Published: July 23, 2010
BAGHDAD — An outsize ceremonial skeleton key traded hands last week in the official transfer of Camp Cropper, the last jail in Iraq that had been under American control. The Iraqi government was, one American general said, “equipped, prepared and poised to take over.”
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Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press
Iraq’s justice minister, Dara Nurredin Dara, and Maj. Gen. Jerry Cannon on July 15.
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But it did not end the dark history of prisons in Iraq over the last seven years: Just five days later, four prisoners, at least three of them said to be high-ranking members in the nation’s most violent insurgent group, escaped. The warden and several guards are nowhere to be found.
“Leaders from the Islamic State of Iraq were able to escape from Cropper Prison,” read a statement that appeared Friday on a Web site that carries messages from the group, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “And no one from the apostates has been able to find them, 36 hours after their escape.”
Sunni extremists sometimes use the term “apostates” to describe the majority Shiites, who control Iraq’s government.
The July 15 transfer of Camp Cropper, which had held many of what the United States military considered “high value” inmates, was considered yet another milestone toward full Iraqi sovereignty, just over a month before America is scheduled to withdraw the last of its combat troops.
But institutions are being handed over to a political system in disarray. There is no new government nearly five months after parliamentary elections.
And while overall violence is relatively low, a deadly campaign of assassinations is under way against political figures, members of Awakening groups and people who had cooperated with Americans. The group to which the escaped prisoners belonged, the Islamic State of Iraq, claimed responsibility for one of the worst of these recent attacks: On Sunday, bombings killed at least 47 members of Awakening Councils, made up of former Sunni insurgents who switched sides.
The men escaped from the Camp Cropper prison complex, near Baghdad International Airport, on Tuesday, though Iraqi officials did not make the news public for 48 hours. The missing men include the group’s finance minister, its interior minister and its justice minister, the security officials said, without identifying them. The standing of a fourth escapee was unclear.
The men had been captured by American forces and had been held for about 15 months, the Iraqi police said Friday. On Friday, the United States military in Iraq declined to answer questions on the escape from the prison, where 1,500 inmates are held. In Washington, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “U.S. forces are not involved in any aspect of running or securing the facility. The government of Iraq is investigating the circumstances surrounding the escape.” It is not known how the four men escaped the highly secured prison, but Iraq’s minister of justice, Dara Nurredin Dara, said Friday that the jail’s American-assigned warden, Omar Hamis Hamadi, was missing as well.
“We were told that he was trustworthy and had a good reputation,” Mr. Dara said.
Other security officials said that several guards had failed to report to work since the escape.
The prison system in Iraq has been consistently troubled since the United States military invaded Iraq in 2003. Seeking to tame an increasingly effective insurgency, American soldiers arrested thousands of suspects, many of them without proof, and held them for a year or longer.
The system began to change after the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, in which American jailers tortured and abused detainees. Experts say that many men became radicalized against Americans inside the prisons.
Experts also say that, as prisoners have been released and transferred to Iraqi authority, the system remains abusive. In April, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered the closing of a secret prison that held hundreds of detainees from northern Iraq. Dozens of prisoners had been tortured before the country’s human rights minister and the United States intervened.
High-level suspects have disappeared from Iraqi detention with maddening frequency. On Friday, the British Embassy in Baghdad said the British foreign secretary had raised concerns with Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, about the recent disappearance of the man convicted in the 2004 kidnapping and murder of a British-Iraqi aid worker, Margaret Hassan. The man, Ali Lutfi Jassar al-Rawi, was in custody and appealing his conviction when he disappeared.
At Camp Cropper, the American military continues to operate one of the prison’s blocks at the request of the Iraqi government, overseeing about 200 inmates, including members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni group, and officials who had been part of Saddam Hussein’s government. The Iraqi government asked the Americans to hold on to some of the prisoners while Iraqi law enforcement officials determine their legal status. The men escaped from the Iraqi-controlled part of the prison.
In recent months, American and Iraqi security forces have captured and killed dozens of members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, including its top leaders. American generals, however, caution that while the organization has been significantly weakened, it continues to be capable of launching attacks that lead to mass casualties.
Duraid Adnan and Zaid Thaker contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington.
