WASHINGTON, 17 June 2006 — Iraq’s prisons are overrun by Shiite militias who abuse and kill inmates, and Iraqi officials have asked the United States to suspend the transfer of prisons and prisoners to Iraqi control, The Washington Post said yesterday, quoting a senior Iraqi official.
“We cannot control the prisons. It’s as simple as that,” said Deputy Justice Minister Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, an ethnic Kurd.
“Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad,” he said, adding that of special concern were the prisons run by Iraq’s Interior Ministry that house 1,797 inmates, 90 percent of whom are Sunni Arabs. Yei said he had written to the US officer in charge of US-run prisons in Iraq asking him to suspend plans to transfer five facilities housing more than 15,000 inmates to Iraqi control, saying his ministry was “unprepared” to take them over.
US Army Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner told the daily in writing that the transfer would not take place “until each respective facility and the Iraqi corrections system have demonstrated the ability to maintain US standards of care and custody.”
Yei said that because of concern over treatment at prisons run by the interior and defense ministries, the Iraqi police and army had agreed to turn over by the month’s end all their prisoners to the Justice Ministry, whose facilities now house 7,426 inmates.
Some local officials, however, were already resisting the transfer order, the newspaper said.
Yei said that since 2004 the militias had released or helped escape from jail some 725 prisoners in several cities, including from Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib facility.
In some instances, Sunni and foreign inmates were taken out of jail and shot dead by the militias, he added.
Deputy Prime Minister Salam Al-Zobaie, in a recent interview with the American newspaper described the treatment in the Interior Ministry prisons as “inhumane” and produced photographs taken during a recent inspection in one of them showing inmates with broken hands and massive bruises who had been brutally beaten.
“The detention facilities of the ministries of defense and interior are places for the most brutal human rights abuse,” said Muhammed Al-Dayni, a Sunni Parliament member.
