Four years after the Tishreen massacres.. The killer is free and hundreds of wounded without care

Four years after the October 2019 demonstrations, which began to end the corruption system that brought a quarter of the country’s population to the brink of poverty, those involved in the killings escaped punishment, the database of victims disappeared, and the wounded continued to suffer in silence.

“He sat in front of me, 70 meters away. He took a ready position as he pointed the barrel of his rifle at me, this is how 33-year-old Haider Al-Basha describes the last moments of being hit by a smoke bullet during the tishreen demonstrations led by Iraqi youth against the corruption of the country’s successive governments.

This was on November 22, 2019, on Al-Ahrar Bridge in the center of the capital, Baghdad. He remembers those moments well, specifically the injury that caused him to lose one of his eyes. He says with trembling words: “I will never forget that day. Now, 4 years after the October demonstrations, Haider is sitting on a wooden chair in the Ridha Alwan Café, in the Karrada area in central Baghdad, wearing dark glasses that he did not take off throughout his conversation with us.

Haider told the story of his injury, “The clashes were very violent that day between the demonstrators and the riot control forces, and we were busy moving the victims and wounded by tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled motorcycle), to the field hospital that had been established by the demonstrators on Al-Rashid Street near Tahrir Square.”

Haider, who is the father of one daughter, continues his speech, “I was with a group of volunteer paramedics on the Ahrar Bridge. We treated 26 wounded demonstrators, and I did not know that I would be the number 27.” He says while breathing deeply: “I was hit in the head by a smoke grende fired by a member of the riot forces. Directly, his motive was to kill me, but God’s will differently.”

“I did not faint at that moment. I was taken to the demonstrators’ hospital, and from there I was transferred in a tuk-tuk to the Neurological Hospital in central Baghdad. Before entering the operating room, I lost consciousness. After 48 hours, I woke up and realized that I had lost my right eye.”

The tishreen demonstrations ended after the overthrow of the government of former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, and after the killing of more than 550 demonstrators, most of them young people, and the injury of more than twenty thousand others, without changing the “corruption system,” which led to the deterioration of services and the high rates of poverty especially in the southern governorates ruled by Shia Islamic forces, which it exceeded 50%, according to official figures.

A year later, Haider Al-Pasha traveled to the Iranian capital, Tehran, to perform an “eye extraction” operation with the support of “civil society organizations” that covered his treatment for $5,000. In mid-2020, he joined the “Supporting the Wounded of Tishreen” volunteer team, which succeeded in performing surgical operations for 20 demonstrators inside and outside Iraq.

The wounded young man filed a lawsuit in the Rusafa Court against the Ministry of Interior/Riot Forces, but the case was closed without any result.

Dhaher Al- Ghze, another injured victim of the Tishreen demonstrations, was hit by a Smoke grenade in the head area near Al-Haboubi Square in center of Nasiriyah (360 km south of Baghdad), the center of the Dhi Qar oil governorate, where half the population suffers from poverty.

During the demonstrations in Baghdad and the cities of the south, as the number of victims of smoke grenade rose, the protesters’ voices rose loudly against what they described as “systematic violence and direct orders to kill,” which caused dozens of victims to fall with bullets and bombs directed at their heads.

Al-Ghze says: “I left my job and participated in the demonstrations to protest corruption, injustice and deprivation and to change our poor social, economic and political situation, but unfortunately we were facing armed militias that insisted on killing us without mercy.”

The demonstrator, who lost many of his friends, continues: “On January 26, 2020, I was injured in the head area and transferred to Al-Hussein Teaching Hospital. The injury caused my left jaw to be shattered and teeth broken, in addition to damage to the nerves in the neck and the nerves in the left eye.”

Dhaher miraculously escaped death, “In more than one medical examination in Nasiriyah, the doctors showed their inability to perform operations. Six months later, I met the Minister of Health at the time, Hassan Al-Tamimi, who transferred me to the Martyr Ghazi Al-Hariri Hospital in the Medical City in Baghdad. After completing the examinations, the medical staff told me sarcastically: You do not need an operation, as there is no trace of your hit.”

The wounded young man opened his phone, displaying pictures and messages of his wounded friends, full of expressions showing their suffering due to negligence. He added, “We did not receive adequate medical care and were not included in treatment outside the country. Many of the wounded do not have a taxi fare to go to Baghdad for treatment, and I am one of them.”

