Citing party members, New Generation-affiliated NRT TV reported the arrests. The house of Himdad Shahin, head of the party's Iraq Desk, had also been raided.
Kawa Abdulqadir, a New Generation MP in the Kurdistan Parliament, slammed as arbitrary the arrests made by security forces aligned with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in a statement published by his party's Facebook page on Monday night.
"What the PUK Asayesh [security] is doing is not legally but politically motivated," Abdulqadir said. "This is the third time that the PUK Asayesh has raided the main headquarters of the New Generation without a court order or notification, insulting tens of members of New Generation, torturing them and then arresting them," he added.
He attributed the arrest of his fellow party members to a "political agenda" being carried out by the PUK to undermine the New Generation by "spreading intimidation" and committing "partisan" acts against their members.
The arrests come as the party is faced with a deepening schism after several of its MPs in both the Erbil and Baghdad parliaments said the leadership was betraying its founding ideals late last month, accusing party founder Shaswar Abdulwahid of turning what was founded as a political movement into a family business, undermining its collective decision-making process, and then trying to blackmail dissenters into silence.
A number of political voices outside of the ruling PUK and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) have expressed concern about the arrests, emphasising the need for any potential wrongdoing to be followed up using police and judiciary mechanisms instead of Asayesh raids.
Soran Omar Saeed, member of parliament for the Kurdistan Islamic Group (Komal), said in a Facebook post on May 5 that the raids should be “considered as terror" and that they were "against freedom of political profession.” He added that “if they have something against [those arrested], police and court can do their duty from a position of neutrality.”
The Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) in a May 6 statement said that in order to "avoid political discrimination," potential illegal misconduct should be dealt with via "proper legal and political mechanisms."
The same day, The Freedom Movement of Kurdistan Society (Tevgera Azad) said that by raiding the New Generation offices, the “Kurdistan Region’s authorities … openly say that they do not tolerate criticism and will not allow any political party to speak against the establishment." They also called on the KRG to follow legal procedures in the New Generation case.
Popular Kurdish writer and activist Rebin Hardi called the Asayesh raids an "unreasonable terror" in a May 5 Facebook post. He suggested that the arrests went beyond the allegations of intimidation within New Generation and instead formed part of a wider targeting of political opponents, a "political retaliation against a force whose position you do not like."
The New Generation party had a meteoric rise after its foundation just over a year ago, managing to shake up the Kurdish political scene in the 2018 parliamentary elections by winning eight seats in the 111-seat regional parliament in Erbil and four seats in Baghdad with an explicitly anti-establishment rhetoric targeting the ruling parties.
Security forces earlier arrested Abdulwahid’s secretary shortly after the blackmail allegations emerged.
The party's leadership claimed that the allegations from within its own organization are a plot to destabilize New Generation orchestrated by KDP and PUK, the Kurdistan Region’s two big establishment parties.
New Generation has decided to expel members it deems disloyal, the party’s Supreme Council said in a statement on Sunday.
“After differentiating and determining the loyal people of New Generation … from spies and sellouts, then, through the by-laws of the Movement, sellouts will be punished and fired,” read the Council's statement.
Prior to last Sunday's statement, the party had formed a disciplinary committee to challenge dissent, but the two accused Baghdad MPs, Sarkawt Shams and Raboun Marouf, who kicked off the show down with public criticism of Abdulwahid, failed to attend their hearing on April 29th. They have both since been suspended.
Rudaw reached out to the Sulaimani Asayesh and the spokesperson for the PUK for comment, but they were not immediately available.
