The US military on Wednesday closed Camp Bucca, an isolated desert prison that was once its largest lockup in Iraq, as it moves to release thousands of detainees or transfer them to Iraqi custody before the end of the year.
The sprawling facility just north of the Kuwaiti border has held thousands of men over the years, including the most dangerous in US custody — Sunni insurgents, Shiite extremists and al-Qaeda in Iraq suspects swept up from battlefields over six years of war.
Iraqi officials say some who have been freed have returned to violence.
“They’ve been vetted as some of the most dangerous threats not only to Iraq, but internationally,” said Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth King, the commander of the Bucca detention facility.
On Wednesday, about a dozen of the remaining 180 detainees — some who have been held for three years without charge — paced in circles around a fenced-in prison yard, dressed in yellow uniforms and sandals under the watch of a guard tower.
One detainee inside a trailer frantically banged on a metal grill covering his window and shouted in Arabic at a group of visiting reporters: “Open the window.”
By midnight, all were to be transferred to either Camp Taji or Camp Cropper just outside Baghdad, the US military’s two remaining detention facilities, while cases are prepared to try to bring them to trial in Iraqi courts. Sixty-five have already been convicted and are awaiting death sentences, said Brigadier General David Quantock, the commander in charge of the detention system.
Iraqi officials in the former insurgent heartland around Fallujah have watched with concern as an influx of ex-detainees from Bucca return to homes in places with few jobs, making them easy prey for militant recruiters.
The US military is racing to empty its detention facilities because a security pact that went into effect in January requires them to either transfer detainees to Iraqi custody for prosecution or release them.
The vast majority — 5,600 since January — have been freed because of a lack of evidence that would be admissible in Iraqi courts and the military’s unwillingness to compromise intelligence sources by bringing them forward as witnesses. About 1,400 have been handed over to Iraqi custody and the US military now holds around 8,400 prisoners.
The closure of Bucca is the first major step in shutting down a detention system that was tainted by the Abu Ghraib scandal.
The facility began as a small tent camp for prisoners of war just after the March 2003 invasion, with little more than concertina wire to keep those captured from escaping.
Coalition troops rolling across the Kuwaiti border immediately set about building the camp and over the next six years it grew into a 16-hectare facility. Named after Ronald Bucca, a former Green Beret and New York fire marshall killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, the camp also houses a forward operating base.
The facility was the target of abuse allegations from detainees and human rights groups, which denounced the holding of detainees there for years without charge. It was also the site of riots, including one in January 2005 in which American guards fired on prisoners, killing four detainees and wounding six others.
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