BAGHDAD: Hundreds of detainees in Iraq are feared to have been “forcibly disappeared” by Kurdish authorities after they were arrested for suspected ties to the Daesh group, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
“More than 350 detainees held by the Kurdistan Regional Government in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk are feared to have been forcibly disappeared,” the US-based rights group said in a statement.
Most of those missing are Sunni Arabs detained by the Kurdish Asayish security agency on suspicion of Daesh “affiliation” after Kirkuk was taken from the jihadists in 2014, the statement said.
“Families in Kirkuk are desperate to know what has become of their detained relatives,” said HRW’s deputy Middle East director, Lama Fakih.
“The secret, incommunicado detentions raise grave concerns for their safety.”
HRW said the disappearance of the detainees came to light after Iraqi government forces retook Kirkuk from the Kurds in October following a controversial independence referendum.
“Local officials told Human Rights Watch that the prisoners were no longer in the official and unofficial detention facilities in and around Kirkuk,” the group said.
The fate of the missing people has already sparked protests from anxious relatives and drawn the attention of the authorities in Baghdad.
In November, Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi ordered an investigation after dozens of complaints from Arab families about relatives they say have not been heard from since their arrest by Kurdish forces.
Kirkuk and the surrounding oil-rich region are fiercely disputed between Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdish region.
The Kurds took part of the area after the US-led invasion of 2003 and extended their control in the chaos that followed the lightning Daesh advance across Iraq in 2014.
Federal forces reclaimed Kirkuk and the oil fields around it after Baghdad rejected a vote by the Kurds for independence in September.
350 prisoners feared ‘disappeared’ by Iraqi Kurd forces, human rights group claims
350 prisoners feared ‘disappeared’ by Iraqi Kurd forces, human rights group claims
Israel aims to bring ‘permanent demographic change’ to West Bank, Gaza: UN
- UN rights chief Volker Turk says Israeli military operation in West Bank’s north has displaced 32,000 Palestinians
GENEVA: Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.
“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing,” Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.
In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.
Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.
Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
‘Maximum land, minimum Arabs’
In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighborhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza,” the UN human rights office said in a report last week.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.
“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.
“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs,” Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told AFP, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.
