The total number of detainees is unknown. In June, the U.S. military said it had logged 180 cases in Kirkuk alone; political leaders estimated there were more than 500. Wisam al Saadi, deputy director of the Islamic Organization for Human Rights, said 120 families from Mosul have lodged complaints seeking missing relatives in the last month. Nawazad Qadir, director of the Irbil branch of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, said hundreds are being held in that city while still hundreds more are in the other prisons.
One former detainee, Abdul Raheem Faraj, 41, a Mosul human rights activist, said he was taken into custody Nov. 21 in a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid in downtown Mosul. Within hours, he said, the Americans told him he was innocent and planned to release him. An hour after that, he said, Kurdish militiamen blindfolded him, put him in the trunk of an Opel sedan and drove him to Dahuk. He said he spent six months, four days in custody, most of it with 15 other detainees in a windowless basement room at a facility operated by the Kurdish secret service, the Asayesh.
"My rights were violated. From whom am I supposed to get them back?" he said last week. "The Americans? The Americans are the ones who gave the Kurds the opportunity to do this."'
'They Have the Guns'
Across southern Iraq, the Supreme Council and other Islamic parties have consolidated their control in cities along the southern valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through a mix of patronage and coercion, residents and political leaders say.
In Nasiriyah, the city council, dominated by Islamic parties brought to power in the January elections, decided to set up a new, 287-member police battalion. Each council member was allotted seven police jobs to appoint, said Muhajir, the communist leader, giving the most powerful Islamic parties the overwhelming share. "The formation of the force is to serve the parties," he said.
In southern cities, several political leaders said, other appointments to the security forces, civil defense, bureaucracy or state-owned companies require a recommendation from the party that can cost $100 to $1,000.
"The parties have become businessmen," said Khazaal, the Basra party leader.
The coercive side of the parties' power is the militias. In cities like Nasiriyah, the Supreme Council and forces loyal to the young cleric Moqtada Sadr still maintain armed forces that operate both within the police force and independently.
Sadr's Mahdi Army, seen as the most powerful force in the streets, sent what it calls a battalion of 240 men this month to search for car bombs in Suq al-Shuyukh, southeast of Nasiriyah. It manned the city's entrances, exits and intersections for 48 hours, said Ali Zaidi, the militia commander in Nasiriyah. "In every place, the Mahdi Army is there," he said.
The Supreme Council has moved aggressively to seize control of police forces in towns like Nasiriyah, Amarah and Diwaniyah, aided by the party's control of the Interior Ministry in Baghdad.
In February, 70 men belonging to its militia attacked the headquarters of the Nasiriyah police chief, Gen. Mohammed Hajami, in an effort to expel him. Dozens of machine-gun rounds and grenades carved holes in the building's facade. Although Hajami estimated that 70 percent of his men were loyal to Islamic parties and not him, he and a handful of loyalists fought them off.
