[Peace-discuss] NYT today - Iraqi govt killing Sunnis?

[Ricky Baldwin]

I particularly like paragraphs 7 & 8, where the US is
"working closely" with the "Iraqi" government!

There's another article in the same paper today about
on eof our legislators taking a big fat bribe from a
military contractor.

And this is the Times!
Ricky

November 29, 2005
Sunnis Accuse Iraqi Military of Kidnappings and
Slayings
By DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 28 - As the American military
pushes the largely Shiite Iraqi security services into
a larger role in combating the insurgency, evidence
has begun to mount suggesting that the Iraqi forces
are carrying out executions in predominantly Sunni
neighborhoods.

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have
emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward
by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives
have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without
warrant or explanation.

Some Sunni men have been found dead in ditches and
fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns
on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently
made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

Some of the young men have turned up alive in prison.
In a secret bunker discovered earlier this month in an
Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, American and
Iraqi officials acknowledged that some of the mostly
Sunni inmates appeared to have been tortured.

Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, and other
government officials denied any government
involvement, saying the killings were carried out by
men driving stolen police cars and wearing police and
army uniforms purchased at local markets. "Impossible!
Impossible!" Mr. Jabr said. "That is totally wrong;
it's only rumors; it is nonsense."

Many of the claims of killings and abductions have
been substantiated by at least one human rights
organization working here - which asked not to be
identified because of safety concerns - and documented
by Sunni leaders working in their communities.

American officials, who are overseeing the training of
the Iraqi Army and the police, acknowledge that police
officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with
which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out
killings and abductions in Sunni communities, without
direct American knowledge.

But they also say it is difficult, in an already murky
guerrilla war, to determine exactly who is
responsible. The American officials insisted on
anonymity because they were working closely with the
Iraqi government and did not want to criticize it
publicly.

The widespread conviction among Sunnis that the
Shiite-led government is bent on waging a campaign of
terror against them is sending waves of fear through
the community, just as Iraqi and American officials
are trying to coax the Sunnis to take part in
nationwide elections on Dec. 15.

Sunnis believe that the security forces are carrying
out sectarian reprisals, in part to combat the
insurgency, but also in revenge for years of
repression at the hands of Saddam Hussein's
government.

Ayad Allawi, a prominent Iraqi politician who is close
to the Sunni community, charged in an interview
published Sunday in The London Observer that the Iraqi
government - and the Ministry of Interior in
particular - was condoning torture and running death
squads.

The allegations raise the possibility of the war being
fought here by a set of far messier rules, as the
Americans push more responsibility for fighting it
onto the Iraqis. One worry, expressed repeatedly by
Americans and Iraqis here, is that an abrupt pullout
of American troops could clear the way for a sectarian
war.

One Sunni group taking testimony from families in
Baghdad said it had documented the death or
disappearance of 700 Sunni civilians in the past four
months.

An investigator for the human rights organization said
it had not been able to determine the number of
executions carried out by the Iraqi security forces.
So far, the investigator said, the evidence was
anecdotal, but substantial.

"There is no question that bodies are turning up,"
said the investigator, who agreed to speak on the
condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. "Quite
a few have been handcuffed and shot in the back of the
head."

As an example, the human rights investigator said that
the group had been able to verify that a number of
Sunni men taken from the Baghdad neighborhood of
Huriya and shot to death last August. Relatives of the
dead told the group that more than 30 men had been
taken from their homes by the Iraqi police in what
appeared to be a roundup of Sunni males.

In the Iskan neighborhood in Baghdad, the human rights
group said it had confirmed that 36 Sunni men had been
abducted and killed in the neighborhood in August.
Sunni groups say the men were taken from their homes
by men who identified themselves as intelligence
agents from the Interior Ministry.

"The stories are pretty much consistent across the
board, both in the manner that the men are being
abducted and in who they say is taking them," the
human rights investigator said.

More than 15 Sunni families interviewed for this
article gave similar accounts of people identifying
themselves as Iraqi security forces taking their
relatives away without warrants. The families said
that most of those said to have been abducted were
later found dead.

