Iraq: A New Enemy Emerges—'The Shiite Zarqawi'

Discussion in 'World Events' started by Ghost_007, Nov 14, 2006.

  1. Ghost_007 Registered Senior Member

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    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15564792/

    Nov. 13, 2006 issue - Ever since the radical Mahdi Army leader Moqtada al-Sadr joined the Iraqi government, his power on the streets has been slipping. Now U.S. and Iraqi officials worry that even more violent men might be taking up his mantle. One name has come up again and again: Abu Deraa, sometimes called "the Shiite Zarqawi." Abu Deraa and the death squad he runs have been waging a campaign of Shia terror across the city. He is suspected of torturing and killing scores of Sunnis in a bloody wave of ethnic cleansing in neighborhoods across Baghdad. U.S. officials believe Abu Deraa is responsible for the capture of a U.S. Army translator who disappeared two weeks ago while leaving the fortified Green Zone and remains missing. Abu Deraa "is a brutal, loathsome character," says a senior U.S. official who asked not to be identified by name because of the sensitive nature of the topic. "He is definitely a guy we'd like to see not around anymore."

    Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hasn't made the job of hunting him any easier. Last week U.S. forces launched a massive raid in Sadr City, targeting Abu Deraa. The attack reportedly killed two of his sons, but he escaped. Concerned about the political implications, Maliki ordered U.S. troops to end the assault and then dismantle the checkpoints they had set up to net Abu Deraa if he tried to slip away. Maliki insists he would like to see Abu Deraa and other insurgents like him brought to justice—but he wants the United States to let him handle it his own way, by relying on Moqtada al-Sadr to clear out the death squads. "What the prime minister is doing—if it works it would be quite good," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad tells NEWSWEEK.

    But it's a gamble. The son of a fishmonger from one of the poorest slums of Sadr City, Abu Deraa (real name: Ismael Hafidh) has capitalized on Iraq's sectarian hatreds and won support among some Shiites as a defender of the faith. "What Abu Deraa does is just a reaction for what is being done by the mobs that kill innocents," says Abu Ali, 46, a Shiite policeman who has met and worked with Abu Deraa. For now, U.S. officials are reluctantly going along with Maliki's plan to let Sadr deal with Abu Deraa. Privately, however, the officials fear that Maliki can't really rely on militia groups like the Mahdi Army, which has ties to the most brutal death squads, like the one Abu Deraa runs. "[Al-Sadr] has been a violent militia leader for more than three years," says the U.S. official. "It's going to take more than statements to convince me that he's not still got one foot in the violence." Or that he could stop the bloodshed, even if he wanted to.

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    Abu Deraa
     
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  3. Ghost_007 Registered Senior Member

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    http://channel4.com/news/dispatches/article.jsp?id=301

    Iraq's Death Squads:

    Up to a hundred bodies a day are found dumped on waste ground and rubbish tips around Baghdad. They've usually been dreadfully tortured. Acid and electric drills are the favourite methods and many of the bodies are still wearing police handcuffs.

    As we discovered, there is even compelling evidence that the secret prisons of Saddam's day are back - stinking hell-holes where hundreds of victims are herded together to be raped, tortured and maimed for no crime other than belonging to the wrong sect.

    And it's all happening under the eyes of US commanders, who seem unwilling or unable to intervene. These are the chilling findings of a special investigation, filmed for a Channel 4 documentary, The Death Squads that reveals how one of the most senior ministers in Iraq's new administration stands accused of presiding over a campaign to torture, maim and execute his enemies. And this is the dossier that utterly explodes the myth that peace and a liberal democracy are blossoming in the new 'liberated' Iraq.

    In the bloody mayhem of Baghdad it's very difficult to untangle exactly who's who amongst the various death squads who now rule the streets. There are organised criminal gangs, kidnapping and killing for ransom money, and there are private militia groups loyal to particular clerics or clan leaders. But there is no question that among the most efficient of the death squads are the police commandos.

