Missing for Three Years in Iraq’s Prisons

by Karen Button

Assaf Hunaihin Salih al-Jumeili is a well-dressed man with a serious face and very sad eyes. We met at the Cairo Tribunal on Bush, Blair and Sharon; he had been looking my way trying to catch my eye, but focused on the proceedings and assuming he was looking for someone else, at first I didn’t respond. At a break, he motioned me over as I walked by and, puzzled, I sat down next to him. On his lap were several folded papers sitting atop a Koran. Opening the papers, he shows me a letter to the International Red Cross in Egypt he’d written on behalf of his only son, Aysser Assaf, who disappeared at the beginning of April 2003.

Umm Qasr is a port town, which sits on the border of Kuwait in southern Iraq. In the nearby desert, American forces set up the now notorious Bucca Camp where several US soldiers were accused of abusing prisoners as early as May 2003 (long before the Abu Ghraib revelations), and where frustrated US military personnel regularly complained, all the way up to Rumsfeld, about the lack of facilities, training and leadership.

Named after a New York firefighter and Army Reservist who died in the World Trade Center, Camp Bucca was originally set up as a temporary prisoner-of-war camp and was closed by December 2003. The military later re-opened it to accommodate overflow from Abu Ghraib. There are no accurate figures on how many are being detained in Iraq, but it is believed to be tens of thousands.

Between 7,000 and 8,000 prisoners were once held at the Camp Bucca alone; it is believed the number now stands between 5,000 and 6,000.

After his son’s disappearance, Assaf Hunaihin traveled to the closest prison facility, as many families do when a relative disappears, and found his son’s name on a list maintained by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) of Bucca detainees.



“That was April 3, 2003 and that’s the last we ever knew. My son can’t be located. I’ve written to everyone I was told to.” Hoping to would find his son in another detention camp, Assaf tirelessly followed every lead he got.

“I went to the ICRC offices in Basrah seven times, to Nasriyeh three times and I even visited their offices in Baghdad nine times before it was bombed and closed. I went to the US CMCC [Civil-Military Coordination Center] office in Baghdad and filled out the forms they asked me to, and also to the Baghdad Airport prison and Abu Ghraib. I’ve heard no response from any of them.”

Assaf, an attorney, was eventually approached by the families of two other young men who were detained at the same time, Muiah Rashid Resn and Yasser Hamid Ahmed, to represent them as well.

“I was told that maybe my son had been taken to one of the secret US prisons in Jordan, Kuwait or United Arab Emirates…that he was probably no longer in Iraq.” Assaf and his wife and moved from Basrah to Baghdad because of the offices located there, which they hoped could help.

“Even though I have a number that was assigned to him by the Americans, no one can find him,” Assaf laments. “We don’t know if he’s been charged with anything, we don’t know anything, for three years now!”

Unfortunately, it’s an all too common story. Last year the International Red Cross reported that the US holds 70 – 90 percent of Iraqi detainees without cause. This doesn’t even take in to account the numbers who’ve disappeared in Iraqi government prisons.

“The families planned a delegation of lawyers to go outside Iraq and raise this issue of prisoners. Of course, we went to the Iraqi Bar Association for official representation; they, in turn, asked the new government for their permission.”

Instead, the US-backed Iraqi government dissolved the Bar Association, which had maintained its pre-invasion leadership. When asked if he thinks there was any correlation, Assaf shrugs his shoulders, “We don’t know these things. The Union of International Lawyers is supposed to supervise new elections on March 16. But of course, the government doesn’t agree with anything that doesn’t speak in their voice.”

“Now, I am my own delegation,” he explains. “This is why I came all the way to Cairo when I heard about the trial.

“First, I am a father, and if there was one chance in a million that I could meet someone who can help me, it’s worth it. My son’s wife and mother told me, ‘We need to know, is he dead or alive. If he’s dead, we just want to know so that we can at least mourn him!”

My eyes fall to the bottom of Assaf’s letter to the International Committee to the Red Cross where he’s written,

I, as a father, a very broken-heart I beg you to help me to know my son’s destiny and
ask you to allow me to see him according to Geneva Treaty about the captives.