Forced to chew a sandal and facing a death sentence

In Arab culture, even showing the soles of your shoes is considered a great insult.

The man - named on social media as Adnan Abdul Ridha - was reportedly arrested for his role in the bloody Speicher Camp massacre where an estimated 770 unarmed Iraqi air force cadets were captured, gunned down and buried by Islamic State thugs.

An Iraqi court used satellite images of the site where they were killed, as well as ISIS's own propaganda video of the killings, to sentence 24 ISIS members to death for their role in the massacre.

Ridha is accused of gunning down 60 of them himself and could also be sentenced to death although the Iraqi Security Forces have not confirmed this.  

The man was forced to give an interview to several Iraqi media outlets. One of them, Al-Mirbad, claims the man confessed to killing 60 students at Speicher Air Base and being a member of ISIS. 

He supposedly said that he and another terrorist called Abu Ayman took 60 of the captured students, put them on the ground and then shot them in the head. He was arrested in the southern-Iraqi city of Basra.

During the interview, Al-Mirbad claims he confessed to working for terror group Al-Qaeda in 1996 and that his newest employers ISIS are funded by money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. 

Days after conquering Tikrit in June 2014, ISIS claimed it executed 1,700 Shi'ite 'members of the army' who were trying to escape the coming onslaught.

The terror group began to release gruesome videos and images which showed the men shackled together and shot in the head - before their bloodied corpses were thrown into shallow trenches. 

The latest one was released earlier this month and showed handcuffed cadets being led single-file to a dusty outpost near the camp, which used to be a U.S. army base, before they were made to lie down and peppered with bullets. 

An unidentified ISIS leader in military uniform is seen in the video, saying: 'This is a message I address to the whole world and especially to the Rafidha dogs [those who reject Islam], I tell them we are coming.

One of its most harrowing scenes features a young boy shooting two men in the head on the banks of the Tigris river - after they begged for mercy.

It was originally thought that 190 troops were slaughtered when the terror group overran and conquered Saddam Hussein's hometown. But crucial satellite imagery uncovered three new execution sites and tripled the death toll.

These photographs, footage of the gruesome massacre and harrowing eyewitness accounts have now helped convict 24 of the ISIS fanatics - all of whom were Iraqi nationals - of the atrocity.

Every one of them pleaded not guilty to the charges of murder and being part of a terrorist group. They claimed the Iraqi forces tortured them into confessing.

At one point during the trial, relatives of the men they slaughtered stormed the courtroom - where the defendants were locked in cages - and threw shoes and bottles at them.  

The sentences were not carried out immediately because they need to be approved by a higher court and the Iraqi government is reportedly seeking as many as 604 other suspects in connection to the incident. 

Around 600 bodies have been exhumed from the site of the mass execution since government and allied fighters retook Tikrit in April but many of the victims were dumped into the Tigris river.

Forensic teams began the gruesome task of uncovering the bodies of the young army recruits on the banks of the Tigris River in April.

For almost 10 months, their devastated families had been left wondering what became of the bodies of their sons and brothers. The only clues they had were videos posted by the jihadis on social media sites, showing them being machine-gunned down in their hundreds.

Combined with a call by the country's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for Iraqis to take up arms against ISIS, the Speicher massacre played a key role in the mass recruitment of Shi'ite volunteers to fight the jihadists. 

(dailymail.co.uk)