Iraqi officers at a detention facility in the onetime jihadist stronghold of Mosul have continued to torture detainees despite rights defenders' efforts to intervene, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

HRW documented new torture allegations early this year at the Faisaliya prison in northern Iraq, around six months after publishing a report on what it said were "chilling" abuses there and in two nearby facilities.

The rights group said it had reached out about last year's allegations to the Iraqi premier's office, the foreign ministry and the interior ministry, without response.

"If the Iraqi government ignores credible reports of torture, it's no wonder that the abuses persist," said Lama Fakih, HRW's deputy Middle East director.

"What will it take for the authorities to take torture allegations seriously?"

The new reports come from a detainee held in Faisaliya in early 2019.

He described guards beating groups of naked detainees on their feet with plastic piping until they confessed to being affiliated with the Islamic State jihadist group.

The prisoner said guards also waterboarded detainees and suspended them from the ceiling with their hands tied behind their backs.

Faisaliya is located in eastern Mosul, the battered Iraqi city that was IS's de facto capital for three years before security forces recaptured it in late 2017.

Iraq has since tried thousands of its own citizens, as well as hundreds of foreigners, for affiliation to IS.

But rights groups including HRW say the accused are often detained on lofty or circumstantial evidence, their trials do not guarantee due process, and that torture is widespread in Iraq's prison system.

In its Thursday release, HRW said Iraqi judges had "routinely failed" to investigate credible reports of torture in detention.

Earlier this month, it said, Iraq's High Judicial Council told HRW that Iraqi courts had investigated 275 complaints against investigative officers by the end of 2018.

The council said 176 had been "resolved," without providing details of the outcome, while 99 were still being addressed.

Iraq frees Frenchman, says entered Syria to 'support Yazidis'
Baghdad (AFP) April 18, 2019 –

An Iraqi court said Thursday it had released a French national who spent two months in detention after being transferred from war-ravaged Syria as it found no proof he fought there.

Instead, the Baghdad court said, their interrogations had found the unnamed Frenchman travelled to Syria "in support of the Yazidi cause".

In February, the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group handed to Iraqi authorities 13 French nationals caught in IS's dwindling "caliphate" in east Syria.

All 13 were thought to be members of IS's feared contingent of foreign fighters, and Iraqi President Barham Saleh pledged they would be tried "according to Iraqi law".

But as Iraqi prosecutors began investigating, "terrorism" cases were only prepared against 12 nationals.

On Thursday, the Karkh Special Investigations Court for Terrorism Issues in Baghdad announced it "let go one of the 13 accused French nationals due to a lack of evidence".

After months of investigations, the court said, "there was no proof of his involvement in any military activities, and his entry (to Syria) was in support of the Yazidi cause".

During IS's rampage across northern Iraq in 2014, it slaughtered thousands of members of the Yazidi community and seized its women and girls as sex slaves.

The atrocities prompted the US-led coalition to begin a military intervention against IS in Iraq, which it then expanded into Syria by backing a Kurdish-led fighting force.

That force, the Syrian Democratic Forces, attracted hundreds of foreign fighters who wanted to join the fight against IS.

The court found that the French national entered Syria "legally," but did not say which border crossing he used or what exactly he was doing there.

It also remains unclear why the SDF or the US-led coalition handed him over to Iraqi authorities along with suspected jihadists if he had been supporting Yazidis, which would have put him on the other side of the front line against IS.

With the collapse of IS's self-styled "caliphate" last month, dozens of kidnapped Yazidi women and children have been freed.