ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – When Iraqi police and the predominately Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) entered the Saqlawiyah district of Fallujah in Iraq’s Anbar province on June 4, 2016, they detained hundreds of local Sunnis, accusing them of fostering ties with the Islamic State group (ISIS).
Three years on, the whereabouts of many remains a mystery.
According to a report published at the time by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, the PMF, also known as Hashd al-Shaabi, entered the district alongside Iraqi federal police, where they detained at least 1,700 men.
A day later, 605 detainees were released for medical treatment – many of them bearing the marks of rape and torture.
One witness who was released on June 5 and sent to Amiriyat Fallujah Hospital told Human Rights Watch the PMF had separated the town’s men from their families.
During their 24-hour detention, the witness said they were brutally beaten with sticks and cables while PMF guards shouted sectarian slurs.
According to Human Rights Watch, at least four men died under torture, some of them having been dragged behind vehicles. Another later died in hospital.
Based on the Human Rights Watch figures, at least 1,090 men are still unaccounted for.
Bouakash is a village in Saqlawiyah where many families have still not heard from their loved ones, three years on.
Oum Saad, who lives with her two young sons, has heard nothing of her husband and their eldest son since they went missing in June 2016.
“They took my husband and son and isolated them from us. Since then I never saw them again,” Oum Saad told Rudaw on Friday.
“We wrote to Fallujah’s judicial council [asking where they were], but they responded saying ‘We don’t know’.”
Arif Ahmed, another resident in Bouakash, told Rudaw: “Iraqi forces alongside the PMF and federal police took all the men from the town after they liberated Saqlawiyah.”
“According to the Iraqi forces and PMF, all the men in Saqlawiyah, including Bouakash village, were ISIS militants,” he added.
Yehia al-Muhammadi, an Iraqi lawmaker from Fallujah, told Rudaw the Iraqi parliament has formed several committees to follow up the missing persons, but they have made little progress.
“In both third and fourth rounds of the Iraqi parliament, committees have been formed to investigate the case of Saqlawiyah’s missing persons, but no evidence has been found by the committees,” Muhammadi said Friday.
The PMF had a database which included the names of wanted individuals. As families fled the fighting in 2016 and crossed PMF lines, their names were entered into the database. If a name matched, the men of the household were arrested and taken to an undisclosed location. Many have not been heard of since.
Human Right Watch has accused the PMF of committing war crimes by destroying Sunni homes and executing civilians accused of ISIS affiliations.
Investigations into these abuses have been lackluster.
Hadi al-Ameri, a top PMF commander and current head of the Iraqi parliament’s Fatih coalition, “vowed” at the time to hold those to account who had committed war crimes and abuses against civilians.
Former Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi acknowledged “there were mistakes committed by the forces, but they were not systematic, and we will not cover up any of them.”
There are roughly 150,000 PMF fighters spread across Iraq, according to the group’s own figures. It was established in 2014 following a fatwa (religious decree) from Iraq’s top Shiite religious authority Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to resist the ISIS advance.
Since tensions began to mount between the United States and Iran, many PMF leaders have sided with Tehran, adding to concerns the group is acting as an Iranian proxy in Iraq.
ISIS seized control of vast areas of northern Iraq in 2014, killing civilians and enslaving others across Sunni-majority provinces.
Fallujah was the first major urban center seized by the militant group.
The Iraqi army and the PMF launched an offensive on May 22, 2016 to retake the city.
Abadi visited the city on June 26, 2016 and officially announced Fallujah had been recaptured.
