Washington Post. THIS IS AN ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATING STORY.
How is this for a “gulag?” The Kurds (with US help and knowledge) have been rounding up anyone they don’t like, illegally and without “Iraqi government” knowledge, and shipping them off to secret and illegal prisons in the North of Iraq. The only crime, often, is being Arab or Turkman in origin. This is the very definition of a gulag. As a matter of fact it’s closer to “ethnic cleansing.” This, according to the secret State Department cable obtained by the Post, is without the “Iraqi Government’s” knowledge and of course totally illegal.
Early on, the campaign targeted former Baath Party officials and suspected insurgents, but it has since broadened. Among those seized and secretly transferred north were car merchants, businessmen, members of tribal families, Arab soldiers and, in one case, an 87-year-old farmer with diabetes.
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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.
“When we go to the Americans, they send us to the police,” said Osama Danouk, 24. “When we go to the police, they send us to the Americans, and so on, and so on.”
His father, Danouk Latif Jassem, was seized March 2 when U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police stormed into his stationery shop. Jassem, blindfolded and handcuffed, was held for 12 days in the jail of the Emergency Services Unit. From there, his son said, he was taken to the prison in Irbil. Jassem’s wife and 12 children have yet to communicate with him, save for two letters he sent through the Red Cross.
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Jabbouri said he was seized during a raid on his house the night of April 30 in the Kirkuk neighborhood of Rashid. A former fighter pilot who now works as a colonel in the Iraqi Interior Ministry, he pleaded with the Iraqi police and their U.S. colleagues that he had been wrongly targeted by them. The Americans, dressed in civilian clothes and flak jackets, ignored him, he said.
Jabbouri said he was seized with three other men, two of them air force veterans. The Americans photographed the detainees at the entrance to the U.S. air base in Kirkuk, then turned them over to the police, he said. Police placed bags over their heads and moved them between what seemed to be houses in Kirkuk and Irbil for several hours before taking them to the main prison the next day, he said.
There, Jabbouri said, he lived with about 50 men crammed into a 19-by-9-foot cell. The prisoners slept on a bare concrete floor. Conditions were so cramped, he said, the men divided the day into shifts. For three hours, half sat cross-legged while the others lay on their sides in rows and slept.
Jabbouri said he was questioned three times. He said he was treated respectfully. But others in his cell were beaten, he said. Some were forced to wear a 130-pound metal jacket and were beaten when they collapsed, he recalled. Jabbouri said that upon his release he met a fellow prisoner who displayed scars from wounds sustained when he was whipped with a wire cable, sometimes heated over a fire.
“Once you go inside, you never think you’re going to come out,” Jabbouri said.
BONUS FUN Thomas Friedman says this on the same day: “The Kurds have been great.”
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