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Text Messages Proliferate as Threats in
Iraqi Kurdistan
27.4.2011
By Tim Arango - The NY Times |
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Iraqi
Kurdish security apparatus threat activists and
protesters with text messages. Text message sent to
Dr. Pishtewan Abdullah "If you come back to Erbil
you will not see the blue sky again."
April
27, 2011
BAGHDAD/ERBIL, —
When he returned to his native Kurdistan in February
to join the flickering of a protest movement, Dr.
Pishtewan Abdullah, a hematologist who lives in
Australia but also carries an Iraqi passport,
suspected that the demonstrators might face harsh
treatment from the Kurdish authorities. At several
protests during the last two months security forces
have opened fire, and an estimated 10 people have
been killed and dozens wounded, according to human
rights activists.
What Dr. Abdullah did not anticipate, though, was a
barrage of one of this country’s more peculiar
menaces: death threats by text message.
“I’ve been getting heaps of them,” he said recently
in an interview in Baghdad, where he had fled to
from the north after several kidnapping attempts.
“Every single day.”
He estimated that he had received nearly 300 such
threats since late February. They usually read, he
said, “We are going to kill that, or we are going to
burn that. Very rude language.”
One of the few that can be printed read, “If you
come back to Erbil you will not see the blue sky
again.”
Digital media have amplified the young voices of
democracy ringing around the Middle East, but the
flip side here is that the authorities and
insurgents alike are also adept at using technology,
particularly cellphones, largely unavailable here
before the 2003 American invasion, as part of their
arsenals of intimidation.
Actual violence may have declined substantially
since the worst days of the war, but a culture of
fear and intimidation still prevails.
|
For the past two months thousands of protesters are
gathering daily in Sulaimaniyah and other parts of
Kurdistan against corruption and the lording over
Kurdistan region by two main parties KDP and PUK.
Kurdish protestors demand the ouster of the
Kurdistan government KRG and president Massoud
Barzani, calling for improving services and living
conditions and fighting corruption. |
It has been on display
during the intermittent protests that have rippled
across Iraq in the wake of the regional uprisings.
Death threats delivered by text message have become
such a common experience across the spectrum of
Iraq’s public-minded professions —lawyers,
journalists, activists and government officials — that
the two mobile phone companies, Zain and Asia Cell,
have arrangements with the police and courts to
investigate them.
“There is a great deal of cooperation between the
security forces, the Iraqi judiciary and Zain with
exchanging information,” said Mazin al-Asadi, a
representative for Zain.
Yet most of the threats are untraceable, having been
sent from throw-away phones and SIM cards bought on
the black market.
“It’s impossible to count them,” said Abed al-Sattar
al-Bairaqdar, the spokesman for Iraq’s Supreme
Court.
Interviews with Iraqis suggest that the phenomenon
cuts across all strata of society, but journalists
in particular have been subject to such tactics,
especially during the protests. And recent reports
from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
about abuses by security forces have mentioned
text-messaged death threats.
“It’s something we’ve noticed for a while now, and
it’s pervasive throughout Iraq,” said Samer Muscati,
a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch who
has recently visited Iraq. “But it seems it’s
getting worse. Just about every protest organizer
we’ve spoken with, and journalists, too, are getting
these threats by phone and text.”
Mr. Muscati said it was common for journalists in
Iraq to appear on television speaking about a
controversial subject like corruption, and then,
after the show, “they are barraged by these
messages.”
Amnesty International, for example, reported that
numerous journalists in the Kurdish region had
received such messages, which the organization
believes came from security officials who have taken
part in attacks on news organizations. One, a
correspondent for the satellite television channel
KNN,www.ekurd.netaffiliated
with the Kurdish opposition party Gorran, received a
text message after reporting on work that Amnesty
International has been doing in Iraq. The message
told the reporter to stop his work. “Otherwise, the
outcome will be disastrous,” the message read.
In the case of Dr. Abdullah, Kair al-Dain, the
deputy police chief in Erbil, said he was aware of
the doctor’s claims, but he would not comment more
beyond saying that he had “no idea” whether Dr.
