On 20 October last, the Presidential Council ratified the us of the death penalty in the cases of 53 death row inmates, including Suleiman Abderraouf, Mohamed Fraj Allah, Adel Mohamed Ali, Nasser Mojib, Yousri Al-Tariqi and Badr Mohamed Ali, six nationals from Arab countries. Eight of the 53, including the Moroccan national Badr Mohammed Ali, were executed on 27 October. Suleiman Abderraouf and the other prisoners may suffer the same fate at any moment.

After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the American and Iraqi authorities made a number of arrests of nationals of Arab countries under suspicion for having come into the country to fight against the occupation forces. The majority of them have been detained in Iraqi prisons and submitted to torture before being brought before exceptional courts and sentenced to heavy punishments or to the death penalty following unfair trials. Very often, confessions have been extracted under torture and constitute the sole pieces of evidence upon which the sentences are based. In the case of Suleiman Abderraouf, he was one of a number of Arab nationals who resided in Iraq before the invasion of 2003 and the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Iran and other countries from the Arab world have intervened in favor of their detained nationals, following which several have been released. The Iraqi authorities have committed to not executing some of the remaining detainees on other Arab nationals.