NOTE: Here is the story I filed for TIME.com over the weekend and which has been occupying much of my time here in Iraq these last few weeks. It will be my final Iraq story for a while, as I'm leaving in a matter of days. After two months, it's time to take a break.
The bodies began to show up early last week. On Monday, 34 corpses were found. In the darkness of Tuesday morning, 15 more men, between the ages of 22 and 40 were found in the back of a pickup truck in the al-Khadra district of western Baghdad. They had been hanged. By daybreak, 40 more bodies were found around the city, most bearing signs of torture before the men were killed execution-style. The most gruesome discovery was an 18-by-24-foot mass grave in the Shi'ite slum of Kamaliyah in east Baghdad containing the bodies of 29 men, clad only in their underwear with their hands bound and their mouths covered with tape. Local residents only found it because the ground was oozing blood. In all, 87 bodies were found over two days in Baghdad.The grisly discovery was horrible enough, the latest and perhaps most chilling sign that Iraq is descending further into butchery — and quite possibly civil war. But almost as disturbing is the growing evidence that the massacres and others like it are being tolerated and even abetted by Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated police forces, overseen by Iraq's Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr. On his watch, sectarian militias have swelled the ranks of the police units and, Sunnis charge, used their positions to carry out revenge killings against Sunnis. While allowing an Iranian-trained militia to take over the ministry, critics say, Jabr has authorized the targeted assassination of Sunni men and stymied investigations into Interior-run death squads. Despite numerous attempts to contact them, neither Jabr nor Interior Ministry spokesmen responded to requests for comment on this article.
Jabr's and his forces' growing reputation for brutality comes at a particularly inopportune moment for the Bush Administration, which would like to hand over security responsibilities to those same police units as quickly as possible. That has raised the distinct and disturbing possibility that the U.S. is in fact training and arming one side in a conflict seeming to grow worse by the day. "Militias are the infrastructure of civil war," U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told TIME recently. Khalilzad has been publicly critical of Jabr and warned that the new security ministries under the next, permanent Iraqi government should be run by competent people who have no ties to militias and who are "non-sectarian." Further U.S. support for training the police and army, he said, depends on it.
But ever since Jabr was appointed Interior Minister after the January 2005 election brought a religious Sh'ite coalition to power, Sunnis allege, he began remaking the paramilitary National Police into Shi'ite shock troops. A member of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Jabr fled to Iran in the 1970s to avoid Saddam's crackdown. Jerry Burke, a former civilian senior police advisor to the Interior Ministry, said Jabr's experience with Saddam's government has left him bitter and distrustful of anyone he suspects has ties to the previous regime. That would most certainly include the former members of Saddam Hussein's Special Forces and Republican Guards which initially made up the bulk of the National Police when Jabr took charge.
To help facilitate his transformation of the police forces, Jabr made sure to enlist the help of SCIRI's armed wing, the Badr Organization. Members of the militia have been a growing presence in the National Police, which now consists of nine brigades, with about 17,500 members divided between the Special Police Commandos, the Public Order brigades and a mechanized brigade, which will soon be transferred to the Ministry of Defense. "Leadership in the commando positions has been turned over to Badr," said Matt Sherman, a former CPA advisor to the Interior Ministry. "And new recruits are mostly Badr."
Indeed, outside the ministry headquarters, banners proclaiming solidarity with Imam Hussein, one of Shi'ites' holiest figures, snap in the spring breeze alongside — and sometimes instead of — Iraqi flags. Most of the guards' beards are invariably cut in the close-cropped Iranian style, making them stand out in Baghdad, where beards are less common.
Like so many things in Iraq right now, it wasn't supposed to be this way. As far back as December 2003, David Gompert, the former National Security Advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority, realized the dangers sectarian militias posed to Iraq's stability. And in the waning days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, American viceroy L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer issued Order 91, which was intended to demobilize or integrate nine militias totaling about 100,000 men into the Iraqi security forces. But the Kurdish pesh merga and the armed wing of SCIRI, the Badr Organization, still exist today because the order was never completely or competently carried out.
For that, Gompert puts the blame squarely on the Iraqi government, then under Iyad Allawi, as well as the American embassy. With the U.S. military engaged in several major operations in 2004 and the government transitioning from the CPA to a more traditional diplomatic presence with the arrival of U.S. ambassador John Negroponte at the end of June, Gompert says, neither Allawi nor the U.S made the reintegration program a priority. Job training programs run by Allawi's Labor Ministry were cancelled over personal feuds and pension programs and other aspects of the program of DDR — "demilitarization, demobilization and reintegration" — were bounced around from one command to another.
Making matters worse has been the fact that the police — unlike the Iraqi Army, which is still under U.S. command and supervision — were practically ignored almost from the beginning of the occupation, says Burke. And what supervision the National Police did get came from U.S. military intelligence officers, not civilian police advisors.
