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Wakaz Hassan

Iraq

IN DECEMBER 2015, Wakaz Hassan was being kept in a small former police station at the edge of a village about ten miles from Kirkuk. Along with approximately forty other men being held as suspected terrorists, the former ISIS fighter, now twenty-one, spent almost all his waking hours kneeling in a small and fetid room of the secret prison run by the KRG’s security service, Asayish. On those rare occasions when Wakaz was taken from the communal room, he was handcuffed and blindfolded, with the blindfold only removed when he was securely within another featureless room of the prison compound. In this way, he still had no idea where he was even after three months of captivity.

After being picked up on the streets of Kirkuk in September, Wakaz quickly confessed to having been an ISIS fighter. He provided details of his service, including the six executions he carried out in Mosul. Whether this confession was coerced through torture was impossible to know—in conversation with me in the prison, Wakaz insisted that the Asayish interrogators hadn’t mistreated him in any way, but even tortured prisoners tend to say that when their captors are standing over them. Over the course of our two long interviews, the young man sometimes contradicted himself, perhaps a result of trying to gauge what his questioner and captors might want to hear. That said, there seemed a core candor to his words that perhaps was at least partly due to a stricken conscience.

“I did bad things,” he told me, “and I need to confess to them before God.”

Shortly after his arrest, Wakaz also informed on his brother Mohammed. It took Asayish a month to track down the older Hassan sibling, and he was being held in a different prison near Kirkuk. There had been no contact between the brothers since their arrests, but Wakaz hoped Mohammed was also making a clean slate of things. His main goal now, he said, was to atone for his crimes by helping the authorities identify whichever of his former ISIS comrades were still alive. “If I had a chance to do it over again,” he said, “I never would have joined Daesh. I saw the evil things they did, and I know now that they aren’t true Muslims.”

Despite this professed change of heart, the twenty-one-year-old is clear-eyed about his future. “I have no illusions, and I have no hope,” he told me. “I believe I will spend the rest of my life in prison.”

But Wakaz was basing that belief on the fact that he had been captured by KRG investigators and remained in Kurdish custody. In reality, a grimmer future was being planned for Wakaz, one plainly laid out to me by a senior Asayish officer at the secret prison.

Since the events of June 2014—when the Iraqi army in Kirkuk melted away before the ISIS assault, and the Kurds rushed into the breach—the city has technically been under the joint control of the Iraqis and the Kurds. But this collaboration exists largely on paper. In practice, the Kurdish authorities have little faith in their Iraqi counterparts and see even less reason to cooperate with them on security matters. Nowhere is this separation more evident than on issues relating to ISIS.

Men mourning in Balad, Iraq, 2016

“That’s why we haven’t told the Iraqis about the guys in here,” explained the Asayish official. “If we did, they would demand we hand them over, since most of their crimes were committed on Iraqi territory. Then they would either kill these guys outright or, if some of them are high enough up in the Daesh leadership to arrange a bribe, let them go. We just can’t trust the Iraqis at all.” In light of that, the Asayish plan is to keep Wakaz under wraps and to use him to identify other ISIS fighters they capture and with whom he might have served in the field. Once his usefulness to Asayish comes to an end—and that may not be until after the retaking of Mosul and the trove of ISIS fighters expected to surrender there—Wakaz will be handed over to the Iraqi authorities. At that point, his future will be short and preordained.

“He thinks his life will be saved because we have him, and he knows we don’t execute,” the Asayish officer said. “But Iraq does. The Iraqis will try him in their courts here, and they will give him a death sentence. Then they will transfer him to one of the prisons in Iraq where they do the executions, and he will be hanged.”

When I asked if there was any chance that, because of Wakaz’s assistance in unmasking other ISIS fighters, a judge might show leniency in his case, the Asayish officer quickly shook his head. Or that he could somehow cut a deal to spare his life? The officer pondered briefly, then shook his head even more forcefully.

“If he was senior Daesh, maybe,” he said. “But he is a nobody and poor. So no. No chance.”