PUK Hands Over 150 IS Detainees in ‘Shady Deal’ with Arab Tribal Leaders

ARK News.. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) on Tuesday, May 19, handed over more than 150 Islamic State (IS) detainees after it struck a controversial deal with the local administration of Kirkuk and tribal leaders in the disputed Kurdish province.

The IS militants were reportedly captured during the battles against the jihadist group between 2014 and 2017. They were in detention of armed forces affiliated with the PUK in Sulaimaniyah, multiple sources confirmed.

Commenting on the issue, which has triggered a debate on social media and the political arena of Kurdistan Region, Abdul Nasir Ahmed, a member of the Kurdistan Region Parliament from the PUK, confirmed that his party has already handed over the IS jihadists “to the local administration of Kirkuk”.

“Why so much pressure on the PUK? We had no other choice. What we are expected to do? Should have we fought them,” Ahmed said, indicating that his party made the deal under pressure, which is interpreted by political commentators as PUK’s compromise on the crucial issue of IS detainees in return for a greater role in Kirkuk administration which is ran by the Iraqi government since October 2017 when a faction within the PUK made another deal with Baghdad to agree on handing over Kirkuk to the federal government.

“Yes, we handed over the Da’esh detainees and we are expecting them to be tried, because not all of them are necessarily [members of] Da’esh,” the PUK lawmaker said, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

He argued that the backlash is not against the handover of the IS detainees, but it rather is “jealousy” about PUK’s “progress”.

In this regard, Nizar Mulla Ghaffar, a member in the Parliament of Kurdistan, on behalf of the Kurdistan Democratic Bloc said that “whoever did not care about the bravery of the Peshmerga before, and who was not ashamed of carrying their name formally and with pictures, he cannot care today about the blood of the martyrs and their sacrifices.”

Ghaffar touched on the case of Mustafa Salimi, the Kurdish political detainee who spent 17 years in Iranian prisons, and managed to escape from Saqqez prison in eastern Kurdistan and arrived in Sulaimaniyah, where he was handed over by the security forces of the National Union to Iran. He said: "What kind of injustice is this !! A Kurdish citizen hands Iran over to death, and ISIS terrorists release them so they can live!"

Source: BasNews

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