256 Al Qaeda Suspects Arrested In Diyala
3rd August 2008
BAGHDAD: Iraq said yesterday that its military backed by US forces arrested hundreds of suspects during an offensive aimed at stamping out Al Qaeda in a restive central province.
“Our forces have arrested 265 suspects so far during our operations in Diyala,” a defence ministry spokesman said.
The raids have taken place throughout Diyala province where 50,000 Iraqi soldiers and police began a major push against insurgents to secure the volatile region.
The operation is still on going successfully and is now in its fifth day, an official said.
Among those detained was Abu Anas Al Baghdadi, a top Al Qaeda operative in Diyala and four members of the Council of Mujahedeen, one of many front groups for Al Qaeda, according to an Interior Ministry spokesman.
The US military freed more than 10,000 people from its two detention centres in Iraq so far this year - more than the 8,900 released the during the whole of 2007.
A military statement said there were currently around 21,000 detainees in the two centres - Camp Cropper near Baghdad’s airport and Camp Bucca near the southern oil city of Basra.
This is down from a peak of around 26,000 in mid-2007, when a “surge” of US troops arrested scores of people daily as they moved to quell sectarian fighting unleashed when Sunni insurgents bombed a Shi’ite mosque in the central city of Samarra in February 2006.
Of those now in detention, 12 are women, more than 300 are juveniles, 200 are third country nationals and about 200 are over the age of 60.
Under their UN mandate, coalition forces are entitled to detain anyone “necessary for imperative reasons of security”, the US military says.
A review process allows for detainees to be either kept behind bars at Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper, or to be released. The average detention rate is 330 days.
More than 1,000 Sunni Arabs and Turkomen meanwhile, rallied against Kurdish demands to incorporate the oil-rich area around Kirkuk into their autonomous region on the eve of a special session of parliament aimed at defusing the crisis.
The dispute over Kirkuk has blocked passage of legislation providing for provincial elections this year.
Protesters in Hawija carried banners rejecting Kurdish demands for control of Kirkuk. The rally ended without any violence.
However, residents said the atmosphere was tense in Kirkuk, where a suicide bomber killed 25 people during a recent Kurdish protest.
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