Court set up near Mosul to confer Iraqi IDs on refugees with ISIS-issued documents
Khazir Camp - It is busy outside the Preliminary Court of Mosul in Khazir Camp, which is housed in a group of portacabins in this camp for thousands who fled the fighting in Mosul.
Women are squatting in the winter sun, holding papers, while men are chatting in little groups, and some people queue in front of one of the windows to talk to an employee of the court, that was only recently opened to help internally displaced people (IDPs) from Mosul.
Umm Allah is holding her five-month-old baby boy, who was born in areas controlled by ISIS militants, in the Khansa-hospital that the extremist group ran in Mosul.
She shows the pink piece of paper that she was given there, tattered by repeated folding, that states the names of the parents and the place and date of birth, but strangely enough not the name of the infant.
“I need a new certificate, because without it we will not get aid, nappies and food for him. Here in the camp all is based on identity cards,” Umm Allah says.
That is one of the reasons why the High Juridical Council in Baghdad decided to open this office in the camp last December, explains assistant judge Mohammed Fawzi, who is behind a desk in one of the cabins.
“We do not recognize any of the documents that Daesh issued to the people during the two years of its occupation,” he says, using the local name for ISIS.
For official and certified documentations of marriage, birth, divorce, and death, IDPs until recently would have to connect to the court offices in Shekhan that cover Mosul since the ISIS took control in mid-2014.
In the IDP camps, they need the documents to prove they are a couple or a family to get a tent, food rations and all kinds of other aid.
Since the battle for Mosul started in October, some 140.000 people fled their homes in Mosul and its surroundings, the matter became urgent enough to set up a preliminary court in Khazir. This is one of bigger camps with over 30.000 inhabitants, where security screening is conducted for new arrivals.
The preliminary court here has a judge, an investigative judge, a deputy attorney general and ten employees, says Fawzi, who himself fled Mosul last year.
The court submits its work to its headquarters in Shekhan for processing.
The main problem is the lack of documents, he says, pointing to the small stack of dossiers on his desk. “Ninety percent of our affairs have stopped because of that.”
That is because people did not bring many documents, as most left in a hurry, he states.
But also, because the Kurdish security forces, also known as Asaish took them upon arrival and did not return them, claims Ahmed Azad, who works for the legal team of the Qandil Foundation, an international aid organization active in the Kurdistan Region.
His team tried to help the IDPs with their documentation problems before the preliminary court was opened. “But the coordination with Shekhan made it even more complicated than it is now.”
Behind his desk, Mohammed Fawzi makes an addition of the marriage and birth certificates his court has been able to submit successfully in the three weeks it has been active: thirty of the first and only six of the latter.
“With proper documentation, we could have done much more,” he sighs.
Therefore, he tries to be lenient. For the court to register a birth certificate, he needs the parents and two witnesses. “And we accept the witnesses even if they are two women, though in Iraqi law they would be equal to only one male witness.”
The same goes for the death certificates of those who were killed during the bombings in Mosul; two witnesses and the place of burial suffice. “Some people buried their family members in the garden, others were able to go to the cemetery,” says Fawzi.
But he does not deal with the cases of the victims of ISIS’ brutal rule who were murdered or executed. They are transferred to the investigative court for research.
Like the case of the death of Khalas Sulaiman’s husband, in Hamam al-Alil. “We were asleep when two men stormed the house and killed my husband because he was helping the Iraqi police,” the mother of three says. “It was a surprise to all of us; we still do not know how they knew.”
According to the official Iraqi document she shows, that happened in August 2013, when ISIS was still just a group infiltrating the area from Syria and terrorizing people.
The court has only verified the paper four days ago, it says on the back, as probably one of the simpler cases, as the document was issued by the Iraqi authorities and not by ISIS.
Two months after she fled with her children, Sulaiman now has a death certificate that will show the camp authorities she is a widow, and will allow her to profit from special benefits because of that.