Nearly 19K Iraqi civilians killed in ISIL fighting, UN says

The assessment called the civilian death toll in Iraq “staggering.” It also detailed the various methods ISIL has employed to kill its enemies, including public beheadings, running people over with bulldozers, burning them alive and throwing them off buildings.

Such acts are “systematic and widespread … abuses of international human rights law and humanitarian law,” the report said. “These acts may, in some instances, amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide.”

The report said another 800 to 900 children were abducted from Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, for religious and military training. It said a number child soldiers were killed by ISIL when they tried to flee fighting in the western Anbar province.

Iraqi forces have advanced against ISIL on a number of fronts in recent months and driven them out of the western city of Ramadi. But U.N. envoy Jan Kubis said in a statement that “despite their steady losses to pro-government forces, the scourge of ISIL continues to kill, maim and displace Iraqi civilians in the thousands and to cause untold suffering.”

U.N. human rights chief Zeid Raad al-Hussein said the civilian death toll could be considerably higher.

“Even the obscene casualty figures fail to accurately reflect exactly how terribly civilians are suffering in Iraq,” he said in a statement. “This report lays bare the enduring suffering of civilians in Iraq and starkly illustrates what Iraqi refugees are attempting to escape when they flee to Europe and other regions. This is the horror they face in their homelands.”

ISIL swept across northern and western Iraq in the summer of 2014 and still controls much of Iraq and neighboring Syria, albeit much of it in sparsely populated desert areas. ISIL has set up a self-styled caliphate and a de facto capital in Raqqa, in Syria, and governs the territories it controls with a harsh and extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press