An Iraqi court sentenced 24 militants to death Wednesday over the killing of hundreds of mainly Shiite soldiers during an ISIS offensive in northern Iraq last year, Reuters reported. The court issued the death sentences within hours of the start of the trial, based on what a spokesman described as strong evidence and confessions from the convicted men. As many as 1,700 soldiers were killed after they fled Camp Speicher, a former U.S. military base just north of Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit, and were rounded up by the Sunni Islamist fighters. Video footage of the soldiers being gunned down in their hundreds, posted online by jihadists, could mark the deadliest single act of violence during a decade of intermittent sectarian war in Iraq.