Dhahir recalls his fellow demonstrator Anas Malek al-Ghze, who died in June 2021, as he says, as a result of medical negligence after being shot on the AL-Zaetoon Bridge in central Nasiriyah. “He left behind a wife and four children.”

On January 12, 2022, Human Rights Watch stated that there had been no legal accountability in the cases of killing, maiming, and disappearance of demonstrators in Iraq, which the organization had investigated, even for high-profile assassinations, noting that the process of compensating the victims was slow and cumbersome.

As Al-Sudani as predecessors

Weeks after the Iraqi Parliament granted confidence to the government of Prime Minister mohamed shia Al-sudani on October 27, 2022, he met with a group of those wounded in the Tishreen demonstrations, and, following the path of his predecessor Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, He assure the investigation into the files of those killed and wounded in October.

During the meeting, Al-Sudani called for completing investigations into the events that accompanied the demonstrations, and activating the Diwani Order Committee (293) for the victims of the demonstrators and security forces, which is the same committee formed by Al-Kadhimi.

In a letter from the office of Prime Minister Muhammad Shia al-Sudani to Amnesty International, the Prime Minister’s Office outlined the measures taken by the fact-finding committee, including “auditing more than 215 cases obtained from the Central Investigation Court in Rusafa and reviewing more than 5,375 official documents including Medical reports, autopsy forms for victims, and reports from forensic experts, and the committee is still continuing to scrutinize documents received from the courts of appeal.”

About a year after that letter, there has been no announced progress in the investigative files of the victims.

Medical trips and compensation

More than four years have passed since the killing of demonstrator Mustafa Abdel Hussein Al-Aboudi (30 years old) near the Nasiriyah Police Directorate building in central Dhi Qar Governorate, without opening an   investigation or even collecting evidence to determine the identity of the perpetrators.

This happened at five o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, November 29, 2019, when a sniper’s bullet hit his head as he tried to evacuate a wounded demonstrator near the Police Directorate building.

This young man, before the demonstrations, was fighting within the Ali al-Akbar Brigade affiliated with the Hussein Shrine, one of the formations al hashd al shaabi, in order to liberate western Iraq from the ISIS. “And when he came out demanding an end to corruption and the restoration of his rights as a citizen, they killed him,” this is how his younger brother Murtada sums up his brother years of life.

Murtada reveals that his family received a compensation sum from the government of former Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, amounting to ten million dinars ($6,600), with the allocation of a residential plot of land and a monthly salary estimated at one million two hundred thousand dinars ($800).

Compensation for the families of the victims of the Tishreen demonstrations came in implementation of the Council of Ministers’ decision issued on August 21, 2020, to include them in the Law on Compensation for Those Affected by Military Operations, Military Errors, and Terrorist Operations, No. (20) Of 2009, with the rights and privileges it entails.

The financial and in-kind compensation that the victims received included retirement salaries and compensatory sums of money for the injured, according to government data.

Haider Al-Basha received financial compensation amounting to 14 million dinars and a monthly salary of 800 thousand dinars, most of which he spent to continue his medical journey, but he pointed out that dozens of the wounded have not received any rights yet, and some of them had their files recorded as injuries outside the demonstration, and he This is also confirmed by the wounded demonstrator, Dhaher al-Ghze, who has not received any financial compensation yet.

The most of patients describe these compensations as simple, especially given the high costs of treatment, some of which require ongoing treatment and care.

Muhammad Al-Ukaili, a young man from Dhi Qar, was shot after participating in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in the center of the capital, Baghdad, in October 2019, causing him to be partially paralyzed and using a wheelchair.

The 23-year-old young man was among 12 wounded people who traveled to Germany on April 8, 2022, to receive treatment, after a promise made to him and a number of his colleagues by former Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, when they met him on September 8, 2021.

However, they were surprised that the trip was limited to conducting examinations and assesses the health condition and provides medical and surgical advice without performing any surgery to improve the condition of the wounded.

Al-Ukaili says: “The trip for which the government allocated nearly 4 billion dinars failed, and most of the wounded returned to Iraq, but some submitted asylum applications in Germany in the hope of obtaining permanent treatment and care there.”

