Comment:
Enter the death squads
Is the current Iraqi government a threat to its people, asks Firas Al-Atraqchi
On 17 November, the media reported that United States military officials were shocked at the discovery of torture chambers located within buildings owned by the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
Words like "horrific" were used to describe some of the evidence of torture found on the bodies of "suspects" detained in these buildings.
One official went so far as to describe the detainees as "so emaciated they looked like Holocaust survivors".
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr defended the use of the facility and said media reports had exaggerated the maltreatment and that only five suspects appeared tortured. He promised to look into it. (Five tortured suspects are five too many, Jabr)
To date, neither further information nor investigation of the torture chambers have come to light.
On 18 November, the US military announced that it had discovered some of its units had provided assistance and support for what were later deemed to be death squads. Apparently, on one raid against Sunni targets several men which were identified by US officers later were found bound, gagged and executed.
There was no comment from the Iraqi government.
In January, the US military said it had arrested an Iraqi 22-man death squad (donned in outfits of the new elite commando corps) "in the act" as they prepared to execute a Sunni man apparently accused of murder.
This is what I term an impromptu Iraqi roadside court system.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry said it had no idea how these men got their hands on the outfits and promised to investigate. A month passed and no word on the developments in the investigation.
Earlier last week, US Major General Joseph Petersen confirmed to the media that the men arrested were indeed members of a death squad affiliated with the Iraqi Interior Ministry. This immediately appears to validate Sunni claims that several such entities were slowly targeting scientists, teachers, philosophers and political dissidents in the country. The Iraqi ministry again professed no knowledge and promised to investigate.
However, this provides one with a conundrum. For the squad to act so freely, it must have received help from elements operating at high levels in the ministry. Is it far-fetched to presume the investigators are also the covert operators of this squad?
Last fall, there was an international outcry against the torture chambers which were used mainly against Sunnis. Families in Iraq have long complained of armed men dressed in official commando outfits raiding homes and detaining several men who would later be found executed in a ditch outside a village or city.
Riverbend, an Iraqi female blogger who has won numerous literary awards in the past 18 months gave a chilling account of the fear instilled in Iraqi society by these death squad raiders when her house was raided:
"Last time they had raided my aunt's area, they took away four men on their street alone. Two of them were students in their early twenties -- one a law student, and the other an engineering student, and the third man was a grandfather in his early sixties. There was no accusation, no problem -- they were simply ordered outside, loaded up into a white pickup truck and driven away with a group of other men from the area. Their families haven't heard from them since and they visit the morgue almost daily in anticipation of finding them dead."
The Sunni Iraqis apprehended are never told why; merely for questioning. The popular phrase du jour is that they are suspected of partaking in the "insurgency", but many Iraqis feel that it is also due to a grander design of settling of scores.
Former Baath Party members, their kin, aides, or those who may have sympathised with their ideology are usually targeted. Political dissidents, those with ties to the predominantly Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, and Sunni politicians are also targeted.
The Interior Ministry for its part says it has no clue how these things are happening, but that it will investigate.
There have been many promises to investigate but to date not one public announcement of the depth or veracity of these investigations. Furthermore, not one official in the ministry has yet been held accountable.
The Iraqi government led by Ibrahim Al-Jaffary has promised Iraqis better security and instructed them to trust and work with the police force. However, it has not even been able to mount an investigation into how so many armed men are able to secure Interior Ministry outfits.
US military officials have been astounded at the gall of these death squads, often acting with impunity and bravely announcing their intentions.
Petersen said that four senior personnel of the 22-man squad were loyal to Faylaq Badr (Badr Brigades) who after the 30 January, 2005 elections were renamed munathamat Badr (Badr Organisation).
The Badr Brigades are the military wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an organisation borne, bred and fed with munitions, logistical and financial support in Iran.
During the Iraq-Iran war, members of Badr used intimidation and torture to force Iraqi prisoners of war to join their ranks.
These recent revelations have led to a different tone in US media, leaning more towards believing Sunni accusations that the government itself is behind the death squads.
"The bodies of Sunni men -- bound, shot in the head and left in dumpsters, on side streets and in patches of desert -- have turned up frequently since the middle of last year, shortly after the Shiite-led government was named in April," said a weekend edition of The Washington Post.
The Interior Ministry quickly issued a statement on Thursday saying it will (yawn) investigate and asked for time to do so.
The same day as the statement was released to the media, three more bodies of Sunni men were found in northern Baghdad, bound and executed -- the same modus operandi that has intimidated Iraqi civil society in the past year.
As a side concern, I also want to bring up the issue of the assassination of several lawyers representing the ousted President Saddam Hussein and his aides.
To date no details of an investigation have been announced. No perpetrators have been brought to justice.
What is required is not time, but international recognition that the weapons of mass destruction we have all been looking for have been truly found -- in the embodiment of the present Iraqi government, which has become an indiscriminate arm of Iran's theocracy.
By failing time and again to truly investigate crimes, the current government has shone itself to be impervious to the needs of its people, whether they be Shia or Sunni.
It is incumbent upon the government to ensure that the Shia and Sunni (let's not forget Turkomen, Yazidi, Sabaean, Chaldean, Assyrian, Armenian, and Kurdish) communities do not fear one another but are rather encouraged to entrust their lives to a viable pluralistic future.
This government has utterly failed in this regard. This is hardly the democratic model Iraq was built up to be.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/783/re302.htm