Our Iraqi 'Allies?' & Death Squads

[Nickdfresh]

Police Abuses in Iraq Detailed
Confidential documents cover more than 400 investigations. Brutality, bribery and cooperation with militia fighters are common, a report says.
By Solomon Moore
Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-corrupt9jul09,0,4624759.story?track=tottext) Staff Writer

July 9, 2006

BAGHDAD — Brutality and corruption are rampant in Iraq's police force, with abuses including the rape of female prisoners, the release of terrorism suspects in exchange for bribes, assassinations of police officers and participation in insurgent bombings, according to confidential Iraqi government documents detailing more than 400 police corruption investigations.

A recent assessment by State Department police training contractors echoes the investigative documents, concluding that strong paramilitary and insurgent influences within the force and endemic corruption have undermined public confidence in the government.

Officers also have beaten prisoners to death, been involved in kidnapping rings, sold thousands of stolen and forged Iraqi passports and passed along vital information to insurgents, the Iraqi documents allege.

The documents, which cover part of 2005 and 2006, were obtained by The Times and authenticated by current and former police officials.

The alleged offenses span dozens of police units and hundreds of officers, including beat cops, generals and police chiefs. Officers were punished in some instances, but the vast majority of cases are either under investigation or were dropped because of lack of evidence or witness testimony.

The investigative documents are the latest in a string of disturbing revelations of abuse and corruption by Iraq's Interior Ministry, a Cabinet-level agency that employs 268,610 police, immigration, facilities security and dignitary protection officers.

After the discovery in November of a secret Interior Ministry detention facility in Baghdad operated by police intelligence officials affiliated with a Shiite Muslim militia, U.S. officials declared 2006 "the year of the police." They vowed a renewed effort to expand and professionalize Iraq's civilian officer corps.

President Bush has said that the training of a competent Iraqi police force is linked to the timing of an eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops and a key element in the war in Iraq.

But U.S. officials say the renegade force in the ministry's intelligence service that ran the bunker in Baghdad's Jadiriya neighborhood continues to operate out of the Interior Ministry building's seventh floor. A senior U.S. military official in Iraq, who spoke on condition of anonymity in an interview last month, confirmed that one of the leaders of the renegade group, Mahmoud Waeli, is the "minister of intelligence for the Badr Corps" Shiite militia and a main recruiter of paramilitary elements for Interior Ministry police forces.

"We're gradually working the process to take them out of the equation," the military official said. "We developed the information. We also developed a prosecutorial case."

Bayan Jabr, a prominent Shiite, was interior minister at the time of the investigations detailed in the documents and has been accused of allowing Shiite paramilitary fighters to run rampant in the security forces.

U.S. officials interviewed for this article said the ability of Jabr's replacement, Jawad Bolani, to deal with the corruption and militia influence in the police force will be a crucial test of his leadership.

The challenges facing Bolani, a Shiite engineer who has no policing experience and entered politics for the first time after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, are highlighted in a recent assessment by police trainers hired by the State Department. According to the report, corruption in the Interior Ministry has hampered its effectiveness and its credibility with Iraqis.

"Despite great progress and genuine commitment on the part of many ministry officials, the current climate of corruption, human rights violations and sectarian violence found in Iraq's security forces undermines public confidence," according to the document, titled "Year of the Police In-Stride Assessment, October 2005 to May 2006."

Elements of the Ministry of the Interior, or MOI, "have been co-opted by insurgents, terrorists and sectarian militias. Payroll fraud, other kinds of corruption and intimidation campaigns by insurgent and militia organizations undermine police effectiveness in key cities throughout Iraq," the report says.

The report increased tensions between the Pentagon, which runs the police training program, and the State Department, which has been pushing to expand its limited training role in Iraq, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The report strikes contradictory tones, saying that the Interior Ministry continues to improve and that its forces are on track to take over civil security from U.S. and Iraqi military elements by the end of the year, while outlining shocking problems with corruption and abuse.

"The document basically shows that Interior Ministry management has failed," the U.S. official said. "The document didn't directly address U.S. policy failures, but I guess it does show that too."

Interior Ministry officials have taken steps to "improve detainee life," the report says. "However, there are elements within the MOI which continue to abuse detainees."

