Via WaPo: Kurdish Officials Sanction Abductions in Kirkuk
Police and security units, forces led by Kurdish political parties and backed by the U.S. military, have abducted hundreds of minority Arabs and Turkmens in this intensely volatile city and spirited them to prisons in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, government documents and families of the victims.Seized off the streets of Kirkuk or in joint U.S.-Iraqi raids, the men have been transferred secretly and in violation of Iraqi law to prisons in the Kurdish cities of Irbil and Sulaymaniyah, sometimes with the knowledge of U.S. forces. The detainees, including merchants, members of tribal families and soldiers, have often remained missing for months; some have been tortured, according to released prisoners and the Kirkuk police chief.
A confidential State Department cable, obtained by The Washington Post and addressed to the White House, Pentagon and U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the “extra-judicial detentions” were part of a “concerted and widespread initiative” by Kurdish political parties “to exercise authority in Kirkuk in an increasingly provocative manner.”
Provocative, indeed. This is not how one works to establish democracy.
I know that there are terrorists and insurgents in Iraq, and know that fighting them is difficult, but we cannot go around being complicit in the extra-legal abudcutions of suspicious persons “just in case” they are the bad guys.
And gosh, do you think?
The abductions have “greatly exacerbated tensions along purely ethnic lines” and endangered U.S. credibility, the nine-page cable, dated June 5, stated. “Turkmen in Kirkuk tell us they perceive a U.S. tolerance for the practice while Arabs in Kirkuk believe Coalition Forces are directly responsible.”
If the Turkmen and Arabs in the region don’t trust the US forces, then the ability to maintain security and stave off sectarian conflict is going to be mightily hampered.
At a minimum the story paints a picture of local law enforcement officials and US military commanders unable to control the actions of local police and political parties. Indeed, whenever political parties are described as having “intelligence arms,” that ain’t good.
Of course, while the story starts out making it sound as if US forces were at least indirectly involved, the main text of the piece, at least in terms of those interviewed, paints a somewhat different picture:
Last month, U.S. officers took a list of missing Arabs and Turkmens to the Kurdish parties and asked for their release. The Kurdistan Democratic Party freed 42 prisoners. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan has yet to free any. With hundreds of prisoners still unaccounted for, many families said their search had become increasingly desperate. In one Kirkuk neighborhood, Arab residents approached a journalist’s car to ask for help locating their missing relatives.
Of course, the waters are muddy:
Abdel-Rahman [Kirkuk's chief of police] said he was concerned that the Americans were being duped by the Kurds, who he said have cloaked what is effectively a power grab as a crackdown on the insurgents. Their strategy, he said, is to bolster their alliance with the Americans.“Unfortunately, they have succeeded,” he said.
This is not a good situation, especially given that the northern portions of Iraq are supposed to be the areas where democratizaton is supposed to have a higher chance of success.
June 15th, 2024 at 7:42 am
[...] 7:56 am Filed under: Middle East, Iraq
The Sultan of Brunei (Poliblogger) has a post this morning linking to this Washington Post article concerning Kurdish abductions in the northern Iraqi [...]