Shafaq News

On the western bank of the Tigris, where Saddam Hussein's former presidential palaces once projected the permanence of his rule, a different kind of permanence has settled. The ruins are quiet now, but they hold, in the soil beneath them and in the water that runs past them, the remains of some of the youngest soldiers Iraq ever lost, young men who walked out of a military base on a summer morning in 2014 and were dead before nightfall.

June 12 marks twelve years since the Camp Speicher massacre, the single deadliest act of terrorism in Iraq's modern history. On that day, ISIS descended on a military air base in Saladin province, about 170 kilometers north of Baghdad, and executed an estimated 1,700 predominantly Shia cadets in a killing operation that spanned multiple sites along the Tigris.

The victims were not combatants. They were Air Force recruits, most of them in their early twenties, in the middle of their training. Some were ordered to leave the base as ISIS closed in. Many were told they would be given safe passage, according to subsequent survivor testimony. They were not.

ISIS documented the killings as propaganda, releasing footage that showed groups of men being marched to riverbanks and ravines before being shot. Bodies were pushed into the Tigris. Others were buried in mass graves around the palace complex. The videos circulated globally and became, for many Iraqis, their first visceral encounter with what ISIS intended to do to their country.

In the days before June 12, the Iraqi military had effectively disintegrated across large parts of the north and west. Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, had fallen to ISIS on June 10 after government divisions abandoned their posts. The command structure for military installations in the region broke down almost immediately. Cadets at Camp Speicher received conflicting orders and, in many cases, no orders at all.

Security researcher Ahmed Omar, speaking to Shafaq News, described the massacre as the direct product of a total security failure. What occurred, he said, was not simply a mass killing but the consequence of institutional collapse on a scale that left thousands of unarmed young men without protection or direction at the moment they needed it most.

Camp Speicher, named after American pilot Scott Speicher whose plane was shot down during the 1991 Gulf War and whose remains were later recovered there, sat in Saladin province —the heartland of Iraq's Sunni Arab population and the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. The cadets who died were overwhelmingly from Iraq's Shia-majority provinces in the center and south; therefore, according to survivors who spoke to Shafaq News anonymously, the sectarian dimension of the killing was explicit: “ISIS chose its victims by religion, separating Shia recruits from Sunni ones before carrying out the executions.”

Um Diyaa, 65, sits every June in front of a photograph of her son, who was 24 years old when he was killed. In an account shared with Shafaq News, she described their last phone call, days before the massacre. "He said, ' Do not be afraid, I will come home soon." He did not come home. She later recognized him in one of the ISIS videos, among the men lined up at the river.

Abbas al-Mohammadawi lost two brothers at Speicher. He told Shafaq News that the grief of losing them was compounded by years of not knowing. "The real pain," he said, "was not just the news of their deaths. It was the years of waiting, before their remains were found and their identities confirmed."

After Iraqi forces retook Tikrit in 2015, forensic teams began excavating mass graves around the presidential palace complex. Dozens of burial sites were identified. DNA testing continued for years. By the tenth anniversary in June 2024, Iraqi authorities had recovered the remains of approximately 1,200 victims, according to statements by lawmaker Moeen al-Kadhimi, who heads the Tikrit Massacre Commemoration Committee. Al-Kadhimi called at that ceremony for the massacre site to be designated a federal sanctuary and for memorials to be constructed in every province.

The legal record of the massacre has accumulated slowly but with growing weight.

By August 2016, Iraqi courts had sentenced more than 50 individuals to death for their participation in the killings. Thirty-six of them were executed by hanging at Nasiriyah prison, with the Justice Minister present to oversee the proceedings. Iraqi judicial authorities have continued prosecuting additional suspects in the years since, though some cases remain open.

Read more: Amnesty Law does not cover inmates convicted in Speicher massacre

The most significant international legal assessment came in June 2024, when the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da'esh/ISIL (UNITAD) handed a milestone report to Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council. The report, titled "Camp Speicher: A Pattern of Mass Killing and Genocidal Intent," concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe the killings were carried out with genocidal intent, in the context of a broader ISIS policy of genocide against Shia Muslims in Iraq. UNITAD also found grounds to believe the acts constituted crimes against humanity and war crimes under international law.

The findings were submitted alongside evidence packages collected by UNITAD's investigative unit.

For some families, the legal proceedings have not provided a measure of acknowledgment. Relatives of victims who have not yet had their remains recovered told Shafaq News that justice remains incomplete as long as the fate of missing individuals is unknown.

In Tikrit itself, where the killings took place, Hassan Ali, a resident, told Shafaq News that the execution sites have become symbols of grief that the city has not been able to set aside. "What happened was too large to be forgotten. Local residents joined the search operations after liberation and assisted forensic teams working to identify victims.”

Lawyer Adnan al-Jubouri, speaking in the context of the eleventh anniversary, told Shafaq News that Speicher must remain in the collective memory not as a sectarian wound but as a rejection of both sectarianism and political violence. "The Speicher crime is not just a local tragedy — it is a national one," he said.

Twelve years on, more than 800 victims remain unaccounted for, according to the International Organization for Migration, which has worked alongside Iraqi forensic authorities and the victims' families. The search continues.