This grave oversight, which stemmed from the military's unfamiliarity with civilian police methods and its unwillingness to learn, has led to numerous abuses and little accountability. The U.S. State Department, in a report released two weeks ago, documented numerous incidents in 2005, dating back to early May when Jabr was first appointed Interior Minister, where Sunni men were killed execution-style by Interior Ministry police or Shi'ite militias. In each case, Jabr ordered an investigation, and in each case the investigation had yet to report any findings.
Thanks in part to the Interior Minister's "nonfeasance," said Burke, the former Interior Ministry adviser, Jabr was at least indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of military-age Sunni men whose bodies have turned up at the sewage plant in southeast Baghdad since late December. Men in police uniforms and vehicles routinely travel through the city in daylight hours with bodies in the back of trucks for disposal at the sewage plant, he said. Prisoners often disappear, Burke said, because they're picked up at night and no one has an accurate account of who is arrested and where they are taken. "The Special Police Commandos," he said, using their old name, "are most definitely out of control."
So black is the reputation of the National Police, that after the Feb. 22 bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, many Sunnis said the perpetrators were Interior Ministry troops who were looking for a pretext to start a civil war. Their fears were further fueled in the bloody two days after the attack, when Iraq became a sectarian slaughterhouse. Instead of protecting citizens from each other, National Police units stood by as Shi'ite rioters — and rival militiamen from Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army — stormed Sunni mosques and swarmed over Sunni neighborhoods, according to numerous reports, including some confirmed by U.S. Gen. George Casey, commander of American forces in Iraq.
The American efforts to try and help stem the deadly sectarianism will likely do little good — and in some respects may well exacerbate the problem. Instead of increasing the number of civilian advisors to Iraq's local police forces, a spokeswoman for the Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) said more U.S. military police and military personnel will be assigned to train them. The Special Police Transition Teams (SPTTs) are the model that will be followed. "The SPTTs have been very successful in their efforts," the spokeswoman said. No change is planned for the oversight program on the National Police.
Gompert notes, "I remember saying, 'If there is going to be a civil war, it's going to be fought between Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias." And as long as Jabr is running the Interior Ministry and its police forces, there is little doubt which of the two in such a conflict will have the law — and American training — on its side.
Reading the stories about the “largest air assault since the invasion”, I had a horrible thought come to mind. Since the intelligence is reportedly coming from Iraqi sources, I have a dread fear that one of those close-cropped-beard units will be combined with a US contingent and sent into an area dominated by bare faces and moustaches.
What I fear is that the close-cropped-bearded fellows will take advantage of their position and start shooting everyone in sight. That will leave the US contingent in a helluva position. Do we fire into the “friendlies”, or do we stand back and watch the massacre?
God grant that this is just a paranoid fantasy on my part, and that US commanders never have to face such a contingency.
Great piece, Chris. And now a well-deserved break for you! Best, Chuck
Great piece highlighting the problems created by the Badr Brigade. I was alarmed earlier to read prime minister al-Jaafari’s op-ed advocating that the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade be brought into the government. It will just make the killings stamped with “Government Certified”. I wrote a piece about it today on my site.
I hope the role of these militias gets more widespread attention in the future.
I’ve been in Iraq almost 2 years, mostly in the Mansour District of Baghdad (nice houses, “noisy” neighbors).
I’m a construction manager for a lot of jobs for the IP, and have done site walks and proposal work on several commando sites around Baghdad.
The Iraqis I work with are very concerned about MOI, and their take is largely consistent with what you have indicated, with the exception of one major point.
They de-emphasize the whole Sunni/Shi’ite aspect, and focus much more on the Iranian influence (some say control) over the commandos and Shi’ite militias.
They say that the true concern isn’t conflicting religious views (that Westerners make so much hay about) as much as the nation of Iran trying to infiltrate and control the nation of Iraq, most ardently through puppets they’ve successfully positioned at MOI.
I’m glad to see an article for the MSM that finally frames what’s going on here into more accurate and pertinent terms - you’ve clearly been immersed in Iraq and the situation with the Commandos and MOI. You are clearly not just another reporter that thinks Iraq’s borders start and end in the IZ.
But I wonder if there are any pressures on you, or inclinations within you, to emphasize failures of US advisors in understanding the sectarian dimensions of Iraq, as opposed to Iran’s willful and significant efforts to further destabilize and interfere with this country’s affairs.
Are we trying to gloss over Iran’s role?
That being said, I’ve also had long conversations with very influential Iraqis (Sheiks, generals, etc.) and they all say the same thing: the lack of integration in the Iraqi forces that the US seemed to allow has been very damaging.
These guys should have been thrown into mixed units, and forced to make their unit their new tribe, which would have been possible under good Iraqi leadership. US oversensitivity to matters of ethnicity or religious groupings (like on US university campuses) allowed religious or ethnic-based units to form, and it has been a major setback.
Good article - thank you.
orangeducks latest resident of Erbil Iraq
Thank you for all you do.
Enjoy your break as best you can.
Chris, Nice piece. And peace to you on your break.
