Iraq frees prisoners to mollify Sunnis
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi authorities released nearly 600 prisoners Wednesday out of a total of 2,500 scheduled to be freed this week in an effort to appease Sunni Arabs who say their sect has been unjustly persecuted by Iraq’s police force.
A witness of one mass release at a Baghdad bus station said that prisoners and their families wept at the sight of one another. Some of the prisoners looked wan and undernourished. A few struggled to walk without help.
Khayrulla Ibrahim Mohammed, 37, a laborer and member of the Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic Party, was freed after spending five months in Abu Ghraib and a year in Camp Bucca. American troops arrested him in December 2004 as he prepared to leave his Baghdad home for dawn prayers at a local mosque. He said he was never formally charged in court with a crime.
“They accused us of holding terrorist meetings inside the Saydiya mosque,” said Mohammed, who added that U.S. soldiers interrogated him 15 times during his imprisonment.
“Frankly speaking, the American authorities were nice with me. … They never hurt me, and they respected my situation being a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party. I was truthful with them and they didn’t try to pressure me,” he said. His family was allowed to visit him eight times, he said, adding that he never witnessed any mistreatment of prisoners by American soldiers.
“It was so unjust to keep me all this time because of suspicion or because of false reports by ill-intentioned groups,” Mohammed said. “Is it acceptable to detain a father for all this time just because of such reasons?”
Omar al-Jabouri, in charge of the Islamic Party’s human rights office, said that at least one of the released prisoners had been held since July 2003.
There are more than 27,000 prisoners in Iraq, according to U.S. officials, about half of them in American-run detention facilities such as Abu Ghraib near Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. U.S. officials say that many have never been formally charged or tried in Iraqi courts, which are able to handle only 20 to 50 cases a day, and that new detainees continue to stream into the system.
A statement issued by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office Wednesday said the prisoners were released as a gesture of good will and an initial step in a yet-to-be-defined national reconciliation process that he will formally kick off in an upcoming conference.
Also freed Wednesday were 15 of the 50 men kidnapped Monday from a downtown Baghdad bus depot by gunmen wearing police uniforms and driving police vehicles. The freed men could not be reached immediately for comment, and the whereabouts of the other abductees is unknown.