

Video posted by the militants on Wednesday showed four children, who appear to be 10 to 14 years old, shooting four civilians accused of disloyalty at a location near the Tigris River, said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the United Nations human rights office in Geneva. The video release identified one of the children as Russian, another as coming from Uzbekistan and two as Iraqis.

United Nations investigators had not identified the time of the killings but believed they were recent, citing the surge in executions by Islamic State courts and fighters in and around Mosul in recent weeks and the brutal training the militants have forced on children in the parts of Iraq and Syria they control.

In one massacre, militants were said to have summarily shot 40 civilians in Mosul, dressing them in orange clothes adorned with words, marked in red, labelling them “traitors and agents of the ISF,” Shamdasani said, using the abbreviation for Iraqi Security Forces. Afterward, the militants strung up the bodies of their victims from electricity poles around the city — a practice the Islamic State long used to strike fear into those who live in the group’s strongholds.

The next day, Islamic State fighters shot 20 civilians at a military base in the north of the city and also strung up their bodies with signs carrying statements like “used cellphones to leak information to the ISF,” she said.                                                                                                                          © 2016 The New York Times News Service