    As part of our investigation, we traced how these commando units have been deliberately infiltrated and taken over by one of the most militant Islamic groups, the Badr Brigade. They're the military wing of an Iraqi political party, The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI was set up in the early 80's in exile in Iran and its aim was always to overthrow Saddam and his Sunni government and replace them with a Shia government. Now, very helpfully, the Americans have done that for them.
    Return of the Badr Brigade

    Immediately after Saddam was toppled in the Spring of 2003 thousands of Badr Brigade militiamen flooded back across the border from Iran, along with their political leaders who'd spent years waiting for this moment. They wanted the new Iraq to become a pro-Iranian, Islamic country where the Shia, who are 60% of Iraq's population, would also be the dominant political force.

    They soon discovered that the best way to achieve this has been to inflitrate Iraq's new police force - right under the eyes the American administration.

    From the early days of the US occupation of Iraq, the warning signs were there. One of the most senior British police officers sent to Baghdad was the former Deputy Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, Douglas Brand. His brief was very simple - to rebuild the Iraqi police. He wanted to create a professional force dedicated to law and order. But the Americans were so keen to build up the numbers they turned a blind eye to who was enlisting. 'They wanted to have the graduation parades, to have them in new uniforms', Douglas Brand told us. 'Nobody was too interested in what happened when they actually went out on the streets'.

    Douglas Brand says he voiced his concerns, 'Probably ten times a day to whoever would listen, usually two star Generals and above.' He even spoke directly to the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, 'But I sensed the subtleties were not understood and if there were consequences down the road, that's something the Iraqis were going to have to handle themselves'.

    Those consequences became clear very quickly. In June 2004 an American soldier, Kevin Maries, was looking through his sights of his sniper rifle from his usual position on the top floor of the Ministry of the Interior building when he saw Iraqi police commandos bring hundreds of prisoners into a Ministry compound directly below him.

    He took a series of astonishing photographs through his rifle sight showing what happened. 'They were forced onto their knees, beaten with rubber hoses,' he remembers, 'The beatings got more severe, a metal bar was used and they were beating the soles of their feet'. When he thought some of the prisoners might die, Kevin alerted his unit and American troops turned up to stop the torture. But an hour later US Headquarters ordered them to withdraw and leave the prisoners to the mercy of their captors. As far as Kevin knows, most of the prisoners were later moved to an official prison but only after they were beaten again.
    US reluctance to intervene

    From the start the US authorities have been reluctant to interfere and that became even more marked when a controversial appointment was made to the Iraqi government. In May 2005, a man named Bayan Jabr was made Minister of the Interior - and thus the man in charge of the police. He was one of SCIRI's most senior figures.

    Suddenly huge numbers of his own exclusively Shia militiamen from the Badr Brigade were recruited into the police. Gerry Burke witnessed that first hand. A senior Massachusetts policeman, seconded as a police adviser to Baghdad, Burke saw a memo from the new Minister authorising the recruitment of one group of 1,300 men into the Commandos without any obvious qualifications for the job. 'These were men without any police training, without any background checks', Gerry Burke told us, 'It was just changing uniforms from the Badr Brigade to the police'.

    A few months later, when groups of Sunni men began to be kidnapped, murdered and their bodies dumped in the same spots every day, Gerry Burke tried to organise a surveillance operation to catch the killers. But the ordinary Iraqi police officers he was working with were too terrified to co-operate. 'They believed the perpetrators were members of the police who would have killed them in retaliation for investigating it'.

    But that is by no means the only evidence that Iraq's Minsiter for the Interior is involved in a covert campaign of terror. One Iraqi MP, accuses Mr Jabr of being behind a network of secret prisons were Sunnis were held without charge and tortured. Of course, in a land where sectarian rivalries often involve wild allegations, we should treat any such claims with caution. But even with that in mind, the evidence provided to us by a Sunni MP named Mohammed al Dini is profoundly disturbing...
     
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  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    And yet somehow the potential for all this partisan violence was a mystery to the Bush administration before we started?
     
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