The medical trip to Germany was not the first, it was preceded by two medical trips to India and Turkey in the years 2020 and 2021, which included 33 injured people. Some of them received treatment, their health condition improved, while attempts to treat others failed due to the severity of the injury to which they were exposed.

Accused in military uniform

In Safaa Al-Saray family home in Baghdad, who was killed by a direct hit in his head with a tear gas grenade during the demonstrations of October 28, 2019, and his friends consider him an “icon of Tishreen”.

 The author of the investigation met his brother, “Bahaa” who accused the government of killings his brother Safaa.

Bahaa says that the government of former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi tried to suppress the demonstrations by using all available force, and deployed militia members wearing military clothing to prevent the demonstrators from approaching or storming the Green Zone, which includes government buildings and the residence of the diplomatic missions.

Al-Saray estimates the number of demonstrators killed inside and outside the protest at about 800 people, and he believes that “the security services deliberately documented some of the dead as victims of incidents of tribal violence or criminal killing in an attempt to evade legal accountability and obscure the identity of the perpetrators.”

The popular movement, which was concentrated in Baghdad and the in the south, began in early October 2019 with calls for protest launched by young activists via social media, and expanded quickly which surprise the Shia forces, whom the demonstrators accused of “corruption and dependency to the outside” and later described it after the killings With the “government of snipers.”

The movement succeeded in overthrowing the government of Adel Abdul Mahdi, and another was formed headed by Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, but the demonstrations continued sporadically in Baghdad and a few southern cities, especially Nasiriyah, to pressure to improve services, fight corruption, and prosecute those involved in killing demonstrators.

Inaccurate government figures

On July 30, 2020, during a press conference, the government announced the death numbers in the protests, setting it at 560 dead, including 18 members of the security forces.

Activists questioned the number of casualties announced by the government, especially with its neglect of the number of wounded, at a time when the author of the investigation obtained documents issued by the Independent High Commission for Human Rights and the Ministry of Health, revealing a higher number.

The documents showed a discrepancy between the numbers announced by the government and those officially registered by UNHCR and the Ministry of Health, which rely on death certificates given to the families of the victims, indicating that there are victims whose deaths have not been documented.

The documents, which extend from the beginning of October 2019, until March 9, 2021, count the killing of 573 demonstrators in 12 governorates: 287 of them in Baghdad, 121 in Dhi Qar, 41 in Basra, 39 in Najaf, 25 in Maysan, 20 in Diwaniyah and 40 In Diyala, Wasit, Babylon, Karbala and Sulaymaniyah.

In addition, 17 members of the security services were killed in Basra, Dhi Qar, Diwaniyah, and Baghdad.

The documents also reveal the assassination of 34 demonstrators outside the sit-in and demonstration areas, 29 of them in Baghdad, Maysan, Dhi Qar, and Basra, and the others in Wasit, Diwaniyah, and Karbala, including journalist Ahmed Abdel Samad and his photographer Safaa Ghali, who were assassinated on January 10, 2020 in Basra.

Before the assassination, Ahmed Abdel Samad had posted a video on his social media, he talked about the threats he received from militias because of his criticism of factions and parties supported by Iran.

Abdel Samad said at the time that he was receiving veiled threats because he crossed “red lines related to Iran, armed militias, and parties.”

According to statistics, 26 demonstrators survived assassination attempts that occurred in the governorates of Maysan, Dhi Qar, Baghdad, and Babil.

The father of activist Salah al-Iraqi, who was assassinated in the ” Baghdad Al-Jideda” on December 15, 2020, says that his murdered son’s case was registered against an unidentified “terrorist” members, in the Rusafa Court, and his name was not included in the lists of Tishreen victims, and his family did not obtain any rights. “This is what happened even though my son was one of the most prominent activists in Tahrir Square.”

The official of the Demonstrations Martyrs Committee at the Iraqi Martyrs Foundation, Ali Jassim, confirms that a number of activists who were assassinated in the capital, Baghdad, as a result of their participation in the protests, were not included in the lists of victims, and their files were treated as victims of terrorist and criminal operations that had nothing to do with the demonstrations, despite the victims’ families’ evidence proving their participation in the protests.

In conjunction with the government’s failure to acknowledge dozens of murder victims who participated in the Tishreen demonstrations and their aftermath, the government of Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, and then the government of mohamed Shia Al-sudani, neglected the file of treating thousands of wounded who fell in the demonstration fields.

