April 09, 2003

Iraqi prisoners detained near Umm Qasr

By Vince Crawley
Times staff writer



U.S.-led coalition forces were holding 7,300 enemy prisoners of war in Iraq as of Wednesday morning, with more being captured daily, and a senior official said a military tribunal would help determine their fate.
However, the official said the military currently has no plans to transfer any enemy prisoners to the U.S. holding facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where fighters from the Afghanistan campaign are housed.

Instead, a U.S.-run facility near the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr would be the rearmost prisoner-of-war camp, said Army Col. John Della Jacono, deputy chief of staff for coalition land forces in Iraq. Although U.S. Central Command has not experienced the wide-scale Iraqi unit surrenders planners had hoped for, the command still has opened what it calls its Theater Internment Facility, or TIF, in Umm Qasr.

Della Jacono spoke to reporters at the Pentagon, as well as in Kuwait City and Qatar, on Wednesday evening Iraqi time in a live satellite video hookup.

U.S. planners originally made preparations for 50,000 or more enemy prisoners, Della Jacono said. However, as the war swiftly progressed over the past three weeks, those plans have been scaled back to a desert tent compound capable of holding about 24,000 prisoners.

In the 1991 Gulf War, more than 80,000 Iraqi prisoners were held by coalition forces before being turned back over to Saddam Hussein’s government. The fate of many of them remains unclear. Della Jacono said he was with the 82nd Airborne Division in the 1991 war, when he also worked with enemy prisoners. In addition, he was in charge of enemy fighters captured during the first nine months of the 2001-02 campaign against Afghanistan’s former Taliban regime.

Once Operation Iraqi Freedom draws to close, Della Jacono said enemy prisoners would be screened by a U.S. tribunal to determine their status. Some would be classified as prisoners of war while others might be classified as civilians who have committed crimes against U.S.-led forces. Prisoners would not be repatriated until an interim Iraqi government is established, he said.

For now, determining who’s who is a challenge for U.S. forces, he said. Relatively few are wearing full military uniforms, and many guerilla fighters have neither uniforms nor identification cards. The United States plans to interview the prisoners to try to identify them.

Among other things, the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War requires that next of kin be notified by the International Committee of the Red Cross when a member of any military becomes a prisoner of war.

Della Jacono said Iraqi prisoners are getting two hot meals per day and would receive prayer mats and copies of the Koran. He said they were being housed in regular military tents, about 15 to 20 prisoners per tent, with officers separated from enlisted members.

Prisoner operations are being handled the by Army’s 800th Military Police Brigade.

Sempers,

Roger