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Frontline police of new Iraq are waging secret war of vengeance
In July, Peter Beaumont revealed the existence of torture squads at
work in the new Iraq. Here he reports on a sinister twist - a brutal
campaign of political 'disappearances'
By Peter Beaumont
11/20/05 "The
Guardian" -- -- 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.
In a new twist in the ongoing brutality of this country,
Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is escalating dramatically.
Last July an Observer investigation reported that Iraqi police
commandos were running secret torture units, and last week there was
international outrage when an Iraqi government bunker was found
being used as a makeshift prison. American forces found 173
half-starved prisoners being held in dreadful conditions. Most were
Sunnis.
The new trend in violence is one that Dr Alaa Maki of the Iraqi
Islamic Party is familiar with. A month ago his bodyguard, Alaa al-Azawi,
was taken from his home with his two brothers by police at midnight.
The family were told the men were being taken for investigation. The
following day his body was dumped in the street.
Eight days ago, another of Maki's friends was being treated in the
Yarmouk Hospital, Iraq's second- biggest, in the western suburbs of
Baghdad. His relatives, Muamir Saad Mahmoud and Ali Mahmoud, went to
visit him. Instead they met men in the uniform of Iraq's police
waiting for them.
Ali was later released in the vast Shia slum of Sadr City after a
violent beating. Muamir has not been seen. Dr Maki and the family
are now waiting for his body to turn up.
And it is not just in Baghdad. The home of Khalid Ahmad Harbood, a
resident of the Alkadisia neighbourhood of Madain city, was raided
at midnight on 13 October by the Alkarrar brigade, commandos of the
Ministry of the Interior. Harbood was detained at their base.
Transferred to the 'Panorama building' in the town, he was tortured
so badly over the period of a week that he died and his badly
battered body was dumped in Sadr City.
As is so often the case in Iraq these days, the details are
difficult to corroborate, but they fit a pattern.
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.
The crisis was underlined by last week's uncovering of the secret
Ministry of the Interior detention facility in the well-to-do
neighbourhood of Jadriya.
It led the US embassy in Baghdad to forcefully condemn the new
Iraq's culture of torture and killing - a statement that many
believe has been too long in coming.
The emergence of a culture of pernicious violence at Iraq's interior
ministry blossomed in the face of repeated warnings to US and UK
officials over the past year and a half, under an apparently
deliberate policy by London and Washington to avoid public criticism
of the country's new institutions.
It is a silence that persisted despite compelling evidence provided
by human rights organisations, journalists and Iraqi officials that,
from the very moment of the hand-over of sovereignty, violent abuses
were being committed in the Ministry of the Interior building - the
results of which have been witnessed by The Observer
Then, as in last week's discovery of the starving prisoners, the
abuses were only uncovered during a raid by American military police
who had been tipped off that prisoners were being beaten in a
'guesthouse' in the ministry's grounds.
It was, in retrospect, the beginning of a pattern of behaviour that
would only worsen as the months went by. The Observer has gathered a
catalogue of mistreatment by the elements of the very police forces
that Washington and London have been counting on as the front line
in the fight against insurgents and terrorists.
Among those to be confronted early in the interim government with
the way in which policing in Iraq was going was a senior British
police officer, involved in mentoring the new Iraqi Police Force,
who described to this paper how he had entered the room of a deputy
minister and found a man with a bag over his head standing in the
corner.
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.
'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.
Pressure was also brought to bear by Unami, the UN Assistance
Mission to Iraq, a joint effort that, by August at least, seemed to
have brought some success when Interior Minister Bayan Jabr
circulated an order reminding police that they must respect the
rights of detainees. It would mark the beginning of an ever more
violent and secretive campaign that would see disappearances in the
Baghdad area escalate beyond anything that had been witnessed
before. And it is taking a sinister new form.
At 9pm on 25 September a Toyota pick-up truck without number plates
turned up at the house of 'H' - who has asked that neither his name
nor the neighbourhood in which he lives in eastern Baghdad be
identified for his family's sake. Inside the pick-up were eight men
in civilian clothes and black balaclavas, wearing body armour with
the word 'Police' stencilled in large letters. They arrested H's son
- a man in his mid-twenties - the only Sunni living in a Shia
neighbourhood.
'There has been a marked change in what has been going on,' said one
senior human rights worker in Baghdad who is involved in monitoring
the cases of the disappeared. His organisation has asked not to be
identified.
'Between May and August last year we would see people being picked
up in what looked like conventional raids by officers in police cars
and uniforms, often supported by multinational forces.
'What has been happening since August is that when people are being
picked up it is by people out of uniform, but who may turn up in
Ministry of the Interior vehicles or show MoI ID cards. Many of
those people are turning up with a bullet in the head.'
It is a state of affairs forcefully described in the most recent
Unami human rights report released in October, and handed to the
Iraqi government. 'It is extremely worrying,' it reported on the
issue of sectarian murders, 'that some of these crimes are committed
by individuals wearing police and military uniforms and using police
or military equipment.'
What is also of deep concern for both human rights officials, as
well as Iraqis such as Dr Maki, is the fact that, despite repeated
complaints, there appears to have be almost no effort by the
government or the Ministry of the Interior to investigate them
seriously.
Indeed, last week, despite the powerfully worded complaint by the US
ambassador over the latest human rights abuses, Bayan Jabr and his
spokesmen continued to deny all knowledge of abuses and murders,
attributing it to vague claims of infiltration of the 'ministry and
police', and accusing those drawing attention to the abuses of
trying to stir sectarian violence.
It is not an answer that has much impressed Human Rights Watch,
which has been cataloguing abuses by the Ministry of the Interior
for the past year and a half.
'The point that needs to be made again and again,' says Sarah Leah
Whitson, an executive director of Human Rights Watch, 'is that
saying you do not know is no defence. The fact that the minister
does not know is an admission of failure. It is his job to know.'
It is a view echoed by Dr Maki of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which
last week called for an international investigation of the human
rights abuses by Ministry of the Interior forces following the
discovery of the secret detention facility in Jadriya.
'We blame the government for these events, and no matter how often
we have complained there has been no investigation. I have spoken to
the UN. I have handed over a dossier of what has been going on.
'We have been trying to persuade the US and UK governments for the
past two years about what has been going on. It has taken until now
to convince them that this is real.'
In the meantime, as the disappearances have escalated in recent
months, so whatever small faith Sunnis had in Iraq's judicial
process has increasingly collapsed, falling back instead on the
tribal code permitting revenge killings.
And so the violence in Iraq continues.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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