According to the documents, the number of injured people from the beginning of October 2019 reached 21,108 demonstrators, while the number of injured members of the security forces reached 4,766, and the number of detainees reached 3165 , some of whom spent months in detention.

The Tishreen Wounded Association, which is run by a group of activists, stated that it “documented the presence of 1,713 wounded demonstrators with permanent disabilities, including cases that were medically described as critical.”

According to the documents, the number of missing and kidnapped demonstrators reached 76 people, 22 of them released later, while the fate of the others remains unknown until today, including the lawyer Ali Jaseb from Maysan, and the activist in the Nasiriyah protests, Sajjad Al-Iraqi, who disappeared on the evening of September 20, 2020.

Women also had a share, as activist Reham Yacoub was assassinated on August 19, 2020, at the age of thirty, by a masked gunman who shot her from a motorcycle, while she was inside her car in Basra. 18 women were injured, five were subjected to assassination attempts, and five others were kidnapped before they were later released.

Four medical personnel, who sometimes intervened to treat and evacuate the wounded from demonstration fields in 12 Iraqi governorates, were also killed, and 158 others were injured with various injuries.

Nine various media institutions were stormed and burned, including Al-Sharqiya, Al-Rasheed, Dijlah, and NRT channels, and 41 journalists and media professionals were subjected to attacks that varied between the confiscation of equipment, arrest, and beatings, while the house of one of them was bombed, which prompted many of them to stop working or flee to the Kurdistan region or to Turkey and Europe.

Covering up the crimes

In mid-March 2024, organizations concerned with freedom of the press learned of the release of the main person involved in the killing of political analyst Hisham Al-Hashemi, an employee in the Interior Ministry who belonged to Kataib Hezbollah, which accused killing of Al-Hashemi, according to a security source.

The news of the release of Al-Hashemi’s killer was not shocking to Tishreen’s and human rights activists in the country especially with increasing influence of armed groups in the government and the state and their ability to liquidate their opponents and critics without being held accountable.

The overwhelming majority of the victims were unable to bring those involved to justice, and the few cases which reached the courts ended without being held accountable, in clear evidence, as activists say, of the “path of impunity” taken by the ruling forces.

The leader of the protests and General Secretary of the ALbait ALwatiny Hussein Al-Gharabi, says that almost all incidents of get rid of demonstrators passed without holding the perpetrators accountable or even revealing their identities, accusing the government of deliberately covering up the crime.

Al-Gharabi explains that the popular forces that emerged from October do not trust the official figures announced by the government regarding the numbers of victims, so independent human rights organizations undertook this task.

The ineffective judicial system

The family of the dead demonstrator, Mustafa Al-Aboudi, filed a complaint with the Al-Thawra Police Station located in central Nasiriyah in early January 2020, which was submitted to the Dhi Qar Investigation Court, but the decision on it was postponed several times by an order from the influential officials in Baghdad, as Murtada, brother of the dead demonstrator said.

He continues: “The court dismissed such cases and closed them in coordination with the parties in power,” revealing that his family received attempts from party representatives to give up their personal rights, “but the family refused to respond to those calls.”

Murtada confirms that the families of the victims have evidence improving the involvement of the security services in killing demonstrators in the city of Nasiriyah, and it has been handed over to concerned persons in the Supreme Judicial Council. He added, “But they did not rely on it and released many of the defendants who were arrested.”

He believes that the Al-Kadhimi government, like the Al-Sudani government, did not show any seriousness in holding the killers accountable, and that security officials deliberately distorted or procrastinated the course of the cases and then closed the cases “so that the parties behind the liquidation operations that targeted the protesters would not be exposed.”

Mortada reveals that the families of the killed have filed 152 cases, while those wounded in the demonstrations have filed 900 cases, for which no rulings have been issued.

In a report issued in June 2022, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) was only able to determine that since May 2021 four “unidentified armed elements” and six members of the security forces had been convicted of targeted shootings, killings, and kidnappings.

The report added: “The International Assistance Mission for Iraq/Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was unable to identify any other cases that had passed the investigation stage.”

Without evidences

As happened in Dhi Qar with the Murtada family, the same thing happened in the capital, Baghdad, with the family of the slain protester, Safaa Al-Saray, who filed a lawsuit at the Al-Saadoun Police Station in early November 2019 and the center transferred it to the Central Criminal Court because it was against former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, And the security forces that were stationed on Al-Jumhuriya Bridge on October 28, 2019, the day Safaa was killed.

