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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The bodies of ten people were discovered in northern Iraq's Salahaddin province on Saturday, a local tribal official has told Rudaw, the day after twelve Sunnis were "abducted" by as yet unknown assailants.
"An unknown force abducted 12 individuals in the Farahat village in Balad in Salahaddin," Khaled Jabbarra, head of Sunni political party Wafd and a member of Salahaddin's tribal forces said on Saturday.
“The 12 were Sunnis, and today the bodies of ten of them were recovered. The fate of the other two is unknown," Jabbarra said.
"The 12 people were members of [Sunni] tribal forces, and some of them were students."
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the abduction or deaths, but Jabbarra said that the security of Balad is under the control of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a faction of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi).
“The PMF is responsible for the security of this area and we call on the Prime Minister [Mustafa al-Kadhimi] to send the interior minister to investigate the incident and find out the fate of the remaining two people," he urged.
A relative of one of the slain abductees told Rudaw that the kidnappers were in military uniform. He added that the bodies were discovered close to Farahat village, approximately 80 kilometers north of Baghdad.
Sunnis predominate across northern and western parts of the country, including Anbar, Salahaddin, Nineveh and Diyala provinces – areas that fell to the Islamic State (ISIS) when the group swept through Iraq and neighbouring Syria in 2014.
In September of last year, Iraq’s highest judiciary authority said it would investigate 'disappeared' Sunnis, most of whom were believed to have gone missing after being detained at checkpoints manned by the PMF and the Iraqi Security Forces during operations targeting ISIS. However, little to no investigation appears to have been carried out.
Decades of war, genocidal campaigns by Iraq’s Baath regime, and most recently the war against ISIS have stacked Iraq’s missing persons count "to the hundreds of thousands," a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told Rudaw last summer.
Iraq's most senior officials have since responded to the incident, with Speaker of Parliament Mohammed al-Halbousi calling it "a heinous crime that unarmed civilians were subjected to," according to state-run TV channel al-Iraqiya.
"The relevant security authorities bear full responsibility to protect the lives of Iraqis," a statement from the speaker's media office quoted him as saying during a phone call with Iraqi premier Kadhimi.
An investigation is to "immediately" be opened to "punish those who tamper with the country's security and the lives of citizens," the statement said.
Updated at 6:50 pm
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