A French human rights group is calling for the repatriation of 47 French nationals held in Iraqi prisons after being transferred from Syria, where they were first detained on suspicion of belonging to the Islamic State group.
The head of Lawyers Without Borders France (Avocats sans frontières France), Matthieu Bagard, met 13 of the detainees during a visit to Iraq this week. He returned to Paris on Wednesday.
Bagard told RFI all of the men he met described harsh detention conditions and said they had been tortured.
“They are suffering from extraordinary deprivation,” he said. “Some of them still have shrapnel in their bodies, some who were kidnapped, others who were not.”
He said several detainees were losing their sight and had been cut off from the outside world for years.
“They have had no news from the outside world since 2017 for the first group, and since 2019 for those who were arrested after the fall of Baghuz. This was the first time they were able to get information about their families, their children who had been repatriated to France.”
Transfer of IS prisoners to Iraq puts renewed pressure on European governments
Trials and death sentences
Iraqi authorities are seeking to obtain confessions linking the men to Islamic State activities in Iraq, in order to try them in Iraqi courts. Eleven French nationals were tried there in 2019.
Iraqi courts have handed down hundreds of death sentences and life terms to people convicted of terrorism offences, including foreign fighters.
Bagard and his colleague Marie Dosé said on Tuesday that the transfer of the French detainees from Syria to Iraq was illegal. They accused Paris of complicity and warned of what they described as an imminent security disaster.
“We are completely outsourcing the judicial fate of these nationals,” Bagard said. “We are passing the buck to the Iraqi authorities by saying: ‘It will be up to you to try them, and it will be up to you afterwards to keep them in your prisons for the duration of their sentences’. Whereas we could legally have them transferred to France.”
Syrian Army seizes northeast as US abandons Kurdish-led forces
Pressure on governments
Other groups are also calling for the detainees to be returned to France. Arthur Dénouveaux, head of an association representing victims of the 13 November Paris attacks, said the men should be tried in France.
About 7,000 suspected Islamic State detainees have been transferred from Syria to Iraq over the past week under a US plan to relocate them there.
The detainees, including Iraqis and Europeans, have been distributed across at least three prisons in Iraq.
Backed by US-led forces, Iraq declared the defeat of Islamic State in 2017. Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) later defeated the group in Syria in 2019.
The SDF went on to detain thousands of suspected jihadists and tens of thousands of their relatives in camps.
This month, the United States said the purpose of its alliance with Kurdish forces in Syria had largely expired, as Damascus pressed ahead with an offensive to take back territory long held by the SDF.
Amnesty International has urged the United States to “urgently put in place safeguards before making any further transfers” and called on Iraq to hold “fair trials, without recourse to the death penalty”.
(with AFP)
