Justice before politics

last updated 8 January 2015

Soroe, Denmark

An Iraqi military defector who was planning to lead an insurrection against Saddam Hussein was detained last week on suspicion of war crimes. Nizar Khazraji was a popular war hero and one of Saddam’s most trusted generals until the Gulf War, when he angered the dictator by opposing the invasion of Kuwait. A few years later he fled to Denmark, where he was spotted by Kurdish refugees who accused him of helping to plan Saddam’s 1988 slaughter of the Kurds. Kurdish leaders maintain that Khazraji was not involved in that atrocity, but Danish prosecutors have ordered him to stay in the country pending an investigation. Khazraji says their timing could not be worse. He wants to travel to U.N.-controlled northern Iraq, where he says thousands of disenchanted soldiers are waiting to help him overthrow Saddam. “If we manage to gain control of one army unit,” he told The Washington Post, “it’s going to snowball.” As things stand, he could be stuck in Scandinavia for a year.