Please before you read this you need to read the word “Hoost­age” on Wikipedia

A hostage is a per­son (some­times another entity) which is held by a cap­tor (often a crim­i­nal abduc­tor) in order to com­pel another party (rel­a­tive, employer, gov­ern­ment…) to act, or refrain from act­ing, in a par­tic­u­lar way, often under threat of seri­ous phys­i­cal harm to the hostage(s) after expi­ra­tion of an ultimatum.

- First Doc­u­ment (PDF)
– Sec­ond DOc­u­ment (PDF)

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of sus­pected insur­gents in hopes of “lever­ag­ing” their hus­bands into sur­ren­der, U.S. mil­i­tary doc­u­ments show.

In one case, a secre­tive task force locked up the young mother of a nurs­ing baby, a U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cer reported. In the case of a sec­ond detainee, one Amer­i­can colonel sug­gested to another that they catch her hus­band by tack­ing a note to the family’s door telling him “to come get his wife.”

The issue of female deten­tions in Iraq has taken on a higher pro­file since kid­nap­pers seized Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Jill Car­roll on Jan. 7 and threat­ened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.

The U.S. mil­i­tary on Thurs­day freed five of what it said were 11 women among the 14,000 detainees cur­rently held in the 2 1/2-year-old insur­gency. All were accused of “aid­ing ter­ror­ists or plant­ing explo­sives,” but an Iraqi gov­ern­ment com­mis­sion found that evi­dence was lacking.

Iraqi human rights activist Hind al-Salehi con­tends that U.S. anti-insurgent units, com­ing up empty-handed in raids on sus­pects’ houses, have at times detained wives to pres­sure men into turn­ing them­selves in.

Iraq’s deputy jus­tice min­is­ter, Busho Ibrahim Ali, dis­missed such claims, say­ing hostage-holding was a tac­tic used under the ousted Sad­dam Hus­sein dic­ta­tor­ship, and “we are not Sad­dam.” A U.S. com­mand spokesman in Bagh­dad, Lt. Col. Barry John­son, said only Iraqis who pose an “imper­a­tive threat” are held in long-term U.S.-run deten­tion facil­i­ties.

But doc­u­ments describ­ing two 2004 episodes tell a dif­fer­ent story as far as short-term deten­tions by local U.S. units. The doc­u­ments are among hun­dreds the Pen­ta­gon has released peri­od­i­cally under U.S. court order to meet an Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union request for infor­ma­tion on deten­tion practices.

In one memo, a civil­ian Pen­ta­gon intel­li­gence offi­cer described what hap­pened when he took part in a raid on an Iraqi suspect’s house in Tarmiya, north­west of Bagh­dad, on May 9, 2004. The raid involved Task Force (TF) 6–26, a secre­tive mil­i­tary unit formed to han­dle high-profile targets.

“Dur­ing the pre-operation brief it was rec­om­mended by TF per­son­nel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to lever­age the pri­mary target’s sur­ren­der,” wrote the 14-year vet­eran officer.

He said he objected, but when they raided the house the team leader, a senior sergeant, seized her anyway.

“The 28-year-old woman had three young chil­dren at the house, one being as young as six months and still nurs­ing,” the intel­li­gence offi­cer wrote. She was held for two days and was released after he com­plained, he said.

Like most names in the released doc­u­ments, the officer’s sig­na­ture is blacked out on this for-the-record mem­o­ran­dum about his complaint.

Of this case, com­mand spokesman John­son said he could not judge, months later, the fac­tors that led to the woman’s detention.

The sec­ond episode, in June 2004, is found in sketchy detail in e-mail exchanges among six U.S. Army colonels, dis­cussing an undis­closed num­ber of female detainees held in north­ern Iraq by the Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division.

The first mes­sage, from a mil­i­tary police colonel, advised staff offi­cers of the U.S. north­ern com­mand that the Iraqi police would not take con­trol of the jailed women with­out charges being brought against them.

In a sec­ond e-mail, a com­mand staff offi­cer asked an offi­cer of the unit hold­ing the women, “What are you guys doing to try to get the husband—have you tacked a note on the door and chal­lenged him to come get his wife?”

Two days later, the brigade’s deputy com­man­der advised the higher com­mand, “As each day goes by, I get more input that these gals have some info and/or will result in get­ting the husband.”

He went on, “These ladies fought back extremely hard dur­ing the orig­i­nal deten­tion. They have shown indi­ca­tions of deceit and misinformation.”

The com­mand staff colonel wrote in reply, refer­ring to a com­mand­ing gen­eral, “CG wants the husband.”

The released e-mails stop there, and the women’s even­tual sta­tus could not be imme­di­ately determined.

Of this episode, John­son said, “It is clear the unit believed the females detained had sub­stan­tial knowl­edge of insur­gent activ­ity and war­ranted being held.”

You can read on the same sub­ject here