The U.S. State Department “strongly condemned” Friday the recent executions of more than 220 Iraqis by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Two mass graves containing the bodies of men in the Sunni Muslim Albu Nimr tribe were discovered Thursday in Iraq’s Anbar province. They were affiliated with a militia known as the Awakening, which has its origins in the U.S. fight against Al-Qaeda in 2006 and 2007.
“Early this morning we found those corpses and we were told by some Islamic State militants that ‘those people are from Sahwa, who fought your brothers the Islamic State, and this is the punishment of anybody fighting Islamic State,’ ” a witness told Reuters at the time.
The State Department “vowed to do its part to help Iraq move beyond this crisis” and stated that the Islamic State’s “unrelenting depravity and twisted ideology” is a threat to the entire region.
“[The Islamic State] does not represent the people of Iraq; they are murderers and terrorists, who do not govern, but bleed the country they occupy,” Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
