Iraq holding more than 19,000 because of IS, militant ties

Iraq has detained or imprisoned at least 19,000 people accused of connections to the Islamic State group or other terror-related offenses, and sentenced more than 3,000 of them to death, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

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.

FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2017 file photo, a Kurdish security officer orders a displaced man from Hawija to sit down as they try to determine if the men being held were associated with the Islamic State group, at a Kurdish screening center in Dibis, Iraq. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen, File)

The AP count is based partially on an analysis of a spreadsheet listing all 27,849 people imprisoned in Iraq as of late January, provided by an official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Thousands more also are believed to be held in detention by other bodies, including the Federal Police, military intelligence and Kurdish forces. Those exact figures could not be immediately obtained.

The AP determined that 8,861 of the prisoners listed in the spreadsheet were convicted of terrorism-related charges since the beginning of 2013 — arrests overwhelmingly likely to be linked to the Islamic State group, according to an intelligence figure in Baghdad.

In addition, another 11,000 people currently are being detained by the intelligence branch of the Interior Ministry, undergoing interrogation or awaiting trial, a second intelligence official said. Both intelligence officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press.

FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2017 file photo, displaced men from Hawija stand facing a wall in order not to see security officers, who will try to determine if they were associated with the Islamic State group, at a Kurdish screening center in Dibis, Iraq. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen, File)

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

Al-Gharwari said many legal proceedings have been delayed because the country lacks the resources to respond to the spike in incarcerations.

Large numbers of Iraqis were detained during the 2000s, when the U.S. and Iraqi governments were battling Sunni militants, including al-Qaida, and Shiite militias. In 2007, at the height of the fighting, the U.S. military held 25,000 detainees. The spreadsheet obtained by the AP showed that about 6,000 people arrested on terror charges before 2013 still are serving those sentences.

But the current wave of detentions has hit the Iraqi justice system much harder because past arrests were spread out over a much longer period and the largest numbers of detainees were held by the American military, with only a portion sent to Iraqi courts and the rest released.

FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2017 file photo, a blindfolded suspected Islamic State militant stands against a wall at a Kurdish screening center in Dibis, Iraq. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen, File)

Human Rights Watch warned in November that the broad use of terrorism laws meant those with minimal connections to the Islamic State group are caught up in prosecutions alongside those behind the worst abuses. The group estimated a similar number of detainees and prisoners — about 20,000 in all.

"Based on all my meetings with senior government officials, I get the sense that no one — perhaps not even the prime minster himself — knows the full number of detainees," said Belkis Wille, the organization's senior Iraq researcher.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is running to retain his position in national elections slated for May, has repeatedly called for accelerated death sentences for those charged with terrorism.

The spreadsheet analyzed by the AP showed that 3,130 prisoners have been sentenced to death on terrorism charges since 2013.

Since 2014, about 250 executions of convicted IS members have been carried out, according to the Baghdad-based intelligence official. About 100 of those took place last year, a sign of the accelerating pace of hangings.

The United Nations has warned that fast-tracking executions puts innocent people at greater risk of being convicted and executed, "resulting in gross, irreversible miscarriages of justice."

The rising number of those detained and imprisoned reflects the more than four-year fight against the Islamic State group, which first formed in 2013 and conquered nearly a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria the next year.

FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2017 file photo, displaced men from Hawija sit facing a wall in order not to see security officers, who will try to determine if they were associated with the Islamic State group, at a Kurdish screening center in Dibis, Iraq. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen, File)

Iraqi and Kurdish forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, eventually rolled the group back on both sides of the border, regaining nearly all of the territory by the end of last year.

Throughout the fighting, Iraq has pushed thousands of IS suspects through trials in counterterrorism courts. Trials witnessed by the AP and human rights groups often took no longer than 30 minutes.

The vast majority were convicted under Iraq's Terrorism Law, which has been criticized as overly broad.

Asked about the process, Saad al-Hadithi, a government spokesman, said, "The government is intent that every criminal and terrorist receive just punishment."

The largest concentration of those with IS-related convictions is in Nasiriyah Central Prison, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Baghdad, a sprawling maximum-security complex housing more than 6,000 people accused of terrorism-related offenses.

Cells designed to hold two prisoners now hold six, according to a prison official who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. The official said overcrowding makes it difficult to segregate prisoners charged with terrorism and that an inadequate number of guards means IS members are openly promoting their ideology inside the prison.

Though prisoners at Nasiriyah were banned last year from giving sermons and recruiting fellow inmates, the official said he still witnesses prisoners circulating extremist religious teachings.

In wards holding mostly terror-related convicts, high-ranking IS members have banned prisoners from watching television. Many refuse to eat meat from the cafeteria, believing it hasn't been prepared according to religious guidelines, the prison official said.

The relative free rein for extremists is reminiscent of Bucca Prison, a now-closed facility that the U.S. military ran in southern Iraq in the 2000s.

The facility proved a petri dish where militant detainees mingled — including the man who now leads the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who spent months there, joining with other militants who became prominent in the group.

Iraqi officials say they have taken steps to prevent a repeat of the Bucca phenomenon.

"We will never allow Bucca to happen again," said an Interior Ministry officer overseeing the detention of IS suspects in the Mosul area, also speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

"The Americans freed their captives; under Iraq, they will all receive the death penalty," he said.

Cellphone signal jammers are installed at prisons holding IS suspects. But in Nasiriyah, the prison official said inmates appear to remain in contact with the outside.