Abdullah had indeed received intimidating messages.
The messages come in three basic varieties. Some are
meant to intimidate, as in the case of Dr. Abdullah,
who suspects that they came from the security
officials who confiscated his cellphone when he was
briefly imprisoned.
“They are very advanced in technology,” Dr. Abdullah
said. “When you try to call the numbers, they are
just disconnected.”
Yassir al-Jubori, 28, a journalist in Diyala,
received a text message in February that read, “Your
tongue has become too big, and it is time to cut it
off.” He was told to quit his job.
“I remained for a few days in my house to be away
from the insurgents,” Mr. Jubori said. “Day by day I
got used to it and resumed my job, because I believe
in fate.”
Other messages are mechanisms of blackmail and part
of the kidnapping-for-ransom business that thrives
here. Several of those interviewed said they
received messages demanding payments to stay alive.
One businessman in Kirkuk, who said he was kidnapped
two years ago by the Sunni insurgent group Ansar al-Sunna
because he had worked with the American military,
recently received a text threat by the same group
demanding $50,000.
“I didn’t pay them because the security situation
has gotten better,” said the businessman, Faisal
Hassan Khalaf. But he said he did not disregard the
threat entirely. “I had to move away and change my
vehicles because they can kill me whenever they want
to. But at the same time, I can’t keep paying
ransoms.”
At other times, the messages are tools of sectarian
aggression.
Muhammed Abdul Naser, a 25-year-old student in
Adhamiya, a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad, once
received a text that read: “We are the killers from
the Mahdi Army. We know that you live close to the
fish market. We will get you. We will get you.”
In one of the few instances in which the
interviewees said the message was successfully
traced, Mr. Naser said the cellphone company was
able to locate the sender, who he said was indeed a
member of the Mahdi Army, the now-disbanded Shiite
militia loyal to the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
“I knew some people that were with the Mahdi Army,”
Mr. Naser said, “and they went to him and asked him
to leave me alone.”
In recent days, Dr. Abdullah said the Kurdish
authorities demanded three things of him: that he
stay off Facebook, refrain from news media
interviews and leave Erbil.
He agreed only to the final demand — to protect his
family members who live in Erbil — and spoke
recently at a cafe in Baghdad on the evening before
he left the country. He had just gotten a new
cellphone, and was enjoying a respite from the
steady flow of menacing words.
Dr. Abdullah said he was leaving the country for
only a few weeks. “I’m not going to give up,” he
said.
Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from
Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from
Baghdad, Kirkuk and Diyala, Iraq.
Dr Pishtewan ‘Abdullah, an Iraqi Kurdish medical
doctor with an Australian passport and resident of
Australia, was visiting Kurdistan in February when
he was arrested and tortured in Erbil. On 25
February, he was wearing a shirt over a T-shirt with
“no to corruption, yes to social justice” written on
the front and “the demands of people should not be
answered by bullets” on the back. In Erbil’s main
square he took off his shirt to expose the T-shirt.
Two young men approached him and asked him to put
his shirt back on. He refused. Around 15 people then
attacked him from behind, punching and kicking him
while he was on the ground. He told Amnesty
International:
“They put the shirt on my face and tied my hands
behind my back. There were two police cars and they
did not intervene. The [attackers] put me in car and
drove away. After 10 minutes drive we stopped
outside the Asayish Gishti building. There were many
Asayish officers and they started kicking me and
beating me. I was taken to a small room. Every five
minutes two or three Asayish officers came to the
room and beat me. I was kicked and punched for about
four hours. There was blood coming from my nose,
ears, arms, back, thighs, my right eye. Every five
minutes they would have a break and then two
different officers would replace them… They were
swearing at me, swearing at my wife and kids and
Goran…” Dr Pishtewan spent three days in the Asayish
Gishti building before being transferred to a police
station, where he was held for 24 hours before being
released. He told Amnesty International that he did
not lodge a complaint: “I didn’t complain. Complain
to whom? The Asayish is everything. The KDP is
everything.” Amnesty.org
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