Iraq

The family of Suleiman Kamal, one of nine Badinan Prisoners to stand trial in July, speaks about the situation and upcoming trial of their father and husband. In the upcoming weeks, nine journalists and activists will stand trial for unjust charges. The family members of these activists and journalists hope to see a just trial process and all prisoners released. One of the activists facing trial is Suleiman Kamal Suleiman, a father of four children and the husband of Fatima Haji. Suleiman's eldest son, Amed, told CPT that his father was abducted and arrested on 6 September 2020. Amed reported that his father was accused and unjustly charged with anti-state activism for working with “some of his other friends in a political party called Coalition for Democracy and Justice.”

PRESS RELEASE - 28 June 2021 Christian Peacemaker Teams – Iraqi Kurdistan condemns the final decision of Erbil’s judiciary to deny justice to Badinan activists and journalists. On 27 June 2021, the Court of Cassation in Erbil announced that it upholds the unjust sentencing of the five journalists and civil rights activists Sherwan Sherwani, Guhdar Zebari, Eyaz Karam, Shivan Saeed, and Hariwan Essa, all of whom are from the Badinan region.

On 3 June 2021, the Christian Peacemaker Teams' Iraqi Kurdistan program published a report documenting the impact of the Turkish Armed Forces’ (TAF) Operation Claw-Lightning on the civilian population living in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).  Operation Claw-Lightning is a cross-border military operation that Turkey began on April 23, 2021. This is not the first of its kind as Turkey has conducted a similar strategy multiple times since December 2017 and has advanced 6 to 35 km south of the border in some areas, expanding its territory by building bases and displacing civilians in the Kurdistan Region like Sidakan, Haftanin, and Zap.

Please pray for one hundred Christian and Muslim families who fled their homes this past week because of Turkish bombardments and soldiers invading their lands. Pray that organizations provide help for the families forcefully displaced. And pray that the Turkish invasion ends that people may return home.

Christian Peacemaker Teams – Iraqi Kurdistan condemns the Erbil appeal court's ruling to uphold the six-year prison terms for Badinan journalists and activists.

The border cuts right through our ancestral land in Zagros. It has given us division, landmines, wars, among other atrocities. It has made us Iraqis on one side and Iranians on the other. Even the minerals, the other than human populations of trees, rivers and lakes have been divided that way. There are rivers whose source they claim to be Iranian and whose waters downstream to be Iraqi. So absurd and totalist is that border.

REPORT | On 16 February 2021, the Criminal Court of the First Instance in Erbil found five freelance journalists and civil rights activists guilty of “espionage” and “conspiracy to commit acts that destabilize national security and stability” under Article 1 of Iraqi Kurdistan’s Parliamentary Law No. 21 of 2003. Journalists Sherwan Sherwani, Eyaz Karam and Guhdar Zebari and activists Shivan Saeed and Hariwan Essa were each sentenced to six-year prison terms.