Although those responsible were identified, Bahaa, Safaa Al-Saray’s brother, followed up on the complaint submitted to the Al-Saadoun Police Station, which is responsible for the geographic area of ​​the accident site, to no avail. In the end, he says, “the case was closed confidentially.”

A one of the lawyers’s team says, “The cases in which specific officers and security personnel are accused are very few, but hundreds of cases are registered against unknown persons and without evidence.” He adds: Like any other case, when the court finds that the case submitted to it  “without sufficient evidence,” it orders it to be halted until evidence emerges, and this is the fate of the many pending cases filed by the families of the dead .

The families of the victims accused the government of procrastinating the trial of the perpetrators, especially after a statement by the Supreme Judicial Council issued on October 4, 2020, which stated: “The Council received an administrative investigation file from the government of Adel Abdul Mahdi, which does not contain specific defendants, nor even a determination of the negligent party in the case.

Actions without results

When Mustafa Al-Kadhimi assumed the presidency of the interim government in May 2020, which was formed to succeed the government of Adel Abdul Mahdi, which resigned following the protests, he pledged to investigate the killing of the demonstrators, and on October 18, 2020, he established a committee in accordance with Diwani Order No. 293 to investigate the facts about the acts of violence and those responsible for the killing.

The committee consisted of (25) investigators, retired judges, and members of the intelligence, national security, and intelligence agencies.

Some investigators classified what was documented by surveillance cameras and military and security calls, while others conducted an investigation with some former government figures in an unannounced manner to uncover the truth of what happened.

The Al-Kadhimi government wanted international investigators to participate in this file, but Iraqi law did not allow this.

On May 28, 2021, the fact-finding committee announced the summoning of 22 officers from the rank of captain to brigade and about 90 policemen and soldiers, some of whom were accused of murder cases and the others were affected and victims, according to the government source.

On February 14, 2021, Al-Kadhimi directed to expedite investigative procedures by the Diwani Order Committee No. 293 of 2020 to find those involved in targeting participants in the Tishreen demonstrations, stressing that the results of the investigations “will be presented publicly.”

After a year, the investigative committee did not reveal any results. This continued until Al-Kadhimi left his position.

Despite all the attempts to contact his office to find out what the committee had reached, they refused to make any statement.

Suspended compensation

In a press conference, the government acknowledged what it called “unjustified violence” against protesters that accompanied the demonstrations, pointing out that the government issued a decision to grant each of the victims’ families an amount of ten million dinars (7,000 US dollars) in compensation.

Former member of the Independent High Commission for Human Rights, Ali Al-Bayati, believes that there is a legal problem in compensating victims of demonstrations based on Compensation Law No. 20 of 2009, which includes victims of terrorism and victims of military errors.

He says that the government “has fallen into a dilemma in not being able to call the killed in the protests as a ‘victims of terrorism’, because that would force it to search for the terrorists at a time when it is talking about the presence of a third party and infiltrators who carried out those killings.”

According to Al-Bayati, counting the victims of the demonstrations as military errors means that the peaceful protest arenas were arenas of war and military operations, and therefore the security services will remain accused of committing crimes against unarmed civilians.

These legal problems forced the Parliament to make adjustment to the compensation law, leading to the formation of a special human rights court for victims of demonstrations to investigate security leaders and officials accused of issuing orders, based on the Commission’s law.

These legal problems supposed to force the Parliament to make adjustment to the compensation law, leading to the formation of a special human rights court for victims of demonstrations to investigate security leaders and officials accused of issuing orders, based on the Commission’s law, according to Al-Bayati’s vision.

But all of this was not achieved in the context of procrastination of the file with the participation of both wings of the government, the executive and legislative, and with the inability of the judiciary.

Al-Bayati says that the government’s inability to deal with the file of the Tshreen victims was not limited to “the failure to bring those accused of murder to justice, nor to hold accountable the media and social media pages that were inciting the killing by accusing the demonstrators of sabotage and implementing foreign agendas”, “it reached to prosecuting hundreds of activists and pressing false charges against them, such as accusing them of belonging to the Baath Party.”

