Shafaq News/ Iraqi authorities received missing civilian reports from as many as 11,000 families in the past eight years, the war-ravaged country's human rights watchdog said in a report issued on Saturday.
Iraq is one of the countries with the highest number of missing persons in the world. The hundreds of thousands of missing people leave behind families grappling with uncertainty torn between hope and despair waiting for news, sometimes for decades.
Estimates run from 250,000 to one million people missing from decades of conflict and human rights abuses. Today there are millions of relatives of the missing in Iraq who struggle with uncertainty surrounding the fate of a loved one.
According to the report, the 2003 war, subsequent lawlessness, and ubiquitous paramilitary and terrorist groups significantly contributed to the surge in missing people reports.
The negligence of successive Iraqi governments also contributed to piling these reports without any tangible efforts to address them over the past two decades, according to the monitor.
"It seems like this [issue] will never be a priority for the Iraqi state institutions because it has been eight years since thousands of civilians went missing without any knowledge about their fate," the report said.
The monitor's survey suggests that missing people reports were most abundant between 2014 and 2017.
Enforced disappearances are deeply entrenched in Iraq's modern history. With the rise to power by the Baathist regime in the late 1960s, thousands of Iraqis were abducted due to their real or perceived political, ethnic, and religious affiliations.
Following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, again, thousands of Iraqis disappeared after being taken by the Multinational Forces or the Iraqi authorities. Enforced disappearances remained pervasive between 2014 and 2017, following the seizure of large territories by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which targeted ethnic and religious minorities in particular.
In the context of military operations against ISIL, Iraqi security forces as well as different government-affiliated armed groups belonging to the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMU)–an umbrella organization of paramilitary groups initially mobilized in 2014 to fight ISIL– abducted hundreds of people from or living in areas under the ISIS control, most of whom of Sunni Arab identity.
Most recently, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) has documented the widespread targeting of protesters in the 2019-21 anti-government protests, including through enforced disappearances.
Different armed actors have been considered responsible for the attacks, including PMF-affiliated groups. On numerous occasions, Iraqi security forces did not succeed in preventing attacks perpetrated by armed groups with ties to the state–and the government's attempts to pursue accountability for their violations have so far failed.