BAGHDAD — The Iraqi Interior Ministry ordered police on Tuesday to begin rounding up beggars, homeless and mentally disabled people from the streets of Baghdad and other cities to prevent insurgents from using them as suicide bombers.
The decision, which elicited concern from advocates for the mentally disabled, came nearly three weeks after twin suicide bombings against pet markets. Officials said those blasts were carried out by mentally disabled women who may have been unwitting attackers.
The U.S. military and the Iraqi government have claimed that Sunni insurgents led by al-Qaida in Iraq are increasingly trying to use Iraq’s most vulnerable populations as suicide bombers to avoid raising suspicions or being searched at checkpoints that guard access to many markets, neighborhoods and bridges in the capital.
The people detained in the Baghdad sweep will be handed over to social welfare institutions and psychiatric hospitals that can provide shelter and care for them, Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.
“This will be implemented nationwide starting today,” Khalaf said.
“Militant groups, like al-Qaida in Iraq, have started exploiting these people in the worst way to kill innocent victims because they do not raise suspicions,” Khalaf said. “These groups are either luring those who are desperate for money to help them in their attacks or making use of their poor mental condition to use them as suicide bombers.”
The U.S. military said it understood the Interior Ministry intends to transfer those taken into custody to the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry.
Laurie Ahern, the associate director of the Washington, D.C.-based Mental Disability Rights International, expressed concern that Iraqi authorities might be casting “an awful wide net.”
She noted that insurgents were recruiting women and children in increasing numbers, but said no one should suggest detaining them.
“To round up a group of people based on a disability … I’m not sure that’s the best way to handle the situation,” Ahern said.
Also Tuesday, as many as 15 Iraqi police officers responding to an attack against U.S. bases were killed when rockets, set to be launched from the back of a truck, exploded before the officers could defuse them, officials said.
Four U.S. soldiers were wounded when the initial rockets slammed into their outposts in Baghdad, the military said.
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