Iraqi detainees languish uncharged in crowded jails

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Iraqi detainees languish uncharged in crowded jails
By Steve Lannen | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Wednesday, April 9, 2008


Steve Lannen / Lexington Herald-Leader / MCT

For thousands of Iraqi detainees, visits by a U.S. military monitoring team may be their one hope for learning why they were arrested.


CAMP CONSTITUTION, Iraq — Barefoot in his yellow jumpsuit, the young detainee's eyes welled up as he described in a shaking voice how he landed in an Iraqi army detention facility on the outskirts of Baghdad.

He was visiting his mother in the hospital when Iraqi soldiers raided the hospital and detained him and several others, said Thamer Hamed, 22. They handcuffed and blindfolded him and took him to a holding cell at a former U.S. military base, ironically named Camp Constitution, that's been handed over to the Iraqi army. There, he was told that he was accused of murder. That was 45 days ago, and he still hadn't seen a judge, he said.

Asked to which religious sect he belongs, he smiled ruefully.

"Come on, I'm Sunni. Everyone here is Sunni."

Hamed is just one of thousands of detainees who are locked up in Iraqi-run detention centers.

Some undoubtedly are criminals, but some are innocent people who were caught in roundups after violent incidents or arrested by the largely Shiite-run Iraqi security forces because they're Sunnis, according to interviews with detainees and American military personnel on a rare visit with U.S. Army inspectors last month to an Iraqi army-run run jail.

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