Frontline police of new Iraq are waging secret war of vengeance

[Crunchy Frog]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1646743,00.html

Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer


Baghdad's Medical Forensic Institute - the mortuary - is a low, modern building reached via a narrow street. Most days it is filled with families of the dead. They come here for two reasons. One group, animated and noisy in grief, comes to collect its dead. The other, however, returns day after day to poke through the new cargoes of corpses ferried in by ambulance, looking for a face or clothes they might recognise. They are the relatives and friends of the 'disappeared', searching for their men. And when the disappeared are finally found, on the streets or in the city's massive rubbish dumps, or in the river, their bodies bear the all-too-telling signs of a savage beating, often with electrical cables, followed by the inevitable bullet to the head. <snip>

According to human rights organisations in Baghdad, 'disappearances' - for long a feature of Iraq's dirty war - have reached epidemic proportions in recent months. Human rights workers, international and local, who asked not to be identified in order to protect their researchers in the city and their organisations' access to senior government officials, told The Observer last week that they have hundreds of cases on their books. They described the disappearances as the most pressing human rights issue in a country that is in the midst of a human rights disaster. <snip>

In retrospect, it would turn out to be a minor abuse in comparison with what would follow. Instead, the roots of the human rights catastrophe that has enveloped the ministry were to be found in the simmering sectarian conflict of tit-for-tat assassinations that had taken hold in Baghdad's vast suburbs. There, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Badr Brigades, had begun a campaign of revenge attacks against former members of the largely Sunni secret police, the mukhabarat, tactics that would be imported wholesale into the Ministry of the Interior when SCIRI - and the Badrists - took control of it after the elections. By the early months of this year, a militia widely accused by Sunnis of a campaign of assassination had become integrated into the newly emergent Special Police Commandos under the command of the ministry, led by a senior member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Bayan Jabr. The Badr Brigade's campaign would become integrated into one of the Iraqi government's most powerful ministries. <snip>

'The origins of what is going on now go back to the period from April to May 2003,' said a British security source. Then members of the Badr Brigades returning from exile in Iran began a vendetta against Baathists, largely former members of the mukhabarat. It is a campaign that has widened as it has continued and what is worrying now is the extent to which it is tacitly sanctioned. By the spring and early summer of this year worrying reports were beginning to emerge of secret interrogation facilities where torture and extrajudicial killings were taking place at sites directly controlled by the Ministry of the Interior or associated with police commando units under its command; a list of alleged sites was published by The Observer. Even then, with the accusations of abuse fully in the open, and with the Foreign Office admitting it had privately relayed its concern about the abuses to the Iraqi government, the policy of the US and the UK was to keep up pressure behind the scenes.


And much, much more.

[Erika]

1. Civil war is taking place

and why are we there?

[Crunchy Frog]

2. I think when we look back on all this,

Saddam's Iraq is going to look like a virtual paradise of peace, prosperity and human rights compared with what that country has in store for it in the future.

Whether we stay there and try to hold off on the inevitable, or whether we cut our losses and get out, it's the Iraqi people who have been screwed beyond belief by this catastrophic decision to go to war.

I just want Bush and all of the neocons to rot in hell for the rest of eternity.

[Sandpiper]

6. Saddam was the strongman who held it all together

By fear and intimidation.

Without him it's falling apart. Even though they're under US occupation, Iraqis know that we won't be there forever.

Our presence there is merely delaying the inevitable.

[countmyvote4real]

3. to ensure that the oil companies get the best deal possible.

I'm sure the * regime will leave when they have secured the deal. It's not like the US would have to stay and overseer such an agreement. Everybody has been so forthright and trustworthy so far.

I am going to puke on my own sarcism.

[Crunchy Frog]

4. I honestly don't see how it's going to be possible

to extract Iraq's oil under any concievable circumstances that will emerge in that country. As long as we're there, there will be an insurgency that will target the oil industry to make sure we can't get any of it. As it is, Iraq can't even produce oil for its own people's needs, let alone substantial quantities for export. I guess that pipe line to Israel isn't going to work out after all.:eyes:

My guess is that even if we pull out completely, it will be a long time before there is enough stability there to export substantial amounts of oil, and even then, I expect that the powers that emerge will not be too friendly to America's wish to exploit Iraq's resources. There is no deal we can make with anyone there that will be enforceable in any way.

I guess one plus to all of this is that it may force Americans to finally begin taking energy conservation seriously.

[countmyvote4real]

5. Shame and greed and market value are very sweet.

I know there is a mathematical term for that, but I am too drunk to think of it.

[me b zola]

7. Tit for tat my ass!!!!!!!!

It is a civil war, and as Erika said above, "Why are we there?"

[leftchick]

8. Another:The Dirty War: Torture and mutilation used on Iraqi 'insurgents'

This is another excellent article on the torture rooms in Iraq by a UK source! Where the hell is the US media?? :grr:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article328158.ece

<snip>


Behind the daily reports of suicide bombings and attacks on coalition forces is a far more shadowy struggle, one that involves tortured prisoners huddled in dungeons, death-squad victims with their hands tied behind their backs, often mutilated with knives and electric drills, and distraught families searching for relations who have been "disappeared".

This hidden struggle surfaced last week when US forces and Iraqi police raided an Interior Ministry bunker only a couple of hundred yards from where we were standing. They found 169 tortured and starving captives, who looked like Holocaust victims. The "disappeared" prisoners were being held, it is claimed, by the Shia Muslim Badr militia, which controls part of the ministry. Bayan Jabr, the Minister of the Interior, is himself a former Badr commander, but the ministry's involvement does not end there: General Adnan's commandos come under its control. So does the Wolf Brigade, which vies with the commandos for the title of most feared.

Baghdad is now a city in the shadow of gunmen. As I left the Hamra to replace what was lost in my bombed room, I had to negotiate checkpoints of the Badr militia, their Shia enemies, the Mehdi Army of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Kurdish peshmerga. The Iraqi police and the government paramilitaries have their own roadblocks.

And there are others: the Shia Defenders of Khadamiya - set up under Hussein al-Sadr, a cousin of Muqtada, who is an ally of the former prime minister Iyad Allawi - and the government-backed Tiger and Scorpion brigades. They all have similar looks: balaclavas or wraparound sunglasses and headbands, black leather gloves with fingers cut off, and a variety of weapons. When not manning checkpoints, they hurtle through the streets in four-wheel drives, scattering the traffic by firing in the air. Out of sight they are