At 6:30pm on Sunday evening, February 17th, 2008, Mr. Johnny Khoshaba Al-Rikany was summarily arrested at his home in the town of Telkaif, without charges, by four men in military uniform. Telkaif is a northern town of the Nineveh Plain, situated in Ninawa Governorate, and south of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Members of Mr. Khoshaba’s family indicated the men who forcibly removed him spoke Kurdish and initially held him under the pretext of wanting him for a few hours because they needed some questions answered at the National Guard station in Telkaif. Family members stated that one of the Kurdish men declared they were Iraqi National Guardsmen.

Johnny Khoshaba’s father went to the National Guard station to provide Johnny with some money and his identification. The men who arrested Johnny never asked for his identification or took any other measure indicating the arrest was lawful, or to even confirm whether they were arresting the correct individual.

Men at the station denied Johnny Khoshaba’s father access or the chance to give his son his identification or to check on his son’s condition while detained.

Afterwards, Johnny was taken from the National Guard facility in Telkaif and relocated to the village of Serkene (located between the city of Dohuk and the town of Sarsink). Once there he was placed in a secret facility where detainees of the Asayesh (secret police of the Kurdistan Regional Government) are held.

By removing him from the Governorate of Ninawa, in the jurisdiction where he resides, and taking him into the Kurdistan Region in Dohuk Governorate, it is clear that KRG authorities are involved, or at least accountable. Placing him in a detention facility outside of Ninawa is in itself highly questionable, and the KRG’s involvement is indicative of their over-reaching in areas outside of their formal jurisdiction.

Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac media sources internationally began covering this story and drawing international attention to the summary arrest, fearing for the life of Mr. Khoshaba. Quite suddenly, Mr. Khoshaba was released on Thursday, February 21st. 1

The Cause for Arrest?

Human rights activists and related minority civil society organizations are working to determine the full nature of the ordeal and the basis for the summary arrest of Mr. Khoshaba. However, it is well known that Johnny Khoshaba is a prolific writer on politically-related developments in the Nineveh Plain and surrounding areas.

Johnny is a writer whose articles are posted on his website, ‘Al-Sarkha’ (The Outcry). He developed a reputation as someone shining light on unethical and corrupt acts by those in positions of responsibility. It appears this may be linked to the cause of his arrest.

More specifically, Mr. Khoshaba regularly reports on injustices and authoritarianism perpetrated by the Kurdistan Regional Government. He wrote critically about the activities of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Finance Minister, Mr. Sarkis Aghajan.

Additionally, he exposed corruption in the Church leadership which has been the beneficiary

of financial largesse from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) through Finance Minister Aghajan.

In his own words, he was arrested for maintaining a website known as ‘The Outcry’. Recent articles explicitly exposed the activities and scrutinized the corruption that has entered the Church leadership in northern Iraq through largesse from the Kurdistan Regional Government. Johnny Khoshaba indicates that instead of refuting the corruption he was exposing, the Church leadership had him summarily arrested by their KDP benefactors.

As part of the conditions of his release, he was required to sign a contract. Mr. Khoshaba states, “The contract was written in Kurdish and was translated to me. The clauses were that I would not write offensively again about the government of Kurdistan, its men and some Christian religious authorities.” 2

Making Sense of a Summary Arrest

The political climate of the Nineveh Plain sits in a delicate balance vis-à-vis larger, but related dynamics in Mosul and Kirkuk. The latter two major population centers are seeing fervent activity by the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in expanding their influence, with a view to direct territorial expansion of the Kurdistan Region.

The Nineveh Plain is an area overwhelmingly dominated by vulnerable ethnic/religious minorities, including Shabaks, Yezidis, and the largest group there, Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriacs. These peoples, through independent, legitimate political groups which represent them, are seeking the establishment of an ‘administrative unit’ in the Nineveh Plain as per Article 125 of the Iraqi Constitution.

This constitutional, federal agenda pursued by the abovementioned minorities is in direct conflict with KRG plans at territorial expansion. The KRG’s constitution specifically identifies the major towns of the Nineveh Plain as part of an expanded Kurdistan Region. Many believe that KRG largesse bestowed on easily threatened religious institutions and leaders is part of a cynical strategy to co-opt religious leaders into KRG efforts at absorbing the Nineveh Plain.

The summary arrest of Mr. Khoshaba and placing him in a secret detention facility in the KRG, is a reflection of the KRG’s willingness to remove and/or eliminate those resisting, or threatening their agenda of territorial expansionism into the Nineveh Plain. It also reaffirms the observations of a growing number of Iraq experts and analysts that the KRG has over-reached and needs to pull back from such patterns of behavior.

This incident is all too common in the Nineveh Plain, whose citizens have been enduring such authoritarianism by the KRG since the liberation of Iraq. What is changing is their willingness to speak out loudly and to take firm stands against the injustices they are suffering.

Will the US listen, however? Will the US see that such KRG actions are a regionally destabilizing variable, and one cause of Christian Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac flight from their homeland in what is effectively now an ethno-religious cleansing from Iraq.