The Observer | International | Frontline police of new Iraq are waging secret war of vengeance

The Observer | International | Frontline police of new Iraq are waging secret war of vengeance:

"Frontline police of new Iraq are waging secret war of vengeance"

Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer


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.
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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.
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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.
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'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.