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Iraq Before the UN Human Rights Council: Promises Without Accountability

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Iraq Before the UN Human Rights Council: Promises Without Accountability By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com In January 2025, Iraq appeared before the United Nations Human Rights Council for its fourth Universal Periodic Review — a moment that should have marked a turning point. It did not. The UPR process, designed to hold governments accountable to their international human rights obligations, produced 263 recommendations from 93 countries. Iraq accepted 181 of them. On paper, that looks like progress. In practice, it continues a pattern that anyone who has watched Iraq's human rights record knows well: accept the recommendations, ignore the implementation. What the UN Recommended The recommendations issued to Iraq in January 2025 were not new. Many had appeared in the previous cycle — in 2019 — and in the cycle before that. They included: Imposing a moratorium on executions and ending the use of th...
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Tal Afar After Liberation: A City Without a Future?

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Tal Afar After Liberation: A City Without a Future? By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com When Iraqi forces declared Tal Afar fully liberated from ISIS on September 1, 2017, the celebrations were real. A city that had suffered three years of occupation — massacres, displacement, destruction — was finally free. The Iraqi flag flew again over the ancient Turkmen city in western Nineveh. Five years later, the question is no longer whether Tal Afar was liberated. It is whether liberation meant anything at all for the people who lived there. What ISIS Did to Tal Afar Tal Afar fell to ISIS on June 16, 2014. The city's population — largely Shia and Sunni Turkmen, numbering around 200,000 to 225,000 — was shattered almost overnight. Most fled. Some Sunni Turkmen remained, and a number became implicated in ISIS's war crimes — a wound that still cuts through communal relations today. The Shia Turkmen community...
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