In 2018, Iraqi courts issued arrest warrants for at least fifteen defense lawyers, and charged them with ISIS affiliation. Pretrial detention can last for years, and trials can take less than five minutes. 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 for Iraqi courts is around ninety-eight percent. "Throughout the ISIS period, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, the Iraqi government has carried out mass executions in order to mollify an outraged public." "The Iraqi government refuses to recognize or replace birth certificates issued by the Islamic State, so tens of thousands of children have been rendered effectively stateless." "Thousands of men and boys have been convicted of ISIS affiliation, and hundreds have been hanged." In Baghdad, the relentless pace of trials struck [Ben Taub] as so incongruous with the lack of evidence, the certainty of convictions, and the severity of sentences that he began to wonder whether judges had access to secret intelligence that they were sharing in court. [1]
"By the end of the battle for East Mosul, as much as seventy-five per cent of the counterterrorism forces had been injured or killed." "ISIS fighters who surrendered were executed on the spot. Iraqi security forces filmed themselves hurling captives off a cliff, then shooting them as they lay dying on the rocks below." "As late as March [2018], journalists were still finding the bodies of women and children on the river banks, with their hands tied behind their backs and bullet holes in their skulls." "But the West Mosul civil defense has retrieved thousands of corpses from the Old City." "The war against the Islamic State displaced a million people in Nineveh Province."
"Elsewhere in Iraq, security forces filmed themselves punching, kicking, and whipping men in ad-hoc detention sites, including school classrooms." "Although there were only around eight thousand ISIS fighters living in Mosul, and far fewer in the surrounding villages, the lists of wanted people grew to some hundred thousand names." "Pretrial detention can last years,and even if detainees don't die from the conditions, they may never see the insides of a courtroom."
One of Ben Taub's visits coincided with that of the country head of a major N.G.O. " 'This is set up like a concentration camp,' he said, gesturing at the fence. 'All the barbed wire, the division of sectors. There are no social spaces. There are no places for the children to play. There are no places for people to gather. There's one entrance in and out. And you have seen the guys at the entrance? Most of them are from militias.' "
"Air strikes cannot kill an idea, and so it has fallen to Iraq's fractured security, intelligence, and justice systems to try to finish the task. But ISIS has always derived much of its dangerous appeal from the corruption of the Iraqi state." "What is at stake in this post-conflict period, is whether the Iraqi government can win over the segment of the population for whom ISIS seemed a viable alternative."
Footnotes:
[1] Ben Taub, "Shallow Graves," The New Yorker, December 24/31, 2019.
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