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No terrorism law in Kurdistan Region-Iraq
26.12.2006
Hundreds Disappear
Into the Black Hole of the Kurdish Prison System in
Iraq |
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December 26, 2006
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan Region (Iraq), -- The
inmates began their strike with an angry call.
“Allahu akbar!” they shouted, 120 voices joining in
a cadence punctuated by whoops.
They thrust their arms between the metal bars and
ripped away the curtains and plastic sheets covering
the windows facing the prison courtyard. Their
squinting faces were exposed to light.
Their Kurdish guards gathered, ready to control a
prison break. There was no break. The inmates were
able only to shove their bunks against the doors and
barricade themselves in their cells. They settled
into a day of issuing complaints.
They were not allowed the Koran, they said. Their
rations were meager and often moldy. Sometimes the
guards beat them, they said, and several inmates had
disappeared. The entire inmate population had either
been denied trials or had been held beyond the terms
of their sentences, they said — lost in legal limbo
in the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq.
The prison strike here, on Dec. 4, ended when the
local authorities agreed to transfer three unpopular
guards and to allow copies of the Koran in the
cells. But it exposed an intractable problem that
has accompanied Kurdish cooperation with the United
States in Iraq.
The Kurdish prison population has swelled to include
at least several hundred suspected insurgents, and
yet there is no legal system to sort out their
fates. So the inmates wait, a population for which
there is no plan.
The Kurdish government that holds the prisoners says
they are dangerous, and points out that the
population includes men who have attended terrorist
or guerrilla training in Iraq or Afghanistan. But it
also concedes to being stymied, with a small budget,
limited prison space and little legal precedent to
look back on.
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Mullah Krekar, the founder of radical and Terrorist
Islamist group Ansar al-Islam. Krekar, whose real
name is Fateh Najmeddin Faraj
Photo: AP
Photo: NY Times |
“We have not had trials for them,” said Brig.
Sarkawt Hassan Jalal, the director of security in
the Sulaimaniyah region. “We have no
counterterrorism law, and any law we would pass
would not affect them because it would not be
retroactive.”
The problems reach back to before the American-led
invasion, when northern Iraq was a Kurdish enclave
out of Saddam Hussein’s control.
At the time, the Kurds in northeastern Iraq were
fighting Ansar al-Islam, a small insurgent and
terrorist group that seized control of a slice of
territory along the Iranian border in 2002.
The Kurds captured several prisoners and suspected
terrorists, but had no clear idea what to do with
them, other than to hold them in cells.
Several weeks after the war started in 2003, an
attack by American special forces and Kurdish
fighters pushed Ansar al-Islam off Kurdish turf. But
the border with Iran had not been sealed before the
attack. Most of the insurgents escaped.
In the years since, Ansar al-Islam’s ideological war
has spread throughout Sunni Arab regions of Iraq,
becoming a far more dangerous insurgency. Kurdish
jails have swelled with people accused of
participating in it.
Many of the detained men exude menace. But others
claim they are innocent. And Kurdish officials say
they have a limited capacity to disentangle the
groups.
Brig. Hassan Nouri, the Kurdish security official
responsible for the prisons in northeastern Iraq,
said the detainees are in a status resembling that
of the American-held detainees in Guantánamo Bay.
“We cannot let them go, and we will hold them as
long as we have to,” he said.
The population’s size is unclear. In this prison run
by the local security service on a Kurdish military
base at Sulaimaniyah’s outskirts, 120 accused
insurgents are held.
Hania Mufti, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who
has investigated the prison conditions and the
absence of due process for the inmates, said that
about 2,500 people are being held by the security
services of the two ruling Kurdish parties. She
estimated that two-thirds of them are accused of
participating in the insurgency.
Ms. Mufti said she has encouraged Kurdish political
leaders to set up an independent commission to
review each of the accused insurgents’ cases.
“We’re not saying, ‘throw open the doors of the
prisons,’ ” she said, but rather are suggesting that
the Kurds create a means to examine the merits of
each man’s detention, and to determine why and
whether each of them should be held and for how
long, and under what conditions.
Kurdish officials have not yet developed such a
policy; the detainees are essentially warehoused.
The strike in early December exposed the strains the
unresolved status has placed on the Kurdish
government and the inmates alike.
