Syria News: UN Wonders If ISIS Harvests Kidneys and Other Organs to Fund Islamic State Terrorist Group

The Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations on Tuesday accused the ISIS terror group of using organ harvesting as a way to finance its operations and asked the U.N. Security Council to take action.

CBS News reported ISIS, which refers to itself as the Islamic State, has imposed a brutal rule in the large swaths of territory it controls in Iraq and Syria. The group has staged mass executions, beheaded Western captives and this month killed a Jordanian pilot by burning him alive.

Iraqi Ambassador Mohamed Alhakim claimed that, in a chilling twist, the killings helped the organization further expand. He told reporters that bodies with surgical incisions and missing kidneys or other body parts have been found in shallow mass graves in the past few weeks. The diplomat urged the Security Council to investigate whether ISIS harvests and sells the organs of those it executes.

"We have bodies. Come and examine them," the ambassador said. "It is clear they are missing certain parts."

Doctors who to refuse to participate in organ harvesting face execution, and dozens of them have suffered that fate in ISIS-controlled territory, Alhakim claimed.

The diplomat's allegations follow an unconfirmed report late Tuesday that up to 45 people had been captured, rounded up and burned alive by the group in town of al-Baghdadi in Anbar Province, Fox News noted.

The outgoing U.N. envoy to Iraq, Nikolay Mladenov, told the Security Council that 790 people were killed in January alone by terrorism and armed conflict.

"It's very clear that the tactics (ISIS) is using expand by the day," he said.

Mladenov acknowledged an increasing number of reports and allegations that the group is using organ harvesting as a financing method.

It is critical for Iraq to reestablish its sovereignty over the vast parts of its territory now controlled by ISIS, whose followers subscribe to the Sunni branch of Islam, Mladenov insisted.

"Especially worrying is the increasing number of reports of revenge attacks committed particularly against members of the Sunni community in areas liberated from (ISIS) control," the diplomat noted.