Referring to Sunni Arab insurgent groups and Shiite paramilitary organizations, the report says "these groups exploit MOI forces to further insurgent, party and sectarian goals. As a result, many Iraqis do not trust the police. Divisions falling along militia lines have led to violence among police.

"MOI officials and forces are widely reported to engage in bribery, extortion and theft," the report says. "For example, there are numerous credible reports of ministry and police officials requiring payment from would-be recruits to join the police."

The report's findings are borne out in hundreds of pages of internal investigative documents.

The documents include worksheets with hundreds of short summaries of alleged police crimes, letters referring accused officers to Iraq's anti-corruption agencies and courts, citizen complaints of police abuse and corruption, police inspector general summaries detailing financial crimes and fraudulent contracting practices and reports on alleged sympathizers of Saddam Hussein's former regime.

In crisp bureaucratic Arabic, the documents detail a police force in which abuse and death at the hands of policemen is frighteningly common.

Police officers' loyalties appear to be a major problem, with dozens of accounts of insurgent infiltration and terrorist acts committed by ministry officials.

In one case, a ring of Baghdad police officers — including a colonel, two lieutenants and a captain — were accused of stealing communications equipment for insurgents, who used the electronics for remote bomb triggers. In another case, a medic with the Interior Ministry's elite commando force in Baghdad was fired after he was accused of planting improvised explosives and conducting assassinations.

In Diyala province, where last month U.S. forces killed Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, investigators were looking into allegations that a police officer detonated a suicide vest in the bombing of a police station. In a separate case, a brigadier general, a colonel and a criminal judge were accused of taking bribes from a suspected terrorist.

Police officers have also organized kidnapping rings that abduct civilians for ransom — in some of the cases, the victims are police officers. Two Baghdad police commanders kidnapped a lieutenant colonel, stole his ministry car and demanded tens of thousands of dollars from the victim's family, the documents allege. In that case, the two accused, Maj. Gen. Naief Abdul Ezaq and Capt. Methaq Sebah Mahmoud, were fired and taken to court.

The abbreviated notes on the case do not make clear whether the two officers received further punishment, but the fact that the documents mention the courts being involved in the incident at all makes it stand out from the rest of the cases.

In another case, the bodyguards of a police colonel in the Zayona neighborhood of Baghdad kidnapped merchants for ransom, according to the documents. In the capital's Ghazaliya neighborhood, a lieutenant and his brother-in-law kidnapped a man and demanded a huge ransom from his family.

Abuse by police is also a common theme. The victims include citizens who tried to complain about police misbehavior, drivers who disobeyed traffic police commands and, in several cases, other police officers.

But detainees appear to be targeted most often. The U.S. military has been working with the Iraqi government to standardize detention facilities and policies, and the U.S. assessment claims that several site visits turned up no serious human rights abuses. But the ministry documents reveal a brutal detention system in which officers run hidden jails, and torture and detainee deaths are common.

The documents mention four investigations into the deaths of 15 prisoners at the hands police commando units.

In the Rusafa section of Baghdad, a predominantly Shiite area known for its strong militia presence, police tortured detainees with electricity, beatings and, in at least one case, rape, according to the internal documents. Relief was reserved for those detainees whose relatives could afford to bribe detention officers to release them.

The Wolf Brigade, a notorious commando unit, illegally detained more than 650 prisoners, according to the documents. During a mass release of Wolf Brigade prisoners last November, a Times reporter saw dozens of malnourished men among the released detainees; several were so weak that they could not walk without assistance.

Female detainees are often sexually assaulted. According to the documents, the commander of a detention center in the Karkh neighborhood of the capital raped a woman who was an alleged insurgent in August. That same month, two lieutenants tortured and raped two other female detainees.

Among the strongest reprimands — and the most outrageous corruption — detailed in the documents are the cases involving two provincial police chiefs who were removed.



Brig. Gen. Adil Molan Ghaidan, the former Diyala province police chief, was accused of drinking on the job, illegally confiscating real estate from citizens, knowingly paying ghost employees and harboring suspected terrorists. He was removed from the force about six months ago, police sources say.