He recounted how just days after a guard disciplined a senior IS member in the prison, the man threatened the guard's family, listing the names and ages of his children.

The imprisonments hit hard among Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, threatening to worsen tensions with the Shiite-dominated government. The community was both the pool that IS drew recruits from and the population most brutally victimized by its rule.

Mass incarcerations under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki led to widespread resentment among Sunnis, helping fuel the growth of IS.

FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2017 file photo, displaced men from Hawija stand facing a wall in order not to see security officers, who will try to determine if they were associated with the Islamic State group, at a Kurdish screening center in Dibis, Iraq. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen, File)

The head of the International Red Cross, an organization that regularly visits prison and detention facilities in Iraq, warned that mass detentions often incite future cycles of violence.

"It's the tortures, the ill treatments, the continuous long-term bad conditions in detentions which have radicalized a lot of actors which we find again as armed actors on the battlefield," ICRC President Peter Maurer said during a recent visit to Iraq.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Minnesota man who once fought for the Islamic State group in Syria but now expresses remorse for joining a “death cult” and has been cooperating with federal authorities will have to wait to learn how much prison time he faces after his sentencing hearing set for Wednesday was canceled.

Federal prosecutors have recommended 12 years for Abelhamid Al-Madioum in recognition both of the seriousness of his crime and the help has he given the U.S. and other governments. His attorney says that seven years is enough and that Al-Madioum, 27, stopped believing in the group's extremist ideology years ago.

A court notice posted online just over two hours before the hearing was to begin said it would be rescheduled for a date to be determined. The notice did not give a reason for the cancellation.

Al-Madioum was 18 in 2014 when IS recruited him. The college student slipped away from his family on a visit to their native Morocco in 2015. Making his way to Syria, he became a soldier for IS, also known as ISIS, until he was maimed in an explosion in Iraq. Unable to fight, he used his computer skills to serve the group. He surrendered to U.S.-backed rebels in 2019 and was imprisoned under harsh conditions.

Al-Madioum returned to the U.S. in 2020 and pleaded guilty in 2021 to providing material support to a designated terrorist organization. According to court filings, he has been cooperating with U.S. authorities and allied governments. The defense says he hopes to work in future counterterrorism and deradicalization efforts.

“The person who left was young, ignorant, and misguided," Al-Madioum said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery, who will sentence him.

“I’ve been changed by life experience: by the treachery I endured as a member of ISIS, by becoming a father of four, a husband, an amputee, a prisoner of war, a malnourished supplicant, by seeing the pain and anguish and gnashing of teeth that terrorism causes, the humiliation, the tears, the shame,” he added. "I joined a death cult, and it was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Prosecutors acknowledge that Al-Madioum has provided useful assistance to U..S. authorities in several national security investigations and prosecutions, and that he accepted responsibility for his crime and pleaded guilty promptly on his return to the U.S. But they say they factored his cooperation into their recommended sentence of 12 years instead of the statutory maximum of 20 years.

“The defendant did much more than harbor extremist beliefs,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “He chose violent action by taking up arms for ISIS.”

Al-Madioum, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was among several Minnesotans suspected of leaving the U.S. to join the Islamic State group, along with thousands of fighters from other countries worldwide. Roughly three dozen people are known to have left Minnesota to join militant groups in Somalia or Syria. In 2016, nine Minnesota men were sentenced on federal charges of conspiring to join IS.

But Al-Madioum is one of the relatively few Americans who have been brought back to the U.S. who actually fought for the group. According to a defense sentencing memo, he's one of 11 adults as of 2023 to be formally repatriated to the U.S. from the conflict in Syria and Iraq to face charges for terrorist-related crimes and alleged affiliations with IS. Others received sentences ranging from four years to life plus 70 years.

Al-Madioum grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in a loving and nonreligious family, the defense memo said. He joined IS because he wanted to help Muslims he believed were being slaughtered by Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime in that country's civil war. IS recruiters persuaded him “to test his faith and become a real Muslim.”

But he was a fighter for less than two months before he lost his right arm below the elbow in the explosion that also left him with two badly broken legs and other severe injuries. He may still require amputation of one leg, the defense says.

While recuperating in 2016, he met his first wife, Fatima, an IS widow who already had a son and bore him another in 2017. They lived in poverty and under constant airstrikes. He was unable to work, and his stipend from IS stopped in 2018. They lived in a makeshift tent, the defense says.

He married his second wife, Fozia, in 2018. She also was an IS widow and already had a 4-year-old daughter. They had separated by early 2019. He heard later she and their daughter together had died. The first wife also is dead, having been shot in front of Al-Madioum by either rebel forces or an IS fighter in 2019, the defense says.

The day after that shooting, he walked with his sons and surrendered to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which held him under conditions the defense described as “heinous” for 18 months until the FBI returned him to the U.S.

As for Al-Madioum’s children, the defense memo said that they were eventually found in a Syrian orphanage and that his parents will be their foster parents when they arrive in the U.S.

This image provided by the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, Minn., shows Abelhamid Al-Madioum, a Minnesota man who once fought for the Islamic State group in Syria. Al-Madioum, who has been cooperating with federal authorities and now expresses remorse for joining a “death cult”, will learn Wednesday, May 1, 2024, how much prison time he faces. Al-Madioum was brought to the U.S. in 2020 and pleaded guilty in 2021 to providing material support to a designated terrorist organization. (Sherburne County Jail via AP)