Families of Iraq's many missing are 'living in limbo': ICRC

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Relatives of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that remain missing after decades of war and violence in the country are "living in limbo" awaiting news of the fate of their loved ones, the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday.

The ICRC released a statement on the occasion of the International Day of the Disappeared, marked annually on August 30 in remembrance of people lost to conflict, disaster and migration.

"In Iraq, decades of successive conflicts and periods of violence have led to one of the highest number of missing persons in the world. Hundreds of thousands of individuals remain unaccounted for, with nearly as many family members still looking for them and living in limbo due to uncertainty about their fate," the statement reads.

The ICRC said in September 2019 that it had helped 1,500 Iraqi families learn about the fate of their missing loved ones – "a small dot in the big sea of missing Iraqis," ICRC spokeswoman Salma Ouda told Rudaw at the time.

Tens of thousands of people went missing during the Iran-Iraq War that spanned the 1980s, according to the 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.

Mass graves containing the bodies of those killed in all three events continue to be discovered and exhumed. In July of last year, three mass graves containing the bodies of hundreds of Anfal victims were discovered in Samawa, southern Iraq. A sinkhole ISIS used as a mass grave for approximately 1,000 Shiite and Yezidi victims was found in Tal Afar, northern Iraq in February of this year.

A wave of enforced disappearances of scores of young Iraqi men, believed to have been at the hands of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) 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.

With journalists also vulnerable to abduction, kidnappings and killings, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) used today's occasion to launch its #MissingNotForgotten campaign for missing journalists.

"In the Middle East alone, at least 20 journalists have gone missing amid widespread conflict, especially in Iraq and Syria," read a tweet from CPJ MENA.

"The families and colleagues of these journalists deserve answers. Authorities must undertake thorough and credible investigations, and use every tool at their disposal, to bring these journalists home safely," read another CPJ MENA tweet.

The coronavirus pandemic must not cause work to find missing persons to be halted, experts from two United Nations bodies working on disappearances said in a statement released on Saturday.

“States around the world must still act urgently to prevent and investigate enforced disappearances during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the search for the victims must continue without delay," the UN statement read.

The statement warned that the pandemic has created "new and concerning contexts for enforced disappearances," including compulsory quarantines and suspension of visits to people in detention.

Families of Iraq's many missing are 'living in limbo': ICRC

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