A year on from Lalazar, the Lahur Sheikh Jangi case languishes in court

A year after security forces stormed Lalazar and brought Lahur Sheikh Jangi out after three hours of gunfire, the case against him has produced no verdict and has not left Sulaymaniyah. Its complainants of record are Bafel Talabani, president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and his brother Qubad Talabani, a senior party official and the Kurdistan Region’s deputy prime minister. The forces that carried out the raid are affiliated with their party.

Sheikh Jangi’s lawyers have been trying since the first hearing on Jan. 12 to put the case before the Kurdistan Region’s Court of Cassation in Erbil. On Saturday, as relatives and supporters marked the anniversary with a protest outside the Sulaymaniyah court, the head of the defense team, Burhan Rashid Gulla, said a cassation appeal filed on Oct. 23, 2025, had still not been forwarded. The case, he said, had “remained at a standstill for the entire year.”

What the Sulaymaniyah court did send to Erbil, according to the defense, was a photocopy of the file. It kept the original, and the higher court will not rule on a copy.

The year in between has added a second case, three hearings that ended in adjournment, a fourth that never convened, a brief hunger strike in April, two reports by the region’s human rights commission on the brothers’ detention and a complaint from the defense that its lawyers were told to drop the case. Neither the PUK nor the court has answered the defense’s account of the file in public.

The raid

The operation announced itself on the evening of Aug. 21, 2025. Checkpoints across Sulaymaniyah tightened, the queues at them lengthened and armored vehicles began converging on Sarchinar, the neighborhood on the city’s western edge where the Lalazar complex, a hotel and residence, had served as Sheikh Jangi’s headquarters since he was pushed out of the PUK in 2021.

By 10 p.m. it was clear that the deployment was an operation to arrest him. Security personnel in large numbers surrounded Lalazar, where Sheikh Jangi and several associates were staying. Reinforcements arrived at 1 a.m., and shortly afterward the power was cut to the hotel and to his residence.

Outlets close to the PUK circulated warrants from the Sulaymaniyah Security Investigation Court naming Sheikh Jangi and several associates, among them Salman Amin, the former security official known as Azhi Amin, who was not among those arrested. The charge was criminal conspiracy under Article 56 of the Iraqi Penal Code, which carries up to seven years in prison where the object is a felony. Charges were also brought under Article 406, attempted murder.

Sheikh Jangi told local media he had received no official notice and would surrender only if a warrant was formally served. Shortly after 3 a.m., with the complex surrounded, he appeared in a grainy video from the roof to say he was staying where he was and would not give himself up. Minutes later the shooting started. It went on for roughly three hours, with light and heavy weapons, and could be heard across the city.

Court spokesperson Salah Hassan put the toll at three security personnel killed and 19 wounded, with no civilian casualties reported. A People’s Front official said heavy weapons had been fired into a densely populated district. No full count was ever published for Sheikh Jangi’s side, but two of his fighters were confirmed dead, putting confirmed deaths on both sides at five.

He was taken into custody shortly after dawn, together with Polad, wounded in the leg according to a security official who spoke to AFP, and Rebwar Hamid Haji Ghali, the commander of his forces. Dozens more were detained. By several accounts the arresting force included the Counter Terrorism Group, the unit Sheikh Jangi had run for more than a decade, and video of him being seized was circulating by mid-morning.

The reaction

The Kurdistan Region’s Independent Commission for Human Rights later criticized the scale of the operation, saying counterterrorism and other forces had been sent in with heavy weapons to make arrests that would ordinarily be carried out by police. Using such forces and weapons for arrests, it said, “is more of a military display and a bad reflection on the reputation of the Region.”

Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani said on Aug. 25 that the aftermath had to be handled through legal channels. “What happened, happened,” he said. “What matters is that the legal process continues.”

Kurdistan Regional Government Prime Minister Masrour Barzani called the clashes “an internal dispute between the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the People’s Front,” and his office said the regional government had not been informed until after the fighting began. “Despite many efforts by the prime minister to prevent clashes, unfortunately the attack happened,” its statement said, adding that the law “must replace partisan decisions and violence.”

Four days after the arrest, the human rights commission visited Sheikh Jangi at Kani Goma prison. He told its delegation he was in good health, had a private room and could reach his family by video call, and that he had not been beaten, tortured or forced to confess.

The split

Sheikh Jangi is a nephew of the late Jalal Talabani, the PUK’s founder and Iraq’s former president, and he built his standing inside the party’s security wing, first at the Counter Terrorism Group and then at the Zanyari intelligence agency. In February 2020 he and his cousin Bafel Talabani were named co-presidents of the PUK.

The arrangement lasted less than a year and a half. In July 2021 the party’s security bodies were reorganized around Bafel Talabani and Sheikh Jangi lost the posts on which his influence rested. No court was involved. The co-presidency was abolished in 2022, Bafel Talabani became party president and Sheikh Jangi withdrew to Lalazar with his brothers and the loyalists who stayed with him.

