Families hunt for Iraq's 'lost'

Under current Iraqi law, it is illegal for anybody but the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) to operate prisons, but the MOJ says it is not receiving training or new facilities quickly enough to accommodate the thousands of prisoners in various custodies.

"The Ministry of Interior used to avoid transferring detainees to the Ministry of Justice," says Saad Sultan, director of the MOHR's prison monitoring department.

Jumaa Hussein, the general in charge of the MOJ's prisons, says that though his department has been operating for more than two years, only two new prisons are under construction, and that those can only hold 1,600 prisoners total.

"We have asking the ministry to speed it up," Mr. Hussein says. "They just hadn't planned for this. If more prisons are not built, maybe there will be more human rights violations in the future. The number of prisoners is growing."

Daoud's family suspects he has been tortured while in custody. Mr. Sultan says his office visits each of the country's declared prisons every seven to 10 days and that they have continued to find instances of abuse and torture, especially at the hands of Iraqi police.

Also hard to track are prisoners kept at brigade level both by the US military, which does not officially track prisoners until they are held in one of four major theater-level facilities, and by some of the MOI forces, which continue to operate their own prisons. Though Sultan says some of the MOI's brigade prisons had been shut down in recent months, there are at least three still operating.

Jumaa says the US military is training his men to take over Camp Bucca - which presently holds nearly 7,000 prisoners, says the MOJ - in as soon as six months. The MOJ took over the existing buildings at Abu Ghraib last year, though the US military maintains an outdoor prison facility.

The US has also recently begun transferring prisoners to Fort Suse, a recently opened prison near Sulaymaniyah in Iraq's Kurdish-controlled north, in preparation for shutting down US operations at Abu Ghraib entirely.

Families of prisoners and Iraqi human rights groups have complained that it is hard for Arab families to visit their relatives in Suse because of discrimination against them by Kurdish security forces, and Arab Sunnis have complained that the trip to Bucca, near Basra, has become dangerous because of the risk of being arrested by Shiite security forces while traveling there.

Sultan says that the moving of prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, to locations in the south and the north, was a direct result of the impossibility of keeping prisoners safe in restive central Iraq. At least 35 prisoners have been killed by insurgent mortar strikes at Abu Ghraib since 2003 and dozens more injured.

"What should we do? Build each person a prison next to his house?" asks Sultan.

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