Orangeducks, Iran is a largely Shi’ite nation, as is Iraq. While the minute differences in their interpretations of the Koran do not make them enemies, the simple Shia/Sunni labes, representing Iran/Saddam, seem to do just fine. The burden of history weighs on all of us. There’s plenty of Iran talk here at home, but what are you going to do. You think if we got invaded that Canada wouldn’t try to help their preferred side in the conflict?
It’s insidious and not a good thing, but we can’t make it go away. Like you said, we blew it early on with our bull-in-a-china-shop mentality and pie in the sky dreams of being welcomed in the streets with flowers and candies. Heard you on Air America, nice to put a voice to a pen. And the satellite connection was great, amazingly.
Oops, that last part about Air America was for Chris, somehow got pasted wrong. Sorry.
Chris:
Gutsy article. But, aren’t you worried about reprisals from some within the MOI? If some there have already formed death squads, wouldn’t it be easy for them to put an American reporter on the list? It is probably a good thing you are getting out of Iraq for a while. Stay safe.
Mark-In-Chi-Town
too late Steve, american soldiers have apparently gone way beyond accididentally killing innocent Iraqi’s.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article352819.ece
Dadler,
If the US were invaded by China, do you think the Canadians would try to help by blowing up the Statue of Liberty?
What I’ve gathered from Sunnis here is that they have little problem with typical Iraqi Shi’ites. But they have a big problem with Iran trying to take over the MOI which controls all police, police commandos, border forts, and public order battalions in Iraq.
Speaking of historical burdens, Iraq’s history also includes a bitter 8-year war with Iran in the 1980s, and there are virtually no families here without veterans of that war (dead or alive).
My point is, the public focus on religious labels and differences is largely a product of Western media and politicians.
This misdirected focus gives the Western public the perception that only the clumsy US is to blame for failing to recognize the cultural and religious “nuances” of Iraq. As always, US failure seems to be the goal of the media, rather than reporting that missing these nuances isn’t to blame nearly as much as the direct interference of the State of Iran.
As usual, the media cover with a magnifying glass every minute pimple in American war efforts. But when confronted with giant legions of sores oozing directly from the faces of our enemies, the Western media suddenly goes blind.
Why?
orangeducks
Which Iraqis are our enemies, Orangeducks? We’re in SOMEONE ELSE’S COUNTRY waging violent war that was entirely unprovoked. That is a recipe for disaster, which is what we have. Religion, no religion, mindless violence begets more. And we started this violence, so we are mostly to blame for the chaos now there. We chose to ignore the imagination that freedom supposedly has allowed us to evolve, we chose to ignore actual KNOWLEDGE of Iraq, and simply charged in like the bull in the china shop. Violence has very clear limits, and we have more than reached them.
Which Iraqis are our enemies, Orangeducks? We’re in SOMEONE ELSE’S COUNTRY waging violent war that was entirely unprovoked. That is a recipe for disaster, which is what we have. Religion, no religion, mindless violence begets more. And we started this violence, so we are mostly to blame for the chaos now there. We chose to ignore the imagination that freedom supposedly has allowed us to evolve, we chose to ignore actual KNOWLEDGE of Iraq, and simply charged in like the bull in the china shop. Violence has very clear limits, and we have more than reached them.
Ah yes, the popular Lefty refrain, “Violence simply begets violence.” Mindless, of course, like all violence.
Our invasion of Iraq - “entirely unprovoked”, of course.
We lack KNOWLEDGE, naturally. Ignorant shit-kickers with large hats and even larger belt buckles, right? So unsophisticated. So boorish.
Anyone who characterizes Saddam Hussein’s person and regime as “entirely non-provoking” betrays their own serious lack of knowledge.
Anyone who thinks the US is “waging a violent war” in Iraq today has no concept of what a violent war looks like. (hint: if America was being violent, Iraq - all of it - would be in ashes).
Anyone who thinks violence is mindless does not believe that a rapist of children should be apprehended and incarcerated (the application of all force against anyone is “violence”).
If an old lady swats a mugger with her purse, is not the violence she extends justified? Carry that logic to an international level, and you have the justification for War itself in many circumstances.
In short, some fights are worth fighting.
What is truly mindless is a mindless adherence to non-violence. There is another word for it: Surrender.
Wisdom and knowledge and courage and character will lead one to respond, or not, violently. What these attibutes will not allow, however, is a blanket rejection of violence per se.
Horrible? Always. Mindless? Rarely.
orangeducks
USA can not get both the glory and the oil.
The US war machine may be nazi lite but the insurgence is not La Resistance lite. They seem to be very heavy.
Very good piece. I’m a Sunni American living in Baghdad (in the ‘Red Zone’, in fact) and one of my neighbors (high profile in Iraqi Islamic Party) fears reprisals from these militias/brigades and MOI forces. Many nights he spends in IIP headquarters because of this fear. If you ask the average Iraqi citizen, it is these militia forces who are behind many of the kidnappings and assassinations that occur on a daily basis- not of foreigners, but of average Iraqis. Something has got to be done about this problem.