Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report dubbed "Life Without a Father is Meaningless’: Arbitrary Arrests and Enforced Disappearances in Iraq 2014-2017," in which it stated that enforced disappearances in Iraq have been registered since 2014.
The paper, in particular, documents "additional 74 cases of men and four cases of boys detained by Iraqi military and security forces between April 2014 and October 2017 and forcibly disappeared."
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The Iraqi authorities have failed to respond to relevant appeals from relatives and HRW to provide information about the people who have gone missing.
"Despite years of searching, and requests to Iraqi authorities, the government has provided no answers about where they are or if they are even still alive," Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at HRW, said as quoted in the press release.
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The watchdog noted, citing the International Commission on Missing Persons, that the number of missing people in Iraq could range from 250,000 to one million people, while the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) believed that Iraq has the highest number of missing people in the world.
*Daesh — a terrorist group, banned in Russia
