THERE’S an article by George Orwell that I recall reading many years ago entitled: Revenge is Sour. It concerns an incident that Orwell witnessed in a prisoner of war camp in Southern Germany towards the end of 1945.

Orwell, then a war correspondent, was being shown round the camp by an Austrian Jewish man, who had been enlisted by the US Army to help with the interrogation of prisoners. Coming across a group of Nazi SS officers who had been segregated from the other prisoners, the Austrian kicked one injured prisoner and humiliated others by having them strip to the waist, revealing their blood group number tattooed on their under-arms, thus proving they were indeed SS men.

That these officers had committed terrible atrocities was in no doubt, presiding as they had over torture, hangings and gassings while in charge of concentration camps. As Orwell was to later write, it is of course absurd to blame that Austrian man for getting his own back on the Nazis, when perhaps his whole family had been murdered. With typically Orwellian directness he observed that “a wanton kick to such a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime”.

Nevertheless, what struck Orwell that day in the camp was something a little less straightforward, that we could all learn from. Revenge when it becomes possible, he noted, is so often “pathetic and disgusting” . In short, acts of revenge are so often little more than a compounding of our capacity as human beings to inflict yet more hurt, that sometimes leads to even worse happenings.

I was reminded of Orwell’s observations while reading the latest accounts of alleged reprisal atrocities being carried out by the Iraqi Army against suspected members of the Islamic State (IS) group in Mosul. Every day brings more reports of torture, extra-judicial executions and other atrocities being perpetrated not just against IS suspects and sympathisers but randomly against other Sunni Muslims too.

According to human rights groups, the evidence as to who is responsible for this points increasingly towards the predominately Shia soldiers who comprise the Iraqi Army and Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) militias which retook the city.

Ever since 2003 Iraqi forces and mostly Shia non-state and government armed groups have carried out abuses against the civilian population with complete impunity, mainly targeting Sunni Arabs.

Over the last few weeks, though, since the retaking of the city, the banks of the River Tigris that runs through Mosul have been strewn with the corpses of these victims of revenge and sectarian killings.

One video clip obtained by Human Rights Watch (HRW) showed men in Iraqi Army uniforms throwing a detainee off a cliff on to the banks of the river and opening fire on him. As he fell he landed next to another motionless body.

Last week HRW too reported the discovery of an execution site and 17 male corpses, barefoot but in civilian dress, surrounded by pools of blood, in an empty building west of Mosul’s Old City. A shopkeeper who led the observers there told them he had seen the Iraqi Security Forces’ 16th division in the neighbourhood four days earlier, and had heard multiple gunshots coming from the area. He found the bodies the next morning when the security forces left.

The anger of many Iraqi soldiers who appear to be carrying out these killings is to some extent understandable, given that some will have had family who died at the hands of Islamic State (IS) or watched their comrades being blown apart or gunned down by the jihadists in Mosul’s streets.

While in Mosul covering the battle and having seen what IS is responsible for, I can empathise with this anger and struggle myself to feel anything other than disgust for the monsters who make up IS’s cadres. That said, however, two wrongs don’t make a right. Respecting human rights can never be a one-sided thing but must be common to all. Individual human rights extend even to those murderers, terrorists, torturers and rapists of IS who subjected hundreds of thousands of people to the same unimaginable suffering as did the SS men in Orwell’s account.

Right now those members of the Iraqi security forces, who have subsequently resorted to revenge, only serve to diminish the great sacrifices made by many soldiers in taking back the city.

The barbaric acts of these few must not be allowed to taint the selfless acts made by many to protect the civilians of Mosul during the battle and since.

There is another good reason why the perpetrators of these latest atrocities must be condemned and held to account by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and his government. Put quite simply, the future of Iraq is at stake here. Left unchecked this surge of revenge killings could haunt Iraq for generations to come and even lead to its ruin.

Let’s not forget that it was this abuse of mainly Sunni civilians by Shia non-state and government armed groups that drove many in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq into the ranks of IS in the first place.

Any continuation of what is being witnessed right now in Mosul will only make it easy for the next version of IS to gain traction and recruit volunteers.

Winning the military battle against IS is one thing, but if Iraq is to move towards stability,the political battle to stem the factors that encourage young Sunni Arab men to turn to the likes of jihadist extremism must be won too. This will not happen as long as revenge and sectarian killings continue and a reign of impunity against accountability prevails.

To date Mr al-Abadi has insisted that any Iraqi soldiers who violate instructions to hand over prisoners will be tried in a military court, but still the bodies keep turning up in the Tigris and elsewhere.

These are dangerous times for Iraq and without such issues being addressed I, like many who have spent time there, fear for the future.

What a tragedy it would be if just at the moment when IS is being routed, sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shia were once again to push the country into the abyss of civil war.

Right now in Mosul, revenge is not only sour, it is potentially poisonous to a lethal degree for Iraq as a whole.