IRAQ:
Armed Forces Sinking into Sectarian Chaos
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31234
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 29 (IPS) - While the George W. Bush administration
launches a campaign to persuade the public that an accelerated buildup
of Iraqi security forces will permit substantial numbers of U.S.
troops to begin returning home next year, recent reports from Iraq
suggest that the security forces -- and their sectarian make-up -- are
themselves contributing to the country's destabilisation.
A spate of articles in the mainstream U.S. media since the discovery
two weeks ago by U.S. troops of a secret underground prison in the
Iraqi Interior Ministry, where some 170 Sunni Arab men and boys had
been subjected to torture and ill-treatment, has detailed the
existence of death squads in the largely Shiite police and special
commandos or operating with their support.
These units appear to be under the control of two sectarian militias
that have successfully infiltrated the state security forces -- the
Iranian-trained Badr Organisation, the armed wing of the Supreme
Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI); and the Mahdi Army,
which is led by the Shiite nationalist politician, Muqtada al-Sadr.
Operating through or with the Iraqi security forces, the two groups,
which are themselves rivals, have abducted, tortured and executed
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Sunni males, according to front-page
reports that have appeared this week in the New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times, and Knight-Ridder newspapers.
"Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in
recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who
claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in
uniform without warrant or explanation," the New York Times reported
Tuesday.
"Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with
bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in
their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply
vanished."
The motives for the abductions are mixed, according to the reports. In
some cases, they appear directed against suspected insurgents or their
supporters. In others, they seem designed to "ethnically cleanse"
certain neighbourhoods. In still others, they appear aimed at
achieving revenge for decades of discrimination and repression by the
Baathist regime, which generally privileged Sunni citizens.
In any case, the repression that is now directed against the Sunni
community by the police and commandos and their sectarian auxiliaries
threatens the Bush administration's newly-touted plans to reduce the
U.S. military presence from nearly 160,000 to less than 100,000 troops
over the next year by rapidly expanding the size and capabilities of
Iraq's security forces to fight the largely Sunni insurgency on their
own.
In a major policy address Wednesday at the U.S. Naval Academy designed
to convince an increasingly sceptical public that he has a viable
"exit strategy" from Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush is expected
to stress the key role that Iraqi security forces, currently estimated
at just over 200,000, will play in assuring the nation's stability and
defence.
But the perception that those security forces -- about 110,000 of
which are controlled by the Interior Ministry -- are in fact acting
against Sunnis on behalf of Shiite political parties will likely only
fuel the insurgency, despite new U.S. efforts to persuade Sunnis that
their interests will be protected, according to the reports.
"(The abuses) undermine the U.S. effort to stabilise the nation, and
train and equip Iraq's security forces -- the Bush administration's
key prerequisites for the eventual withdrawal of American troops,"
said the Los Angeles Times in a lengthy article that noted that U.S.
military advisors in Iraq, as well as the Interior Ministry's
inspector general, concurred that "death squads" were indeed operating
within the security forces.
"It's increasingly becoming a war of all against all, with no rules,"
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert London's International Institute for
Strategic Studies, told the Wall Street Journal this week. "The Iraqi
security forces themselves are becoming just another of the players,
and if they owe allegiance to anything, it's to their commanders or
communities, and not remotely to the state itself."
The problem itself is not a new one, particularly after U.S. forces
began conducting "joint" operations with Iraqi forces -- which had
been largely purged of Baathists by the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) -- in 2004. The newly constituted Iraqi forces
consisted largely of units recruited from Kurdish peshmerga or Shiite
militias. Their operations in the so-called "Sunni Triangle" --
combined with and often following those of U.S. forces -- clearly
helped fuel the insurgency.
While U.S. commanders have tried to remedy this problem -- in part by
ending the Iraqi Army's ban on recruiting most former Baathist junior
officers in early November and paying tribal militias to maintain
order -- the SCIRI-controlled Interior Ministry has been more
resistant, even after the discovery of the secret prison. While Prime
Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari promised that the incident would be fully
investigated and those responsible punished, Interior Minister Bayan
Jabr, a former leader of the Badr militia, played down the abuses.
But it now appears that the prison was just the tip of the iceberg of
anti-Sunni operations conducted by the police and commandos and their
auxiliaries, as hundreds of bodies of Sunni males, many with their
hands still bound by police handcuffs, have turned up in garbage
dumps, rivers, and alongside roads in recent months, according to the
newspaper reports. In many cases, the victims had been abducted,
sometimes in groups of a dozen or more, by individuals who identified
themselves as police or commandos..
"These reports are definitely credible and very worrisome," said Joe
Stork, a veteran Middle East specialist at Human Rights Watch (HRW)
here.
Last week, former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite
who is trying to woo Sunni support in next month's elections, charged
that the level of repression recalled former President Saddam
Hussein's reign. "People are doing the same as Saddam's time and
worse," he told the London Observer.
While Stork called that characterisation "a bit much", he stressed
that Washington should be very concerned about the situation.
But while U.S. military commanders were willing to tell reporters
about the abuses, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld discounted the
reports as "unverified" during a press conference here Tuesday.
"There's ...a political campaign (in Iraq) taking place, and we ought
to be aware of that, that there are going to be a lot of charges and
countercharges and allegations," he told a reporter who asked about
the death squad reports.
"And they may very well be timed -- as they are in every country in
the world that has a free political system -- they may be timed in a
way to seek advantage," he said. (END/2005)
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