One of the most notorious incidents during this conflict was the October Tripoli massacre, wherein an estimated 4,000 inhabitants of the Mechiya oasis were killed as retribution for the execution and mutilation of Italian captives taken in an ambush at nearby Sciara Sciat.

[1] In another incident during the war reported by a British officer serving with the Turkish forces, Italian soldiers burned several hundred civilians in a mosque, wherein women and children had taken refuge.

[6] Italian authorities claimed that these actions were in response to the Ethiopians' use of Dum-Dum bullets, which had been banned by declaration IV, 3 of the Hague Convention, and mutilation of captured soldiers.

[9] During the 1937–1941 Italian occupation, atrocities also occurred; in the February 1937 Yekatit 12 massacres as many as 30,000 Ethiopians may have been killed and many more imprisoned as a reprisal for the attempted assassination of Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani.

75,000 Italian soldiers of the Corpo Truppe Volontarie fought on the side of the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, as did 7,000 men of the Aviazione Legionaria.

[13][11] Fillipo Focardi, a historian at Rome's German Historical Institute, has discovered archived documents showing how Italian civil servants were told to avoid extraditions.

A typical instruction was issued by the Italian prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi, reading: "Try to gain time, avoid answering requests.

To suppress the mounting resistance led by the Slovenian and Croatian Partisans, the Italians adopted tactics of "summary executions, hostage-taking, reprisals, internments and the burning of houses and villages.

[16] Roatta, like his fellow commanders, was wary that Wehrmacht generals would not honor Hitler’s repeated verbal promises to respect Italy’s long-standing imperial claims in Yugoslavia.

In exchange for their cooperation, the Chetniks expected Italy to turn a blind eye while they avenged themselves against Muslims and conducted retaliatory raids on Croatian communities.

To implement this Roatta suggested the closure of the Province of Fiume and Croatia, the evacuation of people in the east of the former frontiers to a distance of 3–4 km inland, the organization of border patrols to kill anyone attempting to cross, the mass internment of "twenty to thirty thousand persons" to Italian concentration camps, burning down houses, and the confiscation of property from villagers suspected of having contact with Partisans for families of Italian soldiers.

[28] Italian forces committed further massacres on 14 December 1941, in the villages of Babina Vlaka, Jabuka and Mihailovici, destroying homes and killing 120 Montenegrin civilians.

[29] In early July 1942, Italian troops operating opposite Fiume were reported to have shot and killed 800 Croat and Slovene civilians and burned down 20 houses near Split on the Dalmatian coast.

[31] Later that month, the Italian Air Force was reported to have practically destroyed four Yugoslav villages near Prozor, killing hundreds of civilians in revenge for a local guerrilla attack that resulted in the death of two high-ranking officers.

[34] On 16 November 1942, after a Partisan attack on a military truck convoy, Italian forces launched a combined and indiscriminate land, air and naval bombardment targeting the small Croatian town of Primošten in reprisal.

[48] According to statistics collected through 1946 by the Commission for War Damages on the Territory of the People's Republic of Croatia, Italian authorities with their collaborators killed 30,795 civilians in Dalmatia, Istria, Gorski Kotar and the Croatian Littoral, compared to 9,657 partisans.

On their own, or with their Nazi allies, the occupying Italian army undertook many armed actions, including brutal offensives intended to wipe out Partisan resistance.

Italian general Mario Robotti issued commands for all persons caught with arms or false identification papers to be shot on the spot, while most other men of military age were to be sent to concentration camps.

[51] None of the Italians responsible for the many war crimes against Yugoslavs - including Generals Roatta and Robotti, Fascist Commissar Emilio Grazioli, etc - were ever brought to trial.

In 1942 Italian fascist troops completely destroyed the remains of medieval Cathedral of Saint Bartholomew in Knin, in order to build themselves their barracks and concrete bunkers.

[57] The Italians also presided over the Greek famine while occupying the majority of the country, and along with the Germans were responsible for it by initiating a policy of wide-scale plunder of everything of value in Greece, including food for its occupation forces.

The repression of memory led to historical revisionism[60] in Italy and in 2003, the Italian media published Silvio Berlusconi's statement that Benito Mussolini only "used to send people on vacation".

[66] According to the Statistics of the Albanian National Institute of Resistance, the Italian occupiers were responsible for 28,000 dead, 12,600 wounded, 43,000 interned in concentration camps, 61,000 homes burned, 850 villages destroyed.

[71] In at least one recorded case, Italian forces taking part in the invasion of the Soviet Union, handed over a captured group of Jews to be killed by a German Einsatzkommando unit.

This changed in September 1943, when German forces occupied the country, installed the puppet state of the Italian Social Republic (RSI) and immediately began persecuting and deporting the Jews found there.

5 on November 30, 1943, issued by Guido Buffarini Guidi, minister of the interior of the RSI, ordered the Italian police to arrest Jews and confiscate their property.

As noted in the relevant section, very few cases have been brought to court due to diplomatic activities of, notably, the government of the United Kingdom and subsequent general abolition.

[85]A number of names of Italians can be found in the CROWCASS list established by the Anglo-American Allies of the individuals wanted by Yugoslavia and Greece for war crimes.