Letter to Sec. Blinken in Support of Iraqi Dissidents

Dear Secretary Blinken:

On Friday, September 24 in Iraq’s Kurdistan region of Erbil, more than 300 courageous Iraqi dissidents, intellectuals and tribal leaders, both Sunni and Shiite, met to cast aside the hatreds and intolerance of the past and advocate to join the Abraham Accords. Many of these people have worked with the United States, facing down ISIS and Al-Qaeda together with our own troops. They have decided to turn over a new leaf, away from the retrograde forces of prejudice, tyranny, sectarian divisiveness and fear. They have demonstrated total remorse for the mass expulsion of Jews from Iraq and for Iraq’s enmity towards Israel.

Unfortunately, the Iraqi government has responded by issuing arrest warrants for the two valiant members of this gathering who spoke publicly, Sahar al Ta’I, a senior member of Iraq’s Cultural Affairs Ministry, and Wisam al-Harden, a tribal leader who wrote an editorial calling for peace with Israel in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. The Iraqi government has further threatened to identify and arrest all 300 attendees of the conference.

Mr. Secretary, in your September 17 White House address marking the one-year anniversary of the Abraham Accords, you pledged to “continue to build on the successful efforts of the last administration to keep normalization marching forward.” You then outlined three ways to do this, one of which was to “encourage more countries to follow the lead of the Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. We want to widen the circle of peaceful diplomacy because it’s in the interests of countries across the region and around the world for Israel to be treated like any other country. Normalization leads to greater stability, more cooperation, mutual progress – all things the region and the world need very badly right now.”

We are asking you, therefore, to immediately and publicly intervene on behalf of these brave humanitarians facing prison, torture and possibly death at the hands of the Iraqi government. If the government refuses to release these courageous and idealistic individuals, sanctions against individual members of the Iraqi government responsible for these retrograde arrest warrants should be issued.

Thank you very much.

Most respectfully,