The four visible cells here, spaces of about 7 yards
by 8 yards, each were packed with 30 men. The men
shared a toilet on the floor outside the cells, in a
hall. The group seethes. One inmate shouted at two
journalists through the bars. “Stop your hatred
toward Islam!” he said. “Otherwise we will kill
you!”
Speaking from a law enforcement perspective, Mr.
Jalal said the close quarters and evident anger had
made many of the inmates more radical, and that the
prison serves as an insurgents’ nest.
The detainees themselves blame the Kurds. As the
disruption began, one inmate who had been outside
the cells to meet a family member was swiftly pushed
into a guard bunkroom and left with two journalists.
The man, Yunis Ahmad, 34, of Kirkuk, said he had
been held two years without being charged. He was
briefly detained, he said, by the American military,
and then turned over to the Kurds.
Behind him on the wall of the guard’s room hung two
pieces of heavy electric cable, a common tool for
beatings.
Mr. Ahmad said that the Americans had treated him
decently, interviewing him politely and giving him
food and juice. But since being in Kurdish custody,
he said, he had been tortured, including having a
bed placed on him and then being nearly crushed with
weights and having his arms almost pulled from his
shoulder sockets by the guards.
“I promise you, if they pulled your arms like that,
you will confess to being in Al Qaeda,” he said.
He was an Islamic cleric, he said, and his brother
was an insurgent. He said he did not know the
reasons for his incarceration. “The people who are
here don’t know why they are here,” he said.
Later, other prisoners spoke through their windows
and cell doors.
One man, Ahmed Jamal, 24, said he was an Australian
citizen and had been held without being charged
since he was arrested by Kurdish authorities in Aug.
2004.
“They don’t give us enough to drink,” he said. “They
don’t give us medicine.” He pointed to a middle-aged
man who was moaning on a bunk, semi-conscious, and
said that the authorities would not provide the man
with medical treatment.
Mr. Jamal’s own journey into custody appeared
strange. Kurdish authorities said that Mr. Jamal
came to Iraq to join the insurgency, a topic Mr.
Jamal was evasive about.
He said he had flown to Baghdad in 2004 because he
planned to drive into Jordan illegally, and was then
arrested in Mosul by the Kurds. He could not fly
directly to Jordan, he said, because the Jordanian
government considered him a terrorist, which he said
he was not.
Asked how he ended up in Mosul, which is not on the
way to Jordan from Baghdad, he shrugged, and said,
“My plans changed.”
Andrew S. Todd, a senior spokesman for the
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, confirmed
by telephone that Mr. Jamal is an Australian
citizen. He added that he had been visited by
consular officials, who have been discussing his
circumstances with the Kurdish authorities. He
declined to discuss the case further, citing
diplomatic protocol.
Another inmate, Haqi Ismail Ibrahim, an Iraqi Arab
who had trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan
before the terrorist attacks in the United States in
2001, said he had been held without charges or a
legal hearing for more than five years. (Mr. Ibrahim
has been held since at least 2002, when he was
previously interviewed by The New York Times.)
He said 10 to 15 other inmates have vanished, and
that he feared they had been executed. “We asked the
Red Cross to search for these people,” he said
through the bars. “But they do not know where they
are.”
One of the prisoners who Mr. Ibrahim said was now
missing, Qais Ibrahim Khadir, was captured in 2002
after an assassination attempt against Barham Salih.
Mr. Salih was then the prime minister of the eastern
Kurdish enclave and is now a deputy prime minister
of Iraq. Five Kurdish guards were killed in the
attempt.
Mr. Salih later said he wanted to spare Mr. Khadir’s
life, as part of an example of official restraint
and respect for life in a country that had endured
unchecked state violence under Mr. Hussein. Other
Kurdish officials, in interviews in 2002 and 2003,
dismissed such notions as fancy, and said Mr. Khadir
would be executed.
Mr. Khadir’s fate has never been disclosed. Mr.
Jalal and Mr. Nouri would say publicly only that he
is no longer in his custody.
The International Committee for the Red Cross has an
office in Sulaimaniyah. Its head of mission declined
to comment about the prisoners’ allegations, other
than to say that the organization visits the prison
and the inmates and is in contact with the Kurdish
authorities.
The United States military said it was also not
directly involved in these jails. “We just don’t
have that role in the Kurdish legal system,” said
Maj. Derrick W. Cheng, a spokesman for the Third
Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. “We have security
overwatch in the area, but we don’t have an
immediate or direct role in the prisons.”
nytimes com
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