President Barack Obama orders national security advisers to draw up provisional plans for military intervention against jihadists' advance which would see US on side of Iran
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| Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) leading away captured Iraqi soldiers in Tikrit Photo: AP |
The United States has condemned an apparent mass execution by the Sunni jihadist forces that have occupied large parts of Iraq amid further signs Washington is preparing talks with Iran over a joint strategy to deal with the crisis.
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham displayed pictures of scores, perhaps hundreds of Shia soldiers being ferried away from an army base in open-topped lorries, bent double, to a palm-lined field and laid out in lines.
Most were young, and though said to be military wearing jeans and football shirts.
In the next photographs, lines of bearded gunmen raise their Kalashnikovs and appear to be shooting them dead. Puffs of dust are driven up into the air around the bodies, some of which then are displayed in gruesomely close detail in the final pictures.
Accompanying picture captions make clear that the aim of the killings was sectarian and intended to bring fear to Shia soldiers in the army. Many Sunni soldiers have already fled or defected in the face of the Sunni jihadist advance.
"This is the fate that awaits the Shiites sent by Nouri to fight the Sunnis," one caption says, a reference to Iraq's Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
The Iraqi authorities gave conflicting views as to whether the pictures were genuine. But the photographs are not doctored and are internally consistent.
One of the series shows a government office in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's birth-place, with a masked man wielding an ISIS black flag. Another shows a police vehicle marked with the name of the province in which Tikrit sits, Salahuddin.
The same doomed figures can be identified in several of the pictures, before and after what seems to be their deaths. One man is distinctively sitting up till the last moment.
There are several individual massacres. Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, the Iraqi military spokesman, said he thought the pictures were genuine.
A local resident told The Telegraph he had seen thousands of men being taken as captive to the former US military base in the area, Camp Speicher. "I saw the Speicher base. It is controlled by ISIS," said Tamer Hammoudi, 46, a local farmer. "They have thousands of prisoners there, 5,000 prisoners. I saw them being walked into the military base."
The Twitter account which released the pictures said 1,700 men had died, though there is nothing to suggest anything like that number in the photographs.
Washington condemned what had happened. "The claim by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant that it has massacred 1,700 Iraqi Shia air force recruits in Tikrit is horrifying and a true depiction of the bloodlust that these terrorists represent," the US State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said, using an alternative translation of ISIS's name.
"While we cannot confirm these reports, one of the primary goals of ISIL is to set fear into the hearts of all Iraqis and drive sectarian division among its people."
The Twitter account used was one of a number of seemingly genuine ISIS platforms used to spread its message which were suspended from service on Sunday night.
President Barack Obama has ordered his national security advisers to draw up provisional plans for military intervention against the jihadists' advance, which has brought them within 40 miles of Baghdad.
Military action would bring American into the war on the side of its old adversary Iran, which has already sent hundreds if not thousands of men from the Revolutionary Guard, led by the commander of the elite Quds Force, Qassim al-Suleimani, to Baghdad's defence.
Iran, the pre-eminent Shia power, regards itself as having a duty to project force to defend its minority co-religionists across the Middle East.
The Wall Street Journal, in Monday's edition, cited US officials saying it was "imperative" to discuss the crisis with Iran and other regional powers, a strategy John Kerry, the US secretary of state, discussed in a phone call with Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister.
Co-operation would mirror that between the two countries against the Taliban in Afghanistan, another Sunni militant group which Iran saw as a sectarian and regional threat. The administration of President George W. Bush did not allow that to lead to a wider rapprochement, including over Iran's nuclear programme, but since then President Obama has used talks on the issue for a broader outreach to Tehran.
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran also suggested co-operation was possible. "When the U.S. takes action, then one can think about cooperation," he said at a press conference in Tehran. "Until today, no specific request for help has been demanded. But we are ready to help within international law."
Other senior and more hard-line figures in Tehran condemned the idea, however.
The war in Iraq itself was consolidating on sectarian lines. The army re-established lines north of predominantly Shia Baghdad with the help of experienced local militias and Iranian reinforcements.
The government claimed to have retaken towns in the mixed province of Diyala, including Jalawla, where there is also a Kurdish presence. The government also hit back on Tikrit.
Over the weekend, jets bombed Tikrit's Grand Mosque, killing tens of people, residents including Mr Hammoudi, who had left for Iraqi Kurdistan, said. The Mosque was being used for a "repentance session" for Sunni soldiers prepared to join up with the rebels, Amal Hamid, a widowed mother-of-four, added.
The air force also bombed the graveyard of Iraq's former leader Saddam Hussein in his home village outside the city.
However, in the north the rebel force, which includes significant support from remnants of Saddam's former Baath Party and army power base, consolidated its position by taking the town of Tal Afar near Mosul, according to reports.
The town, which contains both Sunni and Shia elements, is predominantly made up by members of the Turkmen ethnic group. The Turkmen are the third largest ethnic group in the country after the Arabs and Kurds, and speak a form of Turkish.
"The city was overrun by militants," one official in the town told Reuters. "Severe fighting took place, and many people were killed. Shiite families have fled to the west and Sunni families have fled to the east."
The town was one of the few from which the army had not fled in the face of the insurgent advance last week.
The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said he was watching events there. "We cannot underestimate the developments in Tal Afar," he said. The Telegraph
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