WASHINGTON – Five detainees who are believed to be American citizens are being held in U.S. military detention facilities in Iraq after their arrests there over the past few months, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.
They are the first Americans taken into custody during the war in Iraq on suspicion of aiding the insurgency or for terrorist activity.
In addition to one detainee with dual U.S.-Jordanian citizenship who was arrested in late October, coalition forces have snared four suspects since April in unrelated cases involving potential insurgent activities throughout Iraq, said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.
Three of those arrested are Iraqi-Americans and one is an Iranian-American who claims he was in Iraq to film footage for a historical documentary.
Defense officials would not identify the detainees by name or divulge where they lived in the United States. It was also unclear Wednesday how involved the detainees were in the actual fight against the coalition.
Whitman said one of the Iraqi-Americans was arrested for “engaging in suspicious activities,” another for alleged involvement in a kidnapping, and the third for “having the knowledge of planning associated with attacks on coalition forces.”
The Jordanian-American, arrested after a search of his Baghdad home in late October, is believed to be a high-ranking associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terrorist network. Officials described him as an emissary with intimate knowledge of and participation in terrorist activities in Iraq.
But in the case of the Iranian-American – 44-year-old Cyrus Kar of Los Angeles – lawyers who are working to return him to the United States argue that he was swept up by mistake as he was traveling through Iraq in a taxi while working on a film documentary about Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian King.
Kar, a native Iranian who served three years in the U.S. Navy, was arrested by Iraqi Security Forces almost immediately after he entered Iraq from Iran on May 17, when soldiers found several washing machine timers in the taxi’s trunk.
Those timers can be used on improvised bombs, military officials said, and are a trademark of insurgents who have launched attacks on coalition forces throughout the country. The soldiers took Kar, his Iranian cameraman and the driver into custody, and Kar eventually landed at Camp Cropper, the highest-level U.S. detention facility in Iraq.
In court papers, Kar’s family members claim that he has been held without reason for nearly two months and that the FBI has cleared him of wrongdoing after searching his home and files and after he apparently passed a lie-detector test. But he remains behind bars in Iraq, without significant contact with the outside world, and with no charges filed against him.
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