Transitional justice is an important and decisive phase for societies liberated from a long era of dictatorial or sectarian rule. When transitional justice is not achieved, society will suffer violent chain reactions among the different social groups. In many cases, the relationship between the executioner and the victim is reversed, and the acts of revenge and retribution breed other violations that intensify and deepen the waves of violence in the country. All this started happening in Iraq after 2003.

The goals of transitional justice go beyond trial and punishment for the perpetrators of heinous massacres. They include a whole project with the aim of reaching national reconciliation in a country where trust between the different sects and between the people and state institutions has been lost. Transitional justice should compensate the people of different sects who have been harmed, commemorating the massacres, seeking the truth about human rights violations and paving the way for a more peaceful future in which they are not repeated.

In Iraq, although the perpetrators of heinous crimes against humanity during the Baathist rule were prosecuted, the other measures necessary to fully implement transitional justice failed. Some illegal and arbitrary measures still stand from the days of the previous rule in the modern Iraqi state. There have been several reports about mass arrests in Sunni states or arbitrary shelling on regions from which shots were fired at the military forces.

Sheikh Abdel Sattar Abdul Jabbar, the imam of the Abu Hanifa Mosque in the Al-Azamiyah district of Baghdad, told Al-Monitor, “We were not happy with the mass arrests during the days of [former President] Saddam Hussein. Yet, history is repeating itself in our Sunni regions. Detained people are jailed without trial and some of them are only released after their families pay large amounts of money to the officers in charge.”