Iraq has urged the United Nations to investigate Islamic State terrorists' bloody trade in human organs after the Iraqi ambassador said doctors are being executed for not harvesting body parts.
Mohamed Alhakim claimed that dozens of bodies with surgical incisions and missing body parts have been found in shallow mass graves near ISIS stronghold Mosul over the past few weeks.
ISIS' horrifying trade in human organs, which was revealed by INNLIVE last December, is just the latest way for the terrorist organisation to finance its activities, with other major sources of the group's $2 million-a-day income being the sale of oil, ransom payments, and smuggled antiques.
Speaking of ISIS' organ harvesting operations, Mr Alhakim said: 'We have bodies. Come and examine them. It is clear they are missing certain parts.'
He also said a dozen doctors have been 'executed' in Mosul for refusing to participate in organ harvesting.
Mr Alhakim briefed the UN Security Council on the overall situation in Iraq and accused ISIS of 'crimes of genocide' in targeting certain ethnic groups.
The outgoing UN envoy to Iraq, Nikolay Mladenov, also told the council that last month alone, 790 people were killed by terrorism and armed conflict in the country.
He also noted the increasing number of reports and allegations that IS is using organ harvesting as a financing method, but he said only that 'it's very clear that the tactics ISIL is using expand by the day'. He used an acronym for the group.
Mr Mladenov said Iraq's most pressing goal is to win back the vast territory that ISIS has seized over the past year.
The Sunni militants currently controls around a third of both Iraq and neighbouring Syria and imposed its strict interpretation of Sharia law in its self-declared caliphate - subjecting a population of around four million people to a brutal campaign of rape and massacre.
'Especially worrying is the increasing number of reports of revenge attacks committed particularly against members of the Sunni community in areas liberated from ISIL control,' Mr Mladenov said, using an alternative acronym for the group known as ISIS in the West and Daesh in Arab nations.
The shocking news of ISIS trade in human organs was first revealed in a report by al-Monitor news website in December, citing an Iraqi ear, nose and throat doctor named Siruwan al-Mosuli.
He told the site that ISIS commanders hired foreign doctors to run an extensive organ trafficking system from a hospital in Mosul that is already beginning to generate huge profits.
The al-Monitor report also claims the terror organisation has even set up a specialist organ-smuggling division whose sole responsibility is to sell human hearts, livers and kidneys on the lucrative international black market.
'[Al-Mosuli] said that lately he noticed unusual movement within medical facilities in Mosul Arab and foreign surgeons were hired, but prohibited from mixing with local doctors,' the report's author wrote. 'Information then leaked about organ selling.'
The report went on: 'Surgeries take place within a hospital and organs are quickly transported through networks specialized in trafficking human organs. Mosuli said that the organs come from fallen fighters who were quickly transported to the hospital, injured people who were abandoned or individuals who were kidnapped.'
Most of the organs are then smuggled out of Syria and Iraq into neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia or Turkey where criminal gangs sell them on to shady buyers across the globe, the Assyrian International News Agency reported.
While organ harvesting may be the most shocking of IS' revenue streams, the report highlights a string of others that contribute to the group's $2million annual income.
One tactic is smuggling families and individuals into other countries. The report highlights one instance when a family paid ISIS over $8,000 per individual to sneak them into Turkey.
Drug smuggling is another. Al Monitor's report claims that IS traffics Afghan heroin into Europe from the city of Nineveh, which the Russian Federal Drug Control Service (RFDCS) says is generating 'significant revenues.'
Its drug business has become so successful in recent months that the RFDCS claims that IS now supplies half of Europe's entire heroin market.
Yesterday it was revealed that militants fighting for ISIS in Syria are making millions of pounds selling ancient statues and mosaics to wealthy Westerners using a complex system of smugglers and middle men.
Looted from ancient buildings in ISIS strongholds, such as the group's de facto capital city Raqqa, the antiquities are up to 10,000-years-old and can exchange hands for more than $1 million each.
The most expensive items are covertly smuggled overseas - usually on the orders of wealthy Europeans - but there is also a lucrative trade in less historically important objects, which often find their way into tourist shops and markets in neighbouring Lebanon and Turkey.
The trade in antiquities is one of ISIS' primary sources of funding, along with oil and ransom payments, and is estimated to fills the terrorists coffers with tens of millions of pounds every year.
The finer points of ISIS trade in antiquities was uncovered in an investigation by the BBC.
It revealed that ISIS militants charge smugglers 20 per cent on the sale of ancient items found or looted in territory under its control. If the smugglers decide not to buy the items, they are promptly smashed to pieces as examples of idolatry, regardless of their historic significance.
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