Militias on the Rise Across Iraq

When Muther arrived, his father was gone. Six uniformed policemen in black masks had entered his house, his family told him. They put a gun to his wife's head and locked her, his mother and the children in the bedroom. The father tried to run, but police caught him. He clawed at the door as they dragged him away.

"The neighbors just watched," Muther said. "What could they do? It was the police."

Muther searched for five hours for his abducted father in Basra's streets. As the sun began to set, he gave up and returned home. Minutes later, a friend rushed into his house, crying. He had heard that Muther's father had been killed.

That evening, the father's corpse was found in The Lot, amid rusted cans and water bottles. He had been shot five times -- twice in the chest, twice in the face and once in the temple.

"They carried out their own justice," Muther said, his eyes welling up.

A Maze of Prisons

In Mosul, a city of above 1 million convulsed by violence, and the hundreds of villages that stretch across a vast plain to the east, many residents fear both the insurgents and the men who are fighting them. The Iraqi army forces in Mosul are dominated by four Kurdish battalions, according to Sinjari.

Since the Kurdish fighters entered the region in November following the collapse of the 7,000-man Mosul police force, U.S. officials and Iraqi humanitarian organizations have received formal complaints that hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and others have been picked up in raids or off the streets and transferred in secret to prisons in Kurdistan, the semiautonomous region controlled by the two Kurdish parties.

The growing reports of the missing stretch across an arc that spans the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian borders, as desperate families search for relatives who have disappeared into a maze of Kurdish-run prisons.

The Kurds are holding detainees in the Kurdistan cities of Irbil, Sulaymaniyah, Dahuk, Akrah, and Shaklawa, according to human rights activists, political leaders and released detainees.

The total number of prisoners is unknown. Sinjari declined to give figures. In June, the U.S. military said it had logged 180 cases in Kirkuk alone. Sunni Arab and Turkmen political leaders in the city estimated there were more than 500. Wisam al Saadi, deputy director of the Islamic Organization for Human Rights, said in the last two months 120 families from Mosul have lodged complaints but many more are afraid to come forward. Nawazad Qadir, a Kurd and the director of the Irbil branch of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, said hundreds of "extremist detainees" are being held in that city while still hundreds more are in the other Kurdish-run prisons.

The missing include former Baathists and former Iraqi army officers "but in some cases there doesn't seem to be any logical reason," said Al Saadi. He described the campaign as "military operations to take people and displace them to other locations."

Hussein Saad Hussein, 60, said he began looking for his son Amar in December after the 33-year-old Mosul hotel worker was picked up in a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid, along with three other men, including Hussein's nephew and son-in-law. Hussein said he heard nothing for weeks until some released detainees told him that Amar had been spotted at a prison in the Kurdish-held city of Dahuk. He sent his daughter, Sukaina, to the prison, but "they denied he was there," Hussein said.