Ali Al-Bayati mocks these charges, and the sending of some victims’ files to the Accountability and Justice Commission to confirm whether they belong to the banned Baath Party or not! He says, “The ages of most of the demonstrators were not more than twenty years old, and they never knew the Baath era and its regime that ended in Iraq in 2003.”

The fact of the third party

After the demonstrations ended with the change of government, the military spokesman for the former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Major General Yahya Rasoul, attributed the killings and injuries to the security forces incorrectly firing tear gas grenades  and he justifying this with the little experience of those forces in dealing with smoke grenades and sometimes using live ammunition.”

Rasoul did not agree with the theory of the third party and held Abdul Mahdi’s government responsible for what happened in the demonstration arena and the clashes between the security forces and the protesters.

A member of the Security and Defense Committee in the parliament, Mehdi Amerli, agrees with what Rasoul said, that “what happened was the result of uncontrolled reactions from some officers and soldiers who while they were dealing with the protesters.”

According to what Amerli revealed, the testimonies of some officers before the investigative committee “proved that a number of officers dealt with the protesters in a hysterical manner, and opened fire on them without orders.”

But activists in the popular movement, such as Hussein Al-Gharabi, deny what Amerli says, confirming the existence of shooting orders from parties that wanted to use killing to end the demonstrations.

In a televised interview broadcast on November 14, 2019, the former Iraqi Minister of Defense, Najah Hassan Ali Al-Shammari, accused an unnamed third party of killing the demonstrators, denying that military orders had been issued to fire on the protesters in the demonstration squares.

The minister attributed the high number of victims of the demonstrations in 2019 to the security forces use of tear gas grenade that were fired directly at the heads of the demonstrators, in addition to the presence of a third party.

Al-Shammari’s statements formed a cover for subsequent killings and kidnappings of activists, in which the anonymous “third party” was responsible!

The government protects killers

On the afternoon of February 5, 2020, in “Al-Ahrar Square” in Najaf, which witnessed protests, Muhannad Wameedh Al-Qaisi, 25 years old, was shot dead by members of an armed faction affiliated with the Al-Hashd.

His mother said that he was in that morning in home in the Al-Wafa neighborhood in central Najaf, while armed men stormed the protest arena, but he quickly went there after receiving a call from one of his friends informing him that their tents were set on fire.

As soon as Muhannad entered the arena, a rifle bullet hit him in the chest and he died instantly, according to his mother who left the Iraq.

The mother says that her son has never carried a weapon.

What happened to Muhannad and his fellow demonstrators is linked by writer Ghaith Al-Tamimi to the state’s failure to protect the demonstrators and their families from organized assassinations, and the inability to prosecute those accused of spilling Iraqi blood.

He believes that the file of the Tishreen deaths is one of the files that will cause societal conflicts in the future because of the government’s abandonment of its responsibility to protect citizens, hold the killers, and treat the injured.

Al-Tamimi holds Abdul Mahdi, and the governments that followed him, responsible for not revealing the killers and compensating the victims, noting to that “hundreds of those injured are still suffering from disability and the need for continuous treatment.”

Al-Tamimi points to the absence of a government database of the victims, indicating that the government itself is responsible for not allowing international organizations to count the numbers of victims because they restricted them and did not give them complete freedom to carry out their work,” which led to the inaccuracy of the numbers it announces.

The overwhelming  of the victims of the Tishreen protests belong to the Shia, and mostly come from poor families from the south of the country, where poverty rates in some of its governorates have reached 25% in recent years as a result of the corruptions governments and despite of enormous oil wealth hidden there.

The persecution of the protesters continued after the end of the demonstrations, and assassinations, killings, kidnappings, and human rights violations continued in the government of Mustafa Al-Kadhimi as a result of the state’s inability to hold accountable those responsible for the bloodshed, according to Al-Tamimi, who accused the government of “protecting the killers of the demonstrators and this is what prompts him to call on the international community to intervene to hold the killers accountable and reveal the fate of the disappeared.

With the victims of the Tishreen protests knowing the impossibility of the Iraqi judiciary holding accountable those involved in the killing , the families of five victims filed a complaint in a French court against former Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, on charges of “committing crimes against humanity,” according to a press release from the law firm that is responsible for the lawsuit which explained that the complaint was submitted to the Public Prosecution Office responsible for combating crimes against humanity in the Paris Court, by lawyer Jessica Vinal, in early April 2021.