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Kurdish Officials Sanction Abductions in Kirkuk
Aissa Ramadan with his sons Raed and Saad. The sons were seized at their home near Kirkuk along with three uncles and their grandfather, 87.
(By Anthony Shadid -- The Washington Post)
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The State Department cable warned that the abuses by the emergency unit threaten to "seriously undermine [Iraqi government] and Coalition efforts in the region unless procedures are established to enforce Iraqi laws with regard to the transfer of detainees."
As he sat in his house, the fans idle on a scorching day during a blackout, Aissa Ramadan seethed over the seizure of most of his family.
He said they were taken March 17, when U.S. and Iraqi forces arrived at his family's compound in the village of Shahid Faleh, about 20 miles south of Kirkuk. Ramadan's three brothers and two sons were taken, along with his 87-year-old father, Ramadan Taha, who walks with a cane. "I wasn't there," he said. "If I was there, they would have taken me, too."
Three months later, the house still bore signs of the raid: The windows of the mud huts were shattered, closet doors were ripped from the hinges, wedding pictures and a television were broken. Ramadan accused the Iraqi forces of stealing $5,000 from under his father's bed and 450,000 Iraqi dinars ($300) from his mother's pocket. One soldier ripped a gold bracelet off his sister-in-law's wrist, he said. Another hit his mother, in her sixties, in the left shoulder with a rifle butt. Videos of his oldest son's wedding were confiscated.
Last month, Ramadan's two sons were released from the Emergency Services Unit's custody; one said he had been hit so hard in the kidney he was urinating blood. One of Ramadan's brothers is still in the jail. A policeman told the family they could pay $5,000 to get him freed. A friend who works with the police told Ramadan that his father and two other brothers were taken to Sulaymaniyah.
No one has heard from them since their transfer on March 23.
"If you could see our house on any day, you'd see that we're having funerals without the corpses," Ramadan said. "Children are looking for their fathers, wives don't know the fate of their husbands, and mothers are dying 40 times a day."
Ramadan said he had "anger in his heart."
"Tomorrow, I could recruit the entire tribe," he said. "I could block the street in Kirkuk and kidnap 40 Kurds. When you lose patience, you can do anything."
