Authoritarian governments seek to use terrorism as a means to compel the people to surrender and submit to their tyranny by spreading a defeatist spirit and submitting to their unjust and tyrannical ideas and demands. The tyrannical regimes use repressive measures that include forms of arrest, torture, assassination, displacement, etc., and this is what is called state terrorism. To carry out this type of terrorism, the state needs a tool that carries out arbitrary acts against people, usually the army, security and intelligence services, and militias. The tyrannical regime uses these tools to control political decisions, plunder wealth, create competencies that serve its greed and tyranny, and helpers and entourage aid in its survival and the survival of its king and throne, as well as to preserve and cover up its robbery of its people and confiscation of its homelands’ wealth, implicit domination of media centers, and intellectual persecution physical persecution, and fabricating or feeding tribal, sectarian, and religious differences to the point of conflict and bloody liquidation, and draining peoples’ energies in destructive regional conflicts and wars.
The inhumane acts practiced by the Asayish forces against peaceful demonstrators in the provinces of the Kurdistan region in recent years were one of the forms of terrorism practiced by the state against the demonstrators. The Asayish forces have arrested, beaten and tortured the demonstrators, as well as fired live bullets to disperse them, which led to the killing and wounding of many. The odd thing is that the demonstrators, who were not politicians but teachers and employees in the region, came out to demand their salaries and overdue financial dues, as well as the resignation of the regional government and the fight against corruption as a result of the region’s suffocating economic crisis. Human Rights Watch documented and mentioned the brutality used against the demonstrators in its annual reports, stating that security forces are obligated to protect the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, and that international law protects the right to peaceful assembly, with restrictions that are only allowed in limited circumstances. The problem is that the regional government has used its security services to protect its interests rather than to protect the citizens, and the security services constantly try to distort the image of the protesters by spreading rumors inciting against them or calling them by many names, such as traitors, agents, or saboteurs, in order to avoid everything that arouses popular and international sympathy for the protesters, and that, in many cases, they deliberately show the presence of losses in the ranks of the security forces in order to tarnish the image of peaceful protesters.
The Asayish apparatus in the city of Sulaymaniyah is a good example of violence. It was responsible for killing many people who disagreed with it, including journalists, university professors, and politicians of the second and third degree who were members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. People who want to know more can read the reports of human rights groups and look at the list of assassinations that have happened in Sulaymaniyah since the Asayish agency was set up. All of these killings were done by an unknown person, even though the Asayish brags about its accuracy and ability to keep Sulaymaniyah safe. to document an assassination in Baghdad against an unknown person There is no doubt that we are all familiar with the daily reality there. However, for many crimes of liquidation against an unknown person to be recorded in a safe city like Sulaymaniyah, which is comparable in size to a neighborhood in a capital like Baghdad, Amman, Damascus, or Riyadh, we have the right to ask: how? What level of stupidity is required for the mind to accept this lie? How can any party remain hidden from the hands of justice and its apparatus for so long? The answer is found in the proverb “Its protector is its thief.”
The brutality of the Asayish forces did not stop within the region only but went beyond that. With the help of the Peshmerga forces, they carried out many forced displacements, demolishing Arab homes and seizing land in Kirkuk and Mosul. Reports issued by Human Rights Watch (2015–2017) were the biggest witness to the practices the brutality of the Kurdish security forces. The goal of these projects is to change the demographic nature of the region, expand the Kurdistan region’s lands, and foster the expansionist spirit of the two parties that control the region. The forced displacement carried out by these forces is a tyrannical act carried out through violence and force in order to protect their interests and policies in the region. The issue was not limited to displacement; these forces began arresting or kidnapping Arab sons and using the absence of their fathers as a trump card to pressure their families to leave the area and save their lives.
Power abuse by security forces in Iraq and the Kurdistan region has become a reality that is difficult to control. Employees of the Asayish have used their authority to serve the two parties (PUK and KDP) in control of the region or to achieve personal goals for members of the same apparatus. For example, in Dohuk, the Asayish forces use the security clearance requirement as a tool to punish those who criticize their ruling political party or stand up to corruption, and the security condition is used as a control tool to get people to vote for the KDP in exchange for approval for a security permit to work in a specific organization or company. Many applicants have been denied employment opportunities and rejected, not because they are harmful and dangerous people, have criminal backgrounds, or lack the necessary qualifications to work, but because they are either politically independent or critical of the policies of the regional government of Kurdistan, or against corruption, or because they are members of other political parties that are not KDP. The role of the Asayish was not limited to serving the party only; there was another type of corruption, which was the use of the powers granted to them to achieve certain gains served by the members of the same apparatus. Such as using some people from the public to get what they want, exposing them, harassing them, or harassing women from outside the Kurdistan region under the guise of security checks, or putting some people in jail because they wouldn’t do what a member of the Asayish wanted them to do.
As Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “The failed ruler produces nothing but emptiness, chaos, and disorder, and gives his citizens nothing but failure, injustice, and humiliation. The system of ruin that has accumulated and entrenched in the joints of the state and the corners of tyrannical governments is unchangeable, It was a fertile environment that the political class and its executioners used to continue oppression, taking away freedoms, cutting tongues, and silencing free mouths that were still tanned under the lashes and speckled tails of tyrants.”