Human right report accuses Kurdish forces of child torture in Iraq

IRBIL, Iraq — Children have been tortured after being detained by Kurdish security forces here on suspicion of collaborating with the Islamic State, a Human Rights Watch report charged Sunday.

The human rights group said it spoke to 19 of 183 boys aged 11 to 17 being held in a facility in this northern Iraqi city in December. It said 17 of them alleged that the security forces, called Asayish, "held them in stress positions, burned them with cigarettes, punched and kicked them, beat them with plastic pipes and cables, and shocked them with electricity."

Human Rights Watch researchers wrote that they saw visible marks on the bodies of five of the detainees.

The detainees said their treatment was meant to extract confessions. Most of the alleged abuse happened before they were transferred to Irbil's Reformatory for Women and Children.

"None knew the content of the confessions they confirmed with fingerprints — some were illiterate or blindfolded, and others said that they were not allowed to read them and could not have because they were written in Kurdish," the report said.

All of the interviewed boys were Sunni Arabs except for one Kurd. Some of the interviewees said they had been forced to work for the Islamic State temporarily, while the others said were never in that position.

Dindar Zebari, head of the Kurdish Regional Government's committee that evaluates and responds to international reports, said in a letter to Human Rights Watch that torture and extrajudicial procedures are illegal under Kurdish law.

"Officers accused to be mistreating prisoners action will be taken to follow up on their misconduct in the court of law,"  he wrote in a Jan. 17 statement on his Twitter account.

On Thursday, an employee of the reformatory, who declined to give his name, said that only about 60 boys are being held in the facility at the moment. USA TODAY was barred access to the facility to confirm that figure.

When families come out of areas controlled by Islamic State militants, their names are checked against a list of tens of thousands of suspected collaborators. The Kurdish and Iraqi governments keep their own lists. Both governments also rely on civilian informants to apprehend suspects.

USA TODAY spoke with a dozen Sunni Arab families in the Dibaga refugee camp, whose relatives have been taken by Asayish, including the mothers of two underage boys at the reformatory.

Most families said the informants were neighbors with whom they had past disputes.

One mother said she was able to see her 16-year-old son but only with Asayish supervision so he could not speak to her freely. He told her he was doing fine but the other detainees she saw looked worse. She asked that her name not be used for fear of reprisals against her son.

She added that she also visited her brother-in-law at an Asayish facility for adults and saw restraint marks on his arms. He was haggard and skinny and looked like he had been tortured, she said.