Regime Brutality in Iraq

by Stephen Lendman

US-installed prime minister Haider al-Abadi is at war with his own people, massacring them in the battle for Mosul. Amnesty International called human rights in the country "dire."

Civilians are threatened by violence instigated by ISIS and their own government, regime forces killing them indiscriminately - earlier in Anbar province, currently in Mosul for months.

Unknown numbers of detainees are being extrajudicially executed. Thousands languish in prison uncharged and untried, held incommunicado without access to family members or counsel - tortured, otherwise mistreated and denied access to healthcare.

If later trials occur, torture-extracted confessions are used to convict. After visiting Iraq last December, AI's Donatella Rovera said "(c)hildren caught in the crossfire of the brutal battle for Mosul have seen things that no one, of any age, should ever see." 

"I met children who have not only sustained horrific wounds but have also seen their relatives and neighbors decapitated in mortar strikes, torn to shreds by car bombs or mine explosions, or crushed under the rubble of their homes."

"War-wounded children then find themselves in hospitals overflowing with patients, or in camps for displaced people, where dire humanitarian conditions make their physical and psychological recovery even more difficult." 

"Many others remain trapped in areas where the fighting is raging. There is an urgent need for the Iraqi authorities and their international partners in the battle for Mosul to set up better care, rehabilitation and protection systems for affected civilians." 

Indiscriminately shelled homes become graves for countless numbers of victims. Hospitals aren't functioning in the epicenter of Mosul fighting.

Care for the wounded and ill are nonexistent, human suffering extreme, unreported by media scoundrels - including the horrors committed by US-led terror-bombing, massacring civilians on the phony pretext of combating ISIS America created and supports.

On March 5, Human Rights Watch said scores of Iraqi families are being forcibly displaced - on alleged "familial ties to affiliates of the Islamic State…"

Victims are being held under open-air prison conditions near Tikrit, their homes destroyed the way Israel bulldozes them owned by Palestinians - for exclusive Jewish development or sheer brutality against a defenseless people.

According to HRW's Lama Fakih, "(w)hile politicians in Baghdad are discussing reconciliation efforts in Iraq, the state's own forces are undermining those efforts by destroying homes and forcing families into a detention camp." 

"These families, accused of wrongdoing by association, are in many cases themselves victims of ISIS abuses and should be protected by government forces, not targeted for retribution."

Decades of US direct and proxy war on Iraq bear full responsibility for what's going on - the cradle of civilization destroyed, its people massacred, survivors brutalized to advance America's imperium.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

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