(Reuters) A young detainee shows a rash on his arm to al-Hashemi during his visit to the juvenile detention center in Baghdad Sept. 25, 2007.



October 9, 2007



"They told me they would only question me for 5 minutes and I've been here since the 25th of April," says Ali Mohammed. October 9, 2007 As if it�s not enough that the Iraqis lost their homes, family members, jobs and in general their lives, the U.S. is now creating a new dilemma; an Iraqi youth detention facility. The children jailed there are aged between 11 and 17 years old and are detained over allegations ranging from theft to murder. According to an ABC report, there has been a huge increase in the number of Iraqi detainees since the U.S. troop surge began earlier this year. Recent reports say detainees� numbers increased from 250 in May to 800 now. Those imprisoned are said to be mostly Sunnis. Ali Mohammed is a teenager among thousands of detainees kept in an overcrowded prison in Western Baghdad who has no idea what his crime is. "They told me they would only question me for five minutes and I have been here since the 25th of April," Mohammed told Reuters. "I suffer from epilepsy, a weak spine and a speech defect", he added, expressing his surprise that he is considered a security threat. Iraq�s Sunni Vice President, Tareq Al Hashemi, expressed his anger towards capturing innocent children and said he was speechless when he saw Mohammed during his last visit to the detention facility. "How are they going to interrogate him?" he told journalist who accompanied him while he toured Ahdath facility. "Cases of lengthy detention without charge are an embarrassment to a government that says it promotes human rights and whose members, exiled or persecuted under Saddam Hussein's rule, criticized abuses carried out by his security forces." Another orphan detained there was caught for stealing a cell phone from a crowded area in central Baghdad and three months later he has not been charged or tried. "I've been here for three months and I don't know why I am here," the young boy told Reuters. As criticism mounts over the growing number of young detainees, Iraqi officials promise that this problem would be solved soon. "We had a problem with (detainees in) Baghdad, but now we have 44 investigative judges and five criminal courts who are all working beyond their hours," says the head of the Supreme Judicial Council, Midhat Al Mahmoud. Last Saturday, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih held a news conference where he promised everyone attending that the government would speed up trials in Iraqi courts. "We want to cooperate with this humanitarian and legal issue through legal procedures only. We don't want this issue to be politicized because it would oppress the citizens who for one reason or another ended up in these prisons," Salih said. "There is a problem in Iraqi prisons. It's not shameful to acknowledge a problem; it's shameful to ignore it." According to Reuters, government figures show that 2,661 detainees have been sent to court since the security crackdown in the capital began in February. Figures also show that more than 4,000 have been freed from prisons over the same period, though it isn�t clear whether those released were all from Baghdad. One must wonder whether such numbers include those detained by the U.S., and whether they are accurate given the difficulty of obtaining reliable figures from a government already tainted by corruption! Source: AJP