Fallujah freed, but thousands of its men in custody

Iraqi forces declare ISIL driven from entire city as screening of male residents continues to find out fleeing extremist fighters.

Iraqi government forces walk in Fallujah after they declared they had taken full control of the city from ISIL on June 26, 2016. Haidar Mohammed Ali / AFP

Near Fallujah, Iraq // Iraqi forces on Sunday declared the battle to retake Fallujah from ISIL over, but the humanitarian concerns continue as thousands of men who fled the city remain in detention amid allegations of torture and summary executions

A month-long campaign “is done and the city is fully liberated,” said Lt Gen Abdul-Wahad Al Saadi, the commander of the counterterrorism forces fighting in Fallujah, after his troops entered Al Julan, the last neighbourhood held by the extremists.

While the fighting raged, the army, police and allied Shiite militia detained all men of fighting age who reached government lines after leaving the city, and their families watched helplessly as large groups were driven off to be screened for ISIL members.

According to Iraq’s joint operations command, about 20,000 men were taken away. Of these, 2,185 are suspected of being ISIL members, 11,605 have been released and about 7,000 are still being screened.

The women are stuck in makeshift refugee camps, prevented from entering nearby Baghdad. They have little more than the clothes they wear, and the food and water receive from struggling aid agencies is barely enough to keep them and their children alive in the scorching summer heat.

They are waiting anxiously for their men to return.

“My husband was taken away as soon as we reached the army. He has eczema and it had spread all over his body by the time we fled Fallujah. We want to get him out but we don’t even know where he is,” said an elderly woman whose family was among an estimated 30,000 people who left the city after an ISIL retreat on June 16. Like most of the other women, she did not want to give her name.

Fallujah has been a hotbed of Sunni extremism since the US invasion in 2003, and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated security forces are suspicious of its population. The city was the first to fall to ISIL, and the terror group was welcomed by some residents angered by the sectarian politics of then prime minister Nouri Al Maliki. There are legitimate security concerns about ISIL members mixing in with the fleeing civilians. According to Bassem Mohsen, a general with the federal police force fighting in Fallujah, about 150 insurgents have been fished out of the stream of people making their way to safety.

But it was not long after the assault on the city began on March 23 that the first allegations of human rights abuses surfaced. According to a Human Rights Watch report, there is credible evidence of summary executions, torture and kidnappings by Shiite militia and federal police. On June 4, prime minister Haider Al Abadi opened an official investigation into these abuses.

In the camps dotting the barren Anbar desert around Fallujah, the women are sick with worry.

Umm Hamid, who arrived with her children in a camp on June 16, gently chided another woman who was complaining about the dire conditions in the camp.

“Let’s not talk about these things, and focus on what is important: our men who are still imprisoned,” she said.

Ahmed Khalid, one of the few men present in the camp of basic tents pitched in the sand near the bridge crossing the Euphrates into Baghdad governorate, flicked through his phone to show a video of men being hosed down in front of a building after their release.

“They were filthy, and smelled really bad,” he said.

Other photographs on his phone show men with bruises on their faces and backs, and others with bandaged limbs.

Mr Khalid said these were some of the 600 men returned to their families after being detained by the Shiite militia in Saqlawiyah, a township on the outskirts of Fallujah, in the early stages of the campaign. They were taken to Baghdad and beaten brutally for several days before being dumped in the Anbar desert, he said. Both the numbers and the accounts of torture are corroborated by the Human Rights Watch report.

Some men have been missing for several months, having been captured by military units that formed a cordon around Fallujah long before the offensive to retake the city began.

A woman in another camp said 11 of her male relatives have been in jail since 2014, arrested on charges of planting improvised explosive devices to ambush government forces.

“They were tortured into making a confession, and now face execution,” said the woman, who has lived in the camp since ISIL came to Fallujah.

Three of her relatives were released, but were kidnapped as soon as they left prison, she said.

Others said they had been asked to ransom their husbands. One middle-aged woman said the captors had demanded US$20,000 (Dh73,463) for the release of the men of her extended family, without specifying whether they were detained by the militias, the police or army units. For families that had to leave behind everything on their dangerous flight from Fallujah, this is an impossible sum.

“I don’t have any money, I have no power and authority, I can’t go and tell them to release my husband,” the woman said.