Iraqi prime minister visits activist rescued from kidnappers
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhimi visited Ali Al Mikdam in a Baghdad hospital yesterday, after the prominent political activist was rescued from kidnappers.
Mr Al Mikdam was freed by security forces yesterday, the prime minister’s office said.
The activist, who had reportedly received threats, had last been seen in a cafe in the Iraqi capital’s Karrada district on Friday afternoon before his disappearance, local media had reported.
The abduction followed a series of assassinations and disappearances of activists and those critical of the government and powerful Iranbacked groups in the Popular Mobilisation Forces, an umbrella grouping of state-sanctioned militias.
Mr Al Mikdam, a journalist and researcher, was a critic of the Iraqi authorities during mass protests that began in October 2019.
More than 500 people were killed and thousands injured during the violent suppression of the protests.
Following threats, Mr Al Mikdam moved to Istanbul and then Erbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. He returned to Baghdad eight days before his abduction, his mother said on Friday.
“Only two days ago he told me he had received threats and gave me the phone numbers of his friends to contact if anything bad happens to him,” she told AFP.
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the UN’s special envoy to Iraq, also visited Mr Al Mikdam in hospital.
“We salute his courage and determination, and condemn cowardly aggressions that threaten a pillar of democracy: freedom of expression,” she said.
Human rights groups have urged the government to protect its citizens and to hold kidnappers to account.
“The release of Ali Al Mikdam shows the government is capable of finding those who were abducted but there is little willingness to do so,” Ali Al Bayati, a member of the semi-official Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, told The National.
After taking office in May last year, Mr Al Kadhimi promised to bring those responsible for killings and abductions to justice, but with little success to date.