Are some of the veryIraqi groups the U.S.created to maintainorder nowspreading death inBaghdad?
Are Iraqi Forces Behind ‘Death Squads’?By Cliff MontgomeryThe drama unfolds again and again throughout Baghdad: people are quickly whisked away by men in police uniforms–sometimes even in police vehicles–and found dead hours later.Since midsummer, Shiite-Sunni violence has escalated in Iraq‘s capitol, with a report from the Health Ministry last month stating that the number of monthly killings had roughly doubled since spring, to 2,600. Most of the victims had been shot, their bodies dumped in the streets. The bodies are often handcuffed, blindfolded and show signs of torture.Many victims are Sunni Arabs, a minority population in Iraq. This has prompted a number of Sunnis and U.S. officials to charge that radical Shiite Muslim militias may be operating inside the mainly Shiite police forces, and could be using their positions to carry on much of the killing.It’s a charge that Iraq’s interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, soundly rejects when questioned by reporters; he however does admit that some of those caught in U.S. or Iraqi raids were later discovered to be members of the police or army.”Whenever we capture someone, we rarely find anyone is an employee of the government ministries,” Bolani said during an Oct. 13th, 2006 news conference. When they are, “they’ve turned out to be mostly from the FPS (Facilities Protection Service), with very few individual, actual incidents involving anyone from the Ministry of Interior or Ministry of Defense.”But this seems an exercise in rhetoric. No one has accused cabinet ministers of swirling around Baghdad in three-piece suits, gun in hand, personally spreading fear. The real question was whether any employees of the Iraqi government–say, members of the FPS–have been some of those behind the spreading violence.American generals were among the first to publicly express suspicion that the FPS was playing a key role in the growing sectarian killings. U.S. commanders themselves started the agency soon after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, intending it to be a force of a few thousand men who would guard buildings against looting.But today the service has grown to a size rivaling that of the U.S. force in Iraq; Iraqi ministers put the number of FPS members at about 150,000. Control of the service’s men is not centralized, but rather is split among the various ministries they are nominally assigned to guard.Most wear uniforms which are nearly identical to those of the police.Bolani and his predecessor as interior minister, Bayan Jabr, both have minimized the possibility of any police involvement in the nightly killings.”We are experiencing a problem of impressions” regarding a police role in the sectarian killings, Bolani said. Bolani however did eventually acknowledge that bodyguard units assigned to unspecified officials were also carrying out some of the murders.Bolani, like Jabr, has repeatedly suggested that killings by gunmen in police uniforms were merely the work of impostors. On Friday, he repeated promises made for the last several months that police would soon be issued uniforms and vehicles that would be difficult to duplicate.Bolani also claimed Baghdad’s police forces are instigating means to reform themselves, such as by retraining men and requiring loyalty oaths. He added that major changes were needed at the command level of the Interior Ministry itself, and that he had the backing of the government to make those changes.But such statements do not match the facts. Iraq’s government, led by the same Shiite religious parties that head the radical militias causing much of the trouble, has shown little willingness to reign them in.Still, Bolani insists officials are serious about purging “corrupt elements,” and have already fired about 3,000 employees for that reason. Aides said 1,228 of those employees had been subjected to administrative punishment, and Bolani added that 10 to 20 percent of the 3,000 had been referred for possible prosecution. But he declined to immediately give any names of those punished.Bolani, an independent allied to the coalition of governing Shiite radical parties, also said three of the country’s biggest militias–those of the country’s two main Kurdish parties and that of a leading Shiite religious party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq–were among those that had been lawfully integrated into the country’s security forces.He said that a fourth major militia, the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, along with Sunni insurgent groups, were “outside the political body and structure.””We do not approve of the existence of these militias,” Bolani said of the Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgents.In other words, the “democratic” Iraqi government does not accept or recognize any death squads other than its own.
