_NOTE: Here is “the story”:http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1175055,00.html 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”:http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61689.htm, 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.