The United Nations agreed on Monday to send investigators to Iraq to examine crimes being committed by Islamic State militants on "an unimaginable scale", with a view to holding perpetrators to account, according to The Associated Press.
An international rights group accused the extremist Islamic State group on Tuesday of systematic "ethnic cleansing" in northern Iraq targeting indigenous religious minorities, as well as conducting mass killings of men and abducting women, the AP reported.
In a new report, Amnesty International said militants abducted "hundreds, if not thousands" of women and girls of the Yazidi faith, according to the AP.
The extremists also killed "hundreds" of Yazidi men and boys, Amnesty said, the AP reported. In at least one incident, the report said militants rounded up on trucks, took them to the edge of their village and shot them.
"We are facing a terrorist monster," Iraq's human rights minister, Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani, told the U.N. Human Rights Council which adopted a resolution tabled by Iraq and France at an emergency sitting of the 47-member state forum in Geneva, according to the AP.
The Council aims to send 11 investigators, with a total budget of $1.18 million, to report back by March 2015, the AP reported.
Islamic State, which declared a "caliphate" in June in parts of Iraq and Syria under its control, has been cited as a major security threat by Western governments since posting a video in August of the beheading of U.S journalist James Foley, according to the AP.
The Sunni militants have driven more than 1.2 million people from their homes this year, the United Nations says, the AP reported. At least 1,420 people were killed in sectarian violence in Iraq in August alone, U.N. figures showed on Monday.
U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Flavia Pansieri said there was "strong evidence" Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and allied groups had carried out targeted killings, forced conversions, sexual abuse and torture in Iraq, according to the AP. "The reports we have received reveal acts of inhumanity on an unimaginable scale," she said.