It was a warm spring evening in a Baghdad suburb when American troops stopped the car in which 11-year-old Sufian Abd al-Ghani was riding close to his home with his uncle and a neighbour. They were ordered out and told to lie face down on the road. Sufian's father heard the commotion and rushed out to find the soldiers pointing their rifles at his son and the others. Claiming the uncle had fired at them, they started beating the three captives with their rifle butts, according to the father.
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The three were driven off to Baghdad airport, where US forces have set up a makeshift prison in large tents. Around 500 Iraqis are held in miserable conditions, sleeping on the ground, with inadequate water rations and not enough blankets to go round, according to former detainees.
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After 24 days the boy's ordeal was over, but he regularly has nightmares. However, his case is not the worst in the four months since the Americans occupied Iraq. Several children have been shot dead, some as passengers in cars which fell foul of American checkpoints, some mistaken at night for adults. But if those deaths were the result of accidents, how is it that an 11-year-old could be held for over three weeks without anyone in authority asking questions?
The answer is: easily. Sufian's detention highlights the problems faced by hundreds of Iraqis: arrests followed by incompetent interrogation, or none at all; the lack of an efficient trial-or-release system; shocking prison conditions; constant buck-passing; and sloppy paperwork by the coalition authorities. The result is that in almost every case families take weeks or months to find out where their loved ones are being detained.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1019096,00.htmlJust one more way we're losing the peace. It's a wonder there hasn't been a lot more violence than there already is in Iraq.
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