Al-Qaeda detainees escape after daring Iraq prison break

Iraqi security forces locked down areas surrounding two maximum-security prisons near Baghdad on Monday to hunt for escaped inmates after a daring attack set hundreds of detainees free, including many al-Qaeda operatives. The attack is believed to be part of the group's "Breaking the Walls" campaign aimed at freeing imprisoned members.

Militants launched a carefully orchestrated attack on Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons late Sunday with mortars, bombs and gunfire, freeing at least 500 inmates and claiming more than 40 lives.

“The number of escaped inmates has reached 500, most of them were convicted senior members of al-Qaeda and had received death sentences,” Hakim al-Zamili, a senior member of the security and defense committee in parliament, told Reuters.

A frenzy of comments posted on social media, including some Twitter accounts reportedly operated by armed groups, claimed that thousands of prisoners had escaped. The two prisons held an estimated 10,000 detainees, an interior ministry official said.

Abu Ghraib prison, once notorious for the torture of opponents of former dictator Saddam Hussein, gained further disrepute in 2004 when graphic pictures emerged showing prisoners being humiliated and abused by U.S. guards.

So many prisoners were able to escape Abu Ghraib because they were in the prison yard for the communal Iftar meal that ends the daylong fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, said a senior intelligence official.

A statement released by the interior ministry on Monday said that prisoners were still on the loose.

“It’s obviously a terrorist attack carried out by al-Qaeda to free convicted terrorists with al-Qaeda,” one security official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Authorities imposed curfews on both prisons as manhunts got under way. Guards at Taji appeared visibly on edge on Monday, with rifles at the ready and wary police warning motorists not to idle even briefly nearby, the Associated Press reported.

Officials said at least 20 members of the security forces were killed and 40 wounded in the attacks. The justice ministry reported 21 inmates were killed and 25 wounded during subsequent rioting in the prisons.

It was not immediately clear how many of the militants who attacked the prison were killed, wounded or captured.

Al-Qaeda’s Iraq arm, now known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, has been positioning itself as a champion of minority Sunnis disillusioned with the Shiite-led government. It is also pushing to make itself a major player among the Sunni rebels fighting to topple the government in neighboring Syria.

Car bombs were detonated near the entrances to the prisons, while three suicide bombers attacked the Taji prison, a police colonel said. Five roadside bombs also exploded near the prison in Taji.

Fighting continued throughout the night and the situation was eventually brought under control on Monday morning, according to the colonel.

The attacks on the prisons came a year after Al-Qaeda's Iraq front group launched a campaign called “Breaking the Walls” that made freeing its imprisoned members a top priority.

"The first priority in this is releasing Muslim prisoners everywhere, and chasing and eliminating judges and investigators and their guards," said an audio message attributed to the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last year.

Jailbreaks are relatively common in Iraq. A dozen prisoners, including al-Qaeda-linked death row inmates, escaped from the Taji prison in January after seizing guards’ weapons. In September, scores of inmates escaped following clashes at a prison in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit that left 12 people dead.

A surge of violence across Iraq has killed more than 3,000 people since the start of April – and the assaults on the prisons exposed the degree to which security has eroded in the country in recent months.

The spike in bloodshed is intensifying fears of a return to the widespread sectarian killing that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war in 2008.

Iraq has faced years of attacks by militants, but analysts say the fresh upsurge of violence has been fuelled by discontent among members of its Sunni Arab minority, which the Shiite-led government has failed to address.

With the latest attacks, more than 600 people have been killed in violence so far this month and over 2,800 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.

Al Jazeera and wire services