[Peace-discuss] Iraqi death squads

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following article, which appeared originally in the
Independent (UK), illustrates points made by Durl and Bob at
last night's meeting.  --CGE]

  And Now Come the Death Squads
  By ANDREW BUNCOMBE and
  PATRICK COCKBURN

Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily
executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working
from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations'
outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.

John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told us on Sunday
that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's
mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or
injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of
the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups
under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

Much of the statistical information provided to Mr Pace and
his team comes from the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute, which
is located next to the city's mortuary. He said figures show
that last July the morgue alone received 1,100 bodies, about
900 of which bore evidence of torture or summary execution.

The pattern prevailed throughout the year until December, when
the number dropped to 780 bodies, about 400 of which had
gunshot or torture wounds.
"It's being done by anyone who wishes to wipe out anybody else
for various reasons," said Mr Pace, who worked for the UN for
more than 40 years in countries ranging from Liberia to Chile.
"But the bulk are attributed to the agents of the Ministry of
the Interior."

Coupled with the suicide bombings and attacks on Shia holy
places carried out by Sunnis, some of whom are followers of
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qa'ida's leader in Iraq, the
activities of the death squads are pushing Iraq ever closer to
a sectarian civil war.
Mr Pace said the Ministry of the Interior was "acting as a
rogue element within the government". It is controlled by the
main Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (Sciri); the Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, is a former
leader of Sciri's Badr Brigade militia, which is one of the
main groups accused of carrying out sectarian killings.

Another is the Mehdi Army of the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
who is part of the Shia coalition seeking to form a government
after winning the mid-December election.

Many of the 110,000 policemen and police commandos under the
ministry's control are suspected of being former members of
the Badr Brigade. Not only counter-insurgency units such as
the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpions and the Tigers, but the
commandos and even the highway patrol police have been accused
of acting as death squads.

The paramilitary commandos, dressed in garish camouflage
uniforms and driving around in pick-up trucks, are dreaded in
Sunni neighbourhoods. People whom they have openly arrested
have frequently been found dead several days later, with their
bodies bearing obvious marks of torture.

Mr Pace, a Maltese-Australian who has now retired from his UN
post to his home in Sydney, says the constant violence and
utter lack of security in Iraq are creating a vicious circle
in which ordinary citizens are turning to extremist sectarian
groups for protection.

Fear of anybody in official uniform inevitably strengthens the
militias and the insurgents. In Sunni areas people will look
to their own defences, and not to the regular army and police.

But ordinary Sunnis are caught between the death squads and
the desire of some of the insurgents on their own side to
start a civil war - an aim they are now not far from
achieving. The so-called Salafi, Sunni fundamentalists, want
not only to eject the Americans but also to build a pure
Islamic state. They see Iraqi Shias, even though they are 60
per cent of the population, as heretics allied to the US who
should be slaughtered.

Last week's attack on the Golden Mosque is only the latest in
a long series of outrages against the Shia community. They
started in August 2003 when Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, then
leader of Sciri, was killed, along with more than 100 of his
followers by a suicide bomber in a vehicle outside the Imam
Ali shrine in Najaf. There have been repeated massacres of the
Shia ever since - some targeting the security forces, such as
the attacks on queues of young men trying to join the police
or army, but others, such as the slaughter of Shia day
labourers waiting for a day's employment, for no other reason
than that they are Shia.

Despite extending a 24-hour curfew into a second day yesterday
in Baghdad and other major cities, the authorities were unable
to prevent further revenge killings and outrages against holy
sites. The current cycle of violence, which began with the
bombing of the Azkariya shrine in Samarra on Wednesday, has
claimed at least 200 lives so far, including those of 47
factory workers pulled from buses and shot on the outskirts of
Baghdad.

This was the sort of killing that touched off Lebanon's civil
war in 1975. Already an exchange of populations is taking
place in Baghdad as members of each community move to
districts in which they are in the majority.

The ability of the US occupiers to influence the situation is
not only limited, but some of their actions are seen as making
things worse. The Americans have been trying to dislodge Mr
Jabr as Interior Minister, accusing him of turning his
ministry into a Shia bastion. But the Shia believe that the US
and its allies, the Kurds, simply want to prevent the majority
community from gaining full power over security despite
winning two parliamentary elections in 2005.

One important development over the past few days is that it is
clearly becoming very difficult to use American or British
troops to keep the peace, undermining the argument that they
are the only bulwark against civil war. The occupation forces
lack the legitimacy to play the role of UN peacekeepers; it is
almost impossible to have US soldiers defend a Sunni mosque
against a Shia crowd, because if they open fire they will be
seen as having joined one side in a sectarian struggle.

In Mr Pace's view, the violence in Iraq is being made worse by
the seizing of young Iraqi men by US troops and Iraqi police
as they move from city to city carrying out raids. "The vast
majority are innocent," he said, "but they very often don't
get released for months.

You don't eliminate terrorism by what they're doing now.
Military intervention causes serious human rights and
humanitarian problems to large numbers of innocent civilians
... The result is that such individuals turn into terrorists
at the end of their detention."

In such circumstances, family members often contacted UN
officials asking for help in getting a young man outside of
the country and away from the influence of insurgents they had
met in jail. They were among many Iraqi citizens fleeing the
country as a result of the violence. "Those with money go to
Jordan. The poor go to Syria," he said.

Mr Pace, who first made his comments to The Times of Malta
newspaper, said the situation in Iraq had "definitely,
definitely" got worse over the two years in which he headed
the UN human rights team. The interim government and the
international community were trying to restart the country's
crippled economy, but, he said, they would not succeed "until
people are secure".

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