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As of December 2007 there are some 50,000 detainees in Iraq, many of them untried and not accused of any crime. Iraqi authorities hold 24,000 detainees and the United States 26,000. Critics say only a small proportion of those held are ever prosecuted.
Sunni Arab leaders have repeatedly called for the release of detainees in American custody, most of whom are Sunni Arabs held as suspected insurgents.
There has been a sharp increase in detentions since the United States 'surge' of mid-2007. Many prisoners are held without formal charges, and their fate is one of many sensitive issues believed to be complicating efforts to promote national reconciliation.
The Iraqi cabinet approved a draft law on December 26 that will offer a general pardon to thousands of prisoners in US military and Iraqi custody, a government spokesman said. "The cabinet has passed the general pardon law, which will define who is eligible to be freed from all prisons, both Iraqi and American," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters.
A draft law approved by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki aims to identify prisoners who would be eligible for release under a general pardon. The law would have to be approved by Iraq's parliament to go into effect.
Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, said that the draft law was aimed at boosting reconciliation between majority Shi'ite and Sunni Arab Muslims.
The US military has said it intends to free most of its detainees by the end of 2008.
Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian citizen born in Saudi Arabia currently held by the U.S. in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He is held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).
Saddam Hussein, the deposed president of Iraq, was captured by the United States military in the town of Ad-Dawr, Iraq on 13 December 2003. Codenamed Operation Red Dawn, this military operation was named after the 1984 American film Red Dawn.
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These abuses included physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape, as well as the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi and the desecration of his body. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs by CBS News in April 2004, causing shock and outrage and receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
About six months after the United States invasion of Iraq of 2003, rumors of Iraq prison abuse scandals started to emerge.
The Iraqi Interim Government was created by the United States and its coalition allies as a caretaker government to govern Iraq until the drafting of the new constitution following the National Assembly election conducted on January 30, 2005. The Iraqi Interim Government itself took the place of the Coalition Provisional Authority on June 28, 2004, and was replaced by the Iraqi Transitional Government on May 3, 2005.
Parliamentary elections were held in Iraq on 30 January 2005 to elect the new National Assembly, alongside governorate elections and a parliamentary election in Kurdistan Region. The 275-member legislature had been created under the Transitional Law during the international occupation. The newly elected body was given a mandate to write a new constitution and exercise legislative functions until the new constitution came into effect. The elections also led to the formation of the Iraqi Transitional Government.
The Council of Representatives, usually referred to simply as the Parliament, is the unicameral legislature of the Republic of Iraq. According to the Constitution of Iraq, it is the lower house of the bicameral legislature of the country. As of 2020, it comprises 329 seats and meets in Baghdad inside the Green Zone.
The Constitution of the Republic of Iraq is the fundamental law of Iraq. The first constitution came into force in 1925. The current constitution was adopted on September 18, 2005 by the Transitional National Assembly of Iraq, and confirmed by constitutional referendum, held on October 15, 2005. It was published on December 28, 2005 in the Official Gazette of Iraq, in Arabic original, and thus came into force. An official translation into English for international use was produced in cooperation between Iraqi state authorities and the United Nations' Office for Constitutional Support. Since 2006, several proposals for adoption of various constitutional amendments were initiated. The Kurdish language is official at state level.
Jamal Udeen Al-Harith, born Ronald Fiddler also known as Abu-Zakariya al-Britani, was a British citizen who reportedly died carrying out a suicide bombing in Iraq in February 2017.
Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States, in the context of the early twenty-first century War on Terrorism, refers to foreign nationals the United States detains outside of the legal process required within United States legal jurisdiction. In this context, the U.S. government is maintaining torture centers, called black sites, operated by both known and secret intelligence agencies. Such black sites were later confirmed by reports from journalists, investigations, and from men who had been imprisoned and tortured there, and later released after being tortured until the CIA was comfortable they had done nothing wrong, and had nothing to hide.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison within Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (NSGB), also called GTMO on the coast of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was established in January 2002 by U.S. President George W. Bush to hold terrorism suspects and "illegal enemy combatants" during the Global War on Terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001. As of August 2024, at least 780 persons from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 740 had been transferred elsewhere, 9 died in custody, and 30 remain; only 16 detainees have ever been charged by the U.S. with criminal offenses.
Camp Nama was a military base in Baghdad, Iraq, originally built by the government of Saddam Hussein, from which its name derives, and now used by Iraqi military forces. Purportedly, the original Iraqi name has been repurposed by U.S. personnel involved with the facility as a backronym standing for "Nasty Ass Military Area".
Nouri Kamil Muhammad-Hasan al-Maliki, also known as Jawad al-Maliki, is an Iraqi politician and leader of the Islamic Dawa Party since 2007. He served as the Prime Minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014 and as Vice President from 2014 to 2015 and again from 2016 to 2018.
The Supreme Command for Jihad and Liberation is an Iraqi front comprising some 23 militia groups formed in October 2007 and were led by former Iraqi vice president and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. The name is also often used to refer to the largest militia in the front, the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, which was commanded by Douri himself.
Governorate or provincial elections were held in Iraq on 31 January 2009, to replace the local councils in fourteen of the eighteen governorates of Iraq that were elected in the 2005 Iraqi governorate elections. 14,431 candidates, including 3,912 women, contested 440 seats. The candidates came from over 400 parties, 75% of which were newly formed.
The U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement was a status of forces agreement (SOFA) between Iraq and the United States, signed by President George W. Bush in 2008. It established that U.S. combat forces would withdraw from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, and all U.S. combat forces will be completely out of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The pact required criminal charges for holding prisoners over 24 hours, and required a warrant for searches of homes and buildings that were not related to combat. U.S. contractors working for U.S. forces would have been subject to Iraqi criminal law, while contractors working for the State Department and other U.S. agencies would retain their immunity. If U.S. forces committed still undecided "major premeditated felonies" while off-duty and off-base, they would have been subjected to an undecided procedures laid out by a joint U.S.-Iraq committee if the U.S. certified the forces were off-duty.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced the holding of a consultative grand council called the Afghanistan's National Consultative Peace Jirga (NCPJ) or Peace Jirga in his inauguration speech on 19 November 2009, after winning elections for a second term, to end the ongoing Taliban insurgency. At the International Afghanistan Conference in London on 28 January 2010, he announced that the government would hold the event in April or May 2010, intended to bring together tribal elders, officials and local power brokers from around the country, to discuss peace and the end of the insurgency. "Jirga" is a word in the Pashto language that means "large assembly" or "council". It is a traditional method in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan of resolving disputes between tribes or discussing problems affecting whole communities.
This article details the Syrian government's response to protests and civilian uprisings of the Syrian revolution which began in early 2011, that unravelled the socio-political stability of Syria, eventually plunging the country into a nationwide civil war by mid-2012.
This article concerns the formation process of the Al Maliki I Government of Iraq in the aftermath of the Iraq National Assembly being elected on December 15, 2005. Due to disputes over alleged vote-rigging the results of the election were only certified by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq on February 10, 2006.
The General Military Council for Iraqi Revolutionaries, was an Ba'athist militant group in Iraq headed by Saddam Hussein-era military and political leaders. It was described by Al Jazeera as "one of the main groups" in the Iraqi insurgency.
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