TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - At least 1,420 people have died in Central and Northern Iraq in August from the ongoing sectarian violence, said the United Nations (UN) on Monday.
More than 1,370 military personnel have been injured and 600,000 civilians displaced as Daulah Islam or Islamic State (IS) rebel group—which controls large swathes of Northern Iraq—began to attack the Kurdish population and persecuted religious minorities in the area, according to Reuters reports.
“Thousands of peoples are being hunted down to be killed by IS. The real cost of this humanitarian crisis is incredibly huge,” said UN representative Nikolay Mladenov in Iraq.
The UN said that there was a real possibility that the number of actual casualties eclipsed the reported cases. However, the organization has not been able to independently verify hundreds of reports coming from within IS-controlled regions.
The conflict has claimed 1,737 lives in July, while June casualties were recorded at 2,400 people.
The latest incident of violence occurred on Monday when two car bombs went off in a Shiite populated area in Baghdad, killing 18 people while injuring 50 others.
According to a senior UN official in Geneva, both the Iraqi military and IS rebels are known to have engaged in war crimes in the past three months.
ANTARA