| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq |
| Iraqi MPs condemn alleged Peshmerga abuses |
| 2017-02-21 |
| [AA.TR] An Iraqi parliamentary committee on human rights One man's rights are another man's existential threat. on Monday demanded that Baghdad and Erbil investigate alleged abuses by Kurdish Peshmerga forces against displaced Sunni-Arab civilians. The demand followed the emergence of a video online purportedly showing Peshmerga forces assaulting Arab civilians who had fled ISIS-held parts of northern Iraq. A Kurdish politician, for his part, said the video portrayed an "isolated incident", which, he asserted, was being exploited by "certain parties" for political purposes. On Saturday, online activists shared a video on Facebook purportedly showing armed fighters -- who activists said were Peshmerga troops -- severely beating Sunni-Arab civilians who had recently fled the ISIS-held al-Hawija district south of djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... "We condemn the brutal treatment meted out by Peshmerga fighters against displaced Arab civilians that occurred in the Molla Abdullah area of Kirkuk province," Abdul-Raheem al-Shammari, chairman of the parliamentary committee, said in a statement. "These acts by Peshmerga forces are a flagrant rights violation against unarmed civilians," he added. Al-Shammari also called for an investigation into the incident by officials in Baghdad and Erbil, the latter of which serves as administrative capital of northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, where the incident allegedly took place. Mohsen al-Saadoun, for his part, a politician for the Kurdistan Alliance party in Iraq’s parliament, said that what appears in the video was an "isolated incident". Nor, he said, did it reflect on the overall performance of Kurdish Peshmerga forces, who, he said, had "provided protection for thousands of displaced Iraqis". |
| Posted by:Fred |