Why We Fight: Building Freedom in Iraq, Ch. 92,356

“Shortly after ten o’clock, three judges in long black robes shuffled into Courtroom 2 and sat at the bench. Suhail Abdullah Sahar, a bald, middle-aged man with a thin, jowly face, sat in the center. There were twenty-one cases on his docket that day, sixteen related to terrorism. 

. . . .

Sahar questioned the other suspects first. One, named Haidar, who wore a back brace, said that he had been mistakenly arrested for a car-bomb attack, in 2014, and that in the course of an interrogation, to make the torture stop, he had started naming random people, including Louai. Judge Sahar then called upon Louai, who rose from his chair and gripped the cage to support himself. “I went to sell my car in the market,” he said. “Then Haidar called me, and I was ambushed, arrested.” He spoke in an urgent, high-pitched tone, but he stuttered and slurred his words; during interrogations, he said, officers had beaten him so badly that he suffered a blood clot in his brain. “They also broke my back!” he shouted. “They broke my feet and hands! I can barely walk!”

“Enough evidence—I ask for a guilty verdict,” the prosecutor said. It was the only phrase she uttered in court that morning.

Haidar’s lawyer noted that there was no witness and no material evidence, and that his request for a medical examination, to prove that Haidar had been tortured, had been rejected. Louai’s lawyer explained that Louai’s confession had been coerced and made no sense: he had said that he remotely detonated the car bomb, when, in fact, the police had concluded that it was a suicide attack.

Louai had spent four years in pretrial detention, and, during the two or three minutes allotted to his defense, the judges had been talking among themselves. “I haven’t seen a judge until now!” he shouted.

“Take them out,” Sahar said. A security officer opened the cage. It took Louai nearly two minutes to limp to the door. Sahar took a lunch break, then ordered his execution.

. . . .

Not long ago, I met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official who is deeply involved in counterterrorism operations. For three hours, over tea and cigarettes, he described systematic criminality within the security forces, detailing patterns of battlefield executions, murders in detention centers, and coverups organized by the state. He spoke as a witness, but also as a participant; although he is in a position to have stopped certain abuses, by intervening he would have risked incurring accusations that he is sympathetic to the group he has sought to destroy.

He believes that the Iraqi government’s response is as much a tactical blunder as it is a moral one; it plays directly into the jihadis’ narrative—that Sunnis, who make up a minority of the Iraqi population, cannot live safely under a government dominated by Shiites. “The reaction is one of vengeance—it is not well thought out,” he told me. “We rarely abide by the law.”

Thousands of men and boys have been convicted of ISIS affiliation, and hundreds have been hanged. But, according to the senior intelligence official, these cases represent only a small fraction of the total number of detainees. “A few of the suspects are sent to court, but only to maintain the illusion that we have a justice system,” he said.

Suspects are tried under a law that makes no distinction between a person who “assists terrorists” and one who commits violent crimes on behalf of an extremist group. The conviction rate is around ninety-eight per cent. Family members of the accused rarely show up to watch the hearings, out of fear that they will be detained, too. It’s not uncommon for relatives to be rounded up by the security forces and sent to remote desert camps, where they are denied food, medical services, and access to documents. “We’re deleting thousands of families from Iraqi society,” the official told me. “This is not just revenge on ISIS. This is revenge on Sunnis.”

. . . .

The coalition concluded that the Old City could not be captured according to the rules of engagement that had governed the battle in East Mosul, so it loosened its requirements for calling in an air strike. In March, the U.S. dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on a roof in the Old City, in an effort to kill two ISIS snipers. The explosion killed a hundred and five civilians who had been sheltering inside the building. Survivors reported that there were no ISIS fighters in the vicinity at the time of the strike.

. . . .

The troops assumed that anyone still living in the Old City sided with the Islamic State. For the rest of the month, corpses bobbed downstream, dressed in civilian clothes. “We killed them all—Daesh, men, women, and children,” an Iraqi Army officer told a Middle Eastern news site, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. As he spoke, his colleagues dragged a suspect through the streets by a rope tied around his neck. “We are doing the same thing as ISIS. People went down to the river to get water, because they were dying of thirst, and we killed them.”

When the battle was over, soldiers used construction equipment to shovel rubble into the entrances of ISIS tunnels—ostensibly to suffocate any remaining jihadis, but also to mingle corpses and concrete, thereby obscuring the scale of the atrocities. As late as March of this year, journalists were still finding the bodies of women and children on the riverbanks, blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs and bullet holes in their skulls.”

–The New Yorker, December 24, 2018