Kurdish Officials Sanction Abductions in Kirkuk

The U.S. military acknowledged picking up detainees in joint raids with the Kurdish-led police and handing them over. But military officials said the secret transfers were ordered by individual Iraqi police commanders. Blagburn said commanders affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party dispatched detainees to an Irbil prison operated by the party's intelligence arm. Commanders affiliated with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan sent detainees to their party's facility in Sulaymaniyah, he said.

The State Department cable noted that U.S. commanders had denied complicity in the transfers, contrary to the perceptions of Arabs and Turkmens. "Coalition PR efforts to counter the story have been ineffective," stated the cable, which was written by the U.S. Embassy's regional coordinator.

"What can we do?" asked Jabbouri, the prisoner released last week. "The Americans are with the Kurds, together. They're walking along the same path."

Jabbouri said he was seized during a raid on his house the night of April 30 in the Kirkuk neighborhood of Rashid. A former fighter pilot who now works as a colonel in the Iraqi Interior Ministry, he pleaded with the Iraqi police and their U.S. colleagues that he had been wrongly targeted by them. The Americans, dressed in civilian clothes and flak jackets, ignored him, he said.

Jabbouri said he was seized with three other men, two of them air force veterans. The Americans photographed the detainees at the entrance to the U.S. air base in Kirkuk, then turned them over to the police, he said. Police placed bags over their heads and moved them between what seemed to be houses in Kirkuk and Irbil for several hours before taking them to the main prison the next day, he said.

There, Jabbouri said, he lived with about 50 men crammed into a 19-by-9-foot cell. The prisoners slept on a bare concrete floor. Conditions were so cramped, he said, the men divided the day into shifts. For three hours, half sat cross-legged while the others lay on their sides in rows and slept.

Jabbouri said he was questioned three times. He said he was treated respectfully. But others in his cell were beaten, he said. Some were forced to wear a 130-pound metal jacket and were beaten when they collapsed, he recalled. Jabbouri said that upon his release he met a fellow prisoner who displayed scars from wounds sustained when he was whipped with a wire cable, sometimes heated over a fire.

"Once you go inside, you never think you're going to come out," Jabbouri said.

Najat Hassan Karim, the Kurdistan Democratic Party representative in Kirkuk, denied that prisoners were mistreated. "They are lies," he said of the allegations. "There is no torture." U.S. officers said they had no evidence that any of the detainees had been tortured.

Flood of Complaints

The U.S. military first heard of the abductions in late February as families searching for their missing relatives began to appear at the provincial government seat in the city of Kirkuk. Lt. Col. Anthony Wickham, who heads a team of U.S. military advisers to the provincial government, said he initially thought the crimes were a recurrence of a wave of ransom-motivated kidnappings last year.

"Then it turned into a new twist: We found out our own brothers-in-arms were involved," Wickham said. By mid-April, the complaints "became a flood," he said. Wickham said he became convinced that the security forces were orchestrating the campaign after seeing letters from the prisoners in the north conveyed to their families by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"Maybe it was naivete on our part, that people would be taken by the police, of all people, to another province," Wickham said. "When we realized what was happening, the first thing we said was, 'Stop. Don't you realize what you're doing, the tensions that you're creating?' The second thing we said was, 'You've got to get them out.' "