The US Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, US military documents show.
In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a US intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one US colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."
The issue of female detentions in Iraq has taken on a higher profile since kidnappers seized US journalist Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.
The US military on Thursday freed five of what it said were 11 women among the 14,000 detainees currently held in the two-and-a-half-year-old insurgency. All were accused of "aiding terrorists or planting explosives," but an Iraqi government commission found that evidence was lacking.
Iraqi human rights activist Hind al-Salehi contends that US anti-insurgent units, coming up empty-handed in raids on suspects' houses, have at times detained wives to pressure men into turning themselves in.
Iraq's deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim Ali, dismissed such claims, saying hostage-holding was a tactic used under the ousted Saddam Hussein dictatorship, and "we are not Saddam." A US command spokesman in Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, said only Iraqis who pose an "imperative threat" are held in long-term US-run detention facilities.
But documents describing two 2004 episodes tell a different story. The documents are among hundreds the Pentagon has released periodically under US court order to meet an American Civil Liberties Union request for information on detention practices.
In one memo, a civilian Pentagon intelligence officer described what happened when he took part in a raid on an Iraqi suspect's house in Tarmiya, northwest of Baghdad, on May 9, 2004. The raid involved Task Force (TF) 6-26, a secretive military unit formed to handle high-profile targets.
"During the pre-operation brief it was recommended by TF personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender," wrote the 14-year veteran officer.
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