Belgian IS member sentenced to death by Iraqi court

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Central Criminal Court of Iraq sentenced a Belgian citizen of Moroccan origin to death by hanging after being convicted of being a fighter for the Islamic State (IS).

“Tariq Jadun nicknamed Abu Hamza al-Beljiki belonged to the IS terrorist organization and participated in many operations,” the spokesperson for the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) Abdul-Sattar al-Bayraqdar said in a statement released on the council’s website.

He added that Abu-Hamza was responsible for training a team of young fighters known as the “Caliphate’s Cubs” and was captured last June in the fight against IS in Nineveh province.

According to an SJC report published in November, Abu-Hamza was also an organizer of an unknown number of cells in Europe.

He also was featured in propaganda videos released by IS, in which he threatens attacks on European soil.

Bayraqdar stated that he is “one of the most wanted foreign terrorists who fought in Iraq and Syria.”

Iraq’s military campaign against IS ended in December, when Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi officially declared victory over the organization and claimed to have taken ‘complete control’ of the Iraqi-Syrian border. Since then, IS fighters have been waging a small-scale insurgency in Iraq, often resorting to tactics used when they first emerged in Iraq, such as car bombings, ambushes, and kidnappings.

Last year, Iraqi forces arrested tens of thousands of those accused of being IS members and affiliates, most of whom await sentencing.

The cases, being heard in federal courts in Baghdad and Nineveh provinces, also resulted in several hundred lesser sentences, including life imprisonment.

The rise of executions in the country has led the UN mission in Iraq, the EU, and international human rights groups to criticize Iraq for a lack of transparency in its courts.

"These executions follow rushed trials of ISIS suspects which are riddled with due process violations, including convictions based solely on confessions which are sometimes extracted by torture," said Human Rights Watch in April.

The death penalty in Iraq was suspended on June 10, 2003, but was reinstated the following year. Critics say that the country's flawed and confession-based criminal justice system in which torture is routinely used to extract confessions is incompatible with such an irreversible sentence as capital punishment.

Editing by John J. Catherine