ABU GHARIB, Iraq, 17 September 2003 — US officials said yesterday they were holding 10,000 prisoners in Iraq, double the number previously reported, and count among the security cases six inmates claiming to be Americans and two who say they are British.
“They didn’t fit into any category,” said Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski of the 3,800 extra people who have now been classified as “security detainees.”
“We got an order from the Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) to categorize them” about a month ago, she said, but gave few details about who these detainees were. “We were securing them. We didn’t want people to be confused” about their status, she said. They were being held in the area of north-central Iraq controlled by the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division, said Karpinski, speaking at Abu Gharib prison, 20 kilometers west of Baghdad.
Asked if they had any rights or had access to their families or legal help while they were being “secured”, she said: “It’s not that they don’t have rights ... they have fewer rights than EPWs (enemy prisoners of war).”
But she added that “they didn’t ask for” any such privileges. Karpinski said the categorizing of the 3,800 prisoners had been mentioned by US officials in press interviews but “had not been reported.”
“We have the opportunity to interview them now,” she said, explaining that this could not be done before because they had not been categorized. Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade now in charge of Iraq’s prisons and detention centers, defined security detainees as “those who have attacked coalition forces” or were suspected of involvement in or planning of such attacks.
There were previously some 600 people classified as security detainees, so that category now numbers about 4,400, said Karpinski. There are 300 enemy prisoners of war, and about 5,300 criminals or suspected criminals in detention, making a rough total of 10,000, she added.
Karpinski said that “several hundred third-country nationals” were among the prisoners held on security grounds since Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April by US and British forces.
The vast majority of these detainees were captured during the war, she said, while only a “negligible” number had been detained since major combat operations were declared over on May 1. “Six are claiming to be Americans and two are claiming to be from the UK,” she said, as coalition military police held “Abu Gharib Media Day” at the prison.
Investigators were seeking to determine whether the claims of US or British nationality were correct. “We are continuing the interviews,” she said. The six “had accents that suggested they were Americans, but when you talked to them their stories started falling apart,” said Karpinski.
Meanwhile, Iraqi scientists working under the new provisional government confirmed yesterday United Nations claims made before the war that Iraq has not had any nuclear weapons program for over a decade. “There was no way to revive those attempts. There was nothing left,” Dr. Albas Balassem, of Iraq’s new Ministry of Science and Technology told reporters after meeting with officials from the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
US officials had claimed before invading Iraq last March that Iraq had been looking for ways to revive its nuclear program cut short by the first Gulf War in 1991, including a disputed claim that Iran had tried to buy uranium in Africa. But IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei told an IAEA general conference meeting in Vienna on Monday that in December 1998, based on “more than seven years” of inspections, “there was no indication of Iraq having achieved its goal of producing a nuclear weapon, nor were there any indications that there remained in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon usable material of any practical significance.”
In another development, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who is set to meet US President George W. Bush in New York next Tuesday, has said that a new UN resolution on Iraq was “achievable within days”.
“Over the next few days I think it is achievable for the UN Security Council to draw up a new resolution,” Aznar told a joint news conference yesterday in Madrid alongside visiting Dominican Republic President Hipolito Mejia. Aznar said a new resolution should seek to “consolidate the UN role in stabilizing and bringing security to Iraq.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul declared yesterday he was convinced the Iraqis would prefer to see Turkish peacekeepers in their country than other foreign troops, despite Baghdad’s vocal opposition to a possible Turkish deployment.
“Naturally, nobody could wish for foreign troops in one’s country... But if foreign troops come, the Iraqi people would prefer Turkish troops rather than soldiers from Britain, Russia, the United States or Poland,” Anatolia news agency quoted Gul as saying.
The minister was speaking to reporters in a plane on his way back from a visit to Georgia. Keen to win a say in the shaping of postwar Iraq and mend fences with the United States after its failure to back the war, Ankara has expressed willingness to contribute up to 10,000 troops to help to restore order in its neighbor’s territory.
But the plan, which has the backing of Washington which heads the coalition in Iraq, has triggered harsh objections in Baghdad, particularly from Iraqi Kurds who have tense relations with Ankara.
A senior Iraqi official told Turkish television yesterday that not only Kurds, but Arabs and other groups also opposed the deployment of more foreign soldiers in their country. “More troops from other countries, particularly from neighbors, will not bring about stability... All foreign soldiers are a source of concern,” Mahmoud Osman, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi Governing Council, told NTV.
