Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Ramadan 17, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Iraqi authorities slowly untangle IS bureaucratic legacy

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KHAZER: Bushra Mohammed married two years ago in her hometown of Mosul and bore a child last spring but as far as the Iraqi state is concerned she is single and her son does not exist.


Bushra is one of thousands of Iraqis emerging from more than two years of IS rule to find themselves in legal limbo: neither her marriage nor her son’s birth certificate issued by the militants are recognised by the Iraqi government.


As Iraqi forces retake territory from the militants, the state is working to reverse the bureaucratic legacy of IS, which subjected millions to its rule after seizing large parts of Iraq during the summer of 2014.


At a makeshift court housed in a cluster of portacabins at a camp for the displaced in Khazer near Mosul, Iraqi bureaucrats are busily converting certificates issued by the self-declared caliphate into official government documents.


“We are changing them so that we can feel like citizens again,” said 20-year-old Bushra, her infant child tugging at the bottom of her abaya. “(IS) are not a state: this is a state.”


Despite the violence and privation that came with IS rule, life went on in Mosul and other areas controlled by the militants: people married, had children, divorced and died.


Outside the portacabin court, displaced Iraqis clutch IS documents as proof not only of their rites of passage, but also of the sophisticated bureaucracy the militants ran in their ambition to create a state.


“We don’t recognise Daesh (IS) procedures,” said judge Khalid al Shammari, his suit and tie incongruous with the spartan portacabin in which he sits. “We are emergency judges, like you have emergency doctors. These are exceptional circumstances.”


Untangling IS’s bureaucratic legacy is proving complex though. Even proving identities is complicated by the fact most of those displaced by the fighting don’t have national ID cards because the authorities in the Kurdish region where the camp is located have taken them away for security purposes.


Divorces pose a particular challenge as Iraqi law demands that both wife and husband be present to terminate a marriage. But couples who separated while under IS rule often end up fleeing in different directions. “Sometimes one is liberated and the other is still in an area controlled by IS,” judge Shammari said.


The procedures for registering deaths are particularly stringent to prevent people taking advantage of the chaos to fake their own deaths so they can escape justice, or claim inheritances before time, the judge said.


Marwa Salem is running up against those obstacles as she tries to register the death of her father, who she said was killed by IS for cooperating with the Kurdish security services.


The militants dumped his body on the outskirts of the village where they lived near Mosul and gave his family a receipt for his death.


Before his death can be recognised by the Iraqi authorities, she must take the case to another court that deals with terrorism cases in a different city, but people staying in the camp are not permitted to leave for now. — Reuters


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