Eight hundred Iraqi soldiers were divided into lines of ten men, given rushed interrogations by Islamic State fighters and shot dead, the survivor said. By dawn, he was one of only 20 left alive.
Mohammed Majul Hamoud, a 24-year-old survivor who spoke in his hometown of Diwaniya, south of Baghdad, said he was spared because he pretended to be a Sunni Muslim Bedouin.
In the worst known massacre during the Islamic State's war, Hamoud was held by the militants for 11 days in June and recounted their systematic killings in chilling detail.