In 2024 he founded the People’s Front and ran it against the PUK in that October’s Kurdistan Region parliamentary election. It won about 33,000 votes and two seats, one of which he took himself. He was an elected member of parliament when the armored vehicles arrived, less than two weeks after the detention in the same city of Shaswar Abdulwahid, leader of the opposition New Generation movement, on defamation charges. Abdulwahid was released in January and has since entered a political alliance with the PUK.

The split was still on display four years on. In the days after the clashes, Bafel Talabani described Sheikh Jangi’s supporters as an “unlawful militia group” that had militarized residential areas and attacked official security forces, endangering civilians and state institutions. The People’s Front rejected the PUK’s account of events.

The complaint

Three days after the raid, PUK-linked media broadcast a recording in which several people described a plan to kill Bafel Talabani and said Sheikh Jangi and Azhi Amin had ordered it. Authorities tied the alleged plot to Sheikh Jangi, Polad, Amin and Haji Ghali. The family and the defense called the recording a script prepared to give the operation political and legal cover.

That is the version that went to court. By the time the trial opened in May, the complainants listed were Bafel Talabani and Qubad Talabani, alleging attempted murder and creating unrest. Defense lawyer Dana Taqiaddin has said his client faces two cases: the Lalazar case under Article 56, in which 12 defendants are charged, and a separate one under Article 406.

A conviction would reach beyond a prison term. An official at the Independent High Electoral Commission told Channel8 last August that under Iraq’s political parties law a convicted party leader has to be replaced. Neither case has reached a verdict.

The file

It took nearly five months to reach a courtroom. In November, after the brothers had been moved to another facility, the human rights commission said they were being kept in a badly ventilated, damp room, and that they were moved again only after its chair wrote to Qubad Talabani.

The first hearing came on Jan. 12, 2026. The judge read the charges, granted a defense motion and suspended proceedings so the file could go to the Court of Cassation. The referral covered Sheikh Jangi, Polad, Haji Ghali and nine other defendants. Sheikh Jangi went back to his cell in Sulaymaniyah; only the paperwork was to travel. The next day Sulaymaniyah security released 17 Lalazar detainees, saying there was not enough evidence to hold them.

The paperwork, the defense says, never properly arrived. A member of the legal team said in April that the Sulaymaniyah court had forwarded a photocopy and kept the original, which the Court of Cassation would not accept as the basis for a ruling. That month the case was sent back to a Sulaymaniyah criminal court for trial, and the Kurdistan Region Presidency, asked about the delay, said it had made inquiries with judicial authorities but that moving a case between courts was a matter for the judiciary alone. Sheikh Jangi and Polad went on hunger strike; the defense said it ended within days after assurances that the case would move, and that another group of detainees had been freed.

The trial opened on May 7 and adjourned the same day, partly because the complainants did not appear and partly because of the volume of documents, Taqiaddin told 964media. A second session a week later heard one witness and adjourned again. Neither Bafel Talabani nor Qubad Talabani attended, and the defense asked that both be summoned for questioning. The witness, a detainee identified as Hama Rash, told the court he had been tortured in custody, according to defense lawyer Aryan Burhan; the defense says the judge should have halted the hearing and ordered a medical examination, and has written to the region’s president, government and judicial council about his treatment.

In the days after that session, Burhan told Kurdistan24 that four members of the defense team had received threats demanding they withdraw, warning that continuing was “not good for them.” A third hearing was set for June 3. It did not take place.

The wait

For the PUK and its supporters the sequence is simple: a court issued a warrant, the wanted men refused it and fired on the forces sent to serve it, and three members of those forces were killed. The court said the day after the raid that the defendants were free to appoint lawyers and to appeal.

Sheikh Jangi’s position, set out through his lawyers on July 23, is that he will stand trial before any court anywhere in the Kurdistan Region, on one condition: that the process be free of party interference.

On Saturday, a year to the day after the arrests, Awat Sheikh Jangi, sister of Lahur and Polad, led a gathering of relatives and supporters outside the Sulaymaniyah court to call for a clear and transparent process for all the Lalazar detainees. “Until now, all of us, the relatives and supporters, have remained patient,” she said. Lahur, she said, was insistent on a resolution and more worried about those arrested with him than about himself; his morale was high. “The law must prevail. They were all arrested without having committed a crime.”

Gulla, speaking at the same gathering, said the defense expected several matters connected to the case to be settled within one to two weeks. If there was neither a settlement nor a transfer of the file to Erbil, he said, the heads of the Judicial Council and the Kurdistan Region should step in.

The complainants did not attend either May session. The original file, by the defense’s account, is still in Sulaymaniyah.