IRAQ has arrested at least 19,000 people accused of links to Islamic State (Isis) or other terrorist offences and has condemned more than 3,000 of them to death, the Associated Press (AP) reported today.

The New York-based news agency based its figures partially on analysis of a spreadsheet listing all 27,849 people imprisoned in Iraq in late January.

Thousands more are believed to be held by other bodies including the federal police, military intelligence and Kurdish forces.

The mass incarceration and speed of guilty verdicts raise concerns over potential miscarriages of justice and worries that jailed militants are recruiting within the general prison population to build new extremist networks, AP said.

According to its analysis, 8,861 of the prisoners listed were convicted of terrorism-related charges since the beginning of 2013 and were overwhelmingly linked to Isis.

Another 11,000 people are now detained by the Interior Ministry intelligence branch, undergoing interrogation or awaiting trial.

“There’s been great overcrowding … Iraq needs a large number of investigators and judges to resolve this issue,” Fadhel al-Gharwari, a member of Iraq’s parliament-appointed human rights commission, told AP.

He said that many legal proceedings have been delayed because the country lacks the resources to respond to the rise in jailings.

Large numbers of Iraqis were detained during the 2000s when US occupation forces and Iraqi governments were battling Sunni militants, including al-Qaida, and Shi’ite militias.

In 2007, at the height of the fighting, the US military held 25,000 detainees. About 6,000 people arrested on terror charges before 2013 are still serving those sentences.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is a candidate to retain his position in elections set for May, has repeatedly demanded accelerated death sentences for those convicted of terrorism.

Since 2013, 3,130 prisoners have been sentenced to death on terrorism charges and about 250 executions of convicted Isis members have been carried out, 100 of them in the past year, indicating an accelerating pace of hangings.

The UN has warned that fast-tracking executions puts innocent people at greater risk of being convicted, “resulting in gross, irreversible miscarriages of justice.”