Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has repeatedly articulated his administration’s commitment to tackling the issue, including supposedly through a new mechanism to locate the people. However, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says there is little evidence progress has been made.
“Creating a do-nothing mechanism, as Iraqi governments have done for years, is simply not enough to address longtime problems like enforced disappearances,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at HRW, in a Monday statement. “Ending enforced disappearances and holding security forces accountable requires a sustained and serious commitment that includes tracking these cases.”
Iraqis have suffered a long history of enforced disappearances, with many family members still looking for relatives decades on.
Tens of thousands of people went missing during the Iran-Iraq War that spanned the 1980s, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Between 1986 and 1988, an estimated 182,000 people were kidnapped during Saddam Hussein's Anfal campaign of genocide against Iraq's Kurds. The bodies of only 2,672 victims have been recovered, according to 2019 statistics from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Ministry of Martyrs' Affairs and Anfal.
In 2014, more than 6,000 Yezidis were abducted by the Islamic State (ISIS), and some 3,000 remain missing six years on. Young men from other ethnic groups have also disappeared under the group’s rule. Mass graves containing the bodies of those killed continue to be discovered and exhumed.
A wave of enforced disappearances of scores of young Iraqi men, believed to have been at the hands of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF or Hashd al-Shaabi in Arabic) militias and national security forces, were reported between 2014 and 2017.
More recently, dozens of participants in anti-establishment protests that have gripped Iraq since October 2019 have gone missing. In May, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) called on the government to find still-missing protesters, numbering 25 at the time.
Looking into the enforced disappearances of eight people between December 2019 and October 2020, HRW says evidence they have collected has all pointed to the PMF being behind the disappearances. The government has not responded to the organization’s claims.
Moreover, the families of the eight victims have all told HRW they have heard nothing specifically about Kadhimi’s new mechanism, nor had anyone from the initiative contacted them about it.