On Nov. 12, according to the Samarraie family in
Gazalia, a Baghdad neighborhood, a group of masked men
identifying themselves as agents of the Interior
Ministry broke down the family's door. Outside, the
family members said, was a line of white pickup trucks
with machine guns mounted on them.

The men in masks said they were looking for Yasir, 36,
one of the Samarraie brothers, the family said. They
took him away.

"We are intelligence people from the Ministry of the
Interior," one of the men said, according to Yasir's
wife, Wuroud Sami Younis.

A few days later, the police found Yasir's body in an
empty field a couple of neighborhoods away. His skull
was broken, and there were two bullet holes in his
temple, family members said. Officials at the city
morgue confirmed Mr. Yasir's death.

"The government is trying to terrorize and dominate
the Sunni people," said Yasir's brother, Shuhaib.

The claims of direct involvement by the Iraqi security
services are extremely difficult to verify. In a land
where rumor and allegation are commonly used as
political weapons, the truth is difficult to distill.

Mr. Jabr, the interior minister, acknowledged that
many civilians were being killed in Baghdad and around
Iraq, and that some of them were being killed for
sectarian reasons. "When we have cases like that, we
investigate them, and if we can find the culprits we
arrest them," he said.

The chief suspects, according to Sunni leaders, human
rights workers and a well-connected American official
here, are current and former members of the Badr
Brigade, the Iranian-backed militia controlled by the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a
principal part of the current government. Since the
fall of the Hussein government in April 2003, Badr
gunmen are suspected of having assassinated dozens of
its former officials, as well as suspected insurgents.

Since April, when the Shiite-led government came to
power, Badr fighters have joined the security
services, like the police and commando units under the
control of the interior minister, Mr. Jabr, who is
also a senior member of the Supreme Council.

With Badr gunmen operating inside and outside the
government, the militia can act with what appears to
be official backing. It is not clear who is directing
the security services, the government officials or the
heads of the militias.

"The difference between the Ministry of the Interior
and the Badr Brigade has become very blurry," the
human rights investigator said.

"You have these people in the security services, and
they have different masters," said the American
official in Baghdad. "There isn't a clear
understanding of who is in charge."

The alarm in the Sunni community is so great the Um
al-Qura Mosque, one of the largest temples in Baghdad,
has begun documenting cases of allegations of
executions and abductions. Mazan Taha, who is
overseeing the project, said he has compiled the names
of some 700 Sunni men who have disappeared or been
killed in the past four months.

In one Sunni neighborhood, Sababkar, residents said
the Iraqi Army surrounded the neighborhood and took
away 11 of its Sunni men in July. Most of the bodies
were found the next day; television stations here
showed pictures of bodies that had been burned with
acid and drilled with holes by electric drills. Most
of the men had been shot in their temples.

"How did these killers get police uniforms?" Mr. Taha
asked of the details surrounding many of the killings.
"How was it that they were operating freely after
curfew? That they had police cars?"

Each day, Sunni families with little faith that the
Shiite-led government will help them line up at Mr.
Taha's office instead, to tell of family members who
have been killed and disappeared.

"They took three of my sons!" wailed Naima Ibrahim,
waving three government-issued identification cards,
as Mr. Taha quietly wrote the information down. "They
took three of my sons!"

The grief in Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods has begun
to spill onto the streets.

On Friday, hundreds of Iraqi Sunnis marched through
the Amriya neighborhood to protest the killing of a
prominent Sunni leader and three of his sons last
Wednesday. Witnesses said the killers were wearing
Iraqi army uniforms and came in the middle of the
night, when the curfew has been strictly enforced. The
Sunni leader, Kadhim Surhid, was buried, but much was
unclear.

"They killed them in their beds," said Jama Hussein, a
friend who attended the funeral. He jutted his palms
out from his body. "I myself carried them from their
beds."

John F. Burns and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting
for this article.



	
		
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