Before his removal several months ago, Maj. Gen. Ahmad Mohammed Aljiboori, the former Nineveh province police chief, allegedly assigned a private army of 1,400 officers to personal security detail. According to an internal inquiry, Aljiboori claimed the force was not under the Interior Ministry's control.

The document also accuses Aljiboori of detaining 300 Iraqis for two months without charges, wasting thousands of dollars on extravagant banquets and neglecting antiterrorism efforts to focus on arresting car dealers. The document says Aljiboori confiscated most of the cars for personal gain and gave some of them away to friends as gifts.

U.S. officials say they have known about Interior Ministry abuses for years but have done little to thwart them, choosing instead to push Iraqi leaders to solve their own problems.

"The military had been at the bunker prior to the raid in November," said the U.S. official, referring to the Jadiriya facility. "But they said nothing."

Some U.S. military leaders want American officials to have a stronger hand with the Interior Ministry, arguing that continuing corruption and militia influence are dashing any hope for a speedy American withdrawal.

Another senior military official said U.S. policy in regard to the ministry was confused and disengaged. The official, who asked not to be identified because his comments impugned his superiors, said the Pentagon and State Department had failed to coordinate their efforts and were disengaged from the Iraqi police leaders.

"They sit up there on the 11th floor of the ministry building and don't talk to the Iraqis," the official said of U.S. police trainers assigned to the Interior Ministry headquarters tower. "They say they do policy and [that] it's up to the Iraqis — well, they're just doing nothing. The MOI is the most broken ministry in Iraq."

[Nickdfresh]

Shiite-Sunni Violence Kills 58 in Baghdad
Sunday, July 9, 2006 7:52 PM EDT
The Associated Press (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=NYBUE&SECTION=HOME)
By ROBERT H. REID

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Masked Shiite gunmen roamed through west Baghdad's Jihad neighborhood Sunday, dragging Sunnis from their cars, picking them out on the street and killing them in a rampage that police said killed 41 people in a dramatic escalation of sectarian violence.

Hours later, two car bombs exploded near a Shiite mosque in the city's north, killing 17 people and wounding 38 in what appeared to be a reprisal attack, police said.

Black-clad Shiite militiamen manned checkpoints on roads into most major Shiite neighborhoods to guard against revenge attacks, as scattered clashes occurred across the Iraqi capital.

Sunni leaders expressed outrage over the killings, and President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, appealed for calm, warning that the nation stood "in front of a dangerous precipice."

Presidential security adviser Wafiq al-Samaraie told Al-Jazeera television that "we are at the gates of civil war" unless "exceptional measures" are taken.

A senior government official, Haidar Majid, contested the police figures, saying late Sunday that only nine people died in Jihad. Police Lt. Mohammed Khayoun insisted the figure of 41 was correct — with 24 bodies taken to Yarmouk hospital and 17 to the city morgue. There was no way to reconcile the discrepancy.

Regardless, the brazen attack was likely to further enflame Shiite-Sunni tensions and undermine public confidence in Iraq's new unity government. It also raises new questions about the effectiveness of the Iraqi police and army to curb sectarian violence in the capital.

The trouble started about 10 a.m. when several carloads of gunmen drove into the Jihad area along the main road to Baghdad International Airport, police and witnesses said. The gunmen stopped cars, checked passengers' identification cards and shot dead those with Sunni names.

Masked gunmen wearing black clothes roamed the streets, abducting Sunnis whose bodies were found later scattered throughout the religiously mixed neighborhood, an Interior Ministry official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to media.

U.S. and Iraqi forces sealed off the area, and residents said American troops using loudspeakers announced a two-day curfew. Black smoke from burning tires wafted through the streets.

Another policeman, Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq, also said 41 bodies had been collected and taken to hospitals. Some Sunni clerics put the death toll at more than 50 in Jihad, a once prosperous neighborhood of handsome villas owned by officials of Saddam Hussein's security services.

Residents contacted by telephone told of gunmen systematically rounding up and massacring Sunni men.

A Shiite shopkeeper said he saw heavily armed men pull four people out of a car, blindfold them and force them to stand to the side while they grabbed five others out of a minivan.

"After ten minutes, the gunmen took the nine people to a place a few meters (yards) away from the market and opened fire on them," Saad Jawad al-Azzawi said.

Wissam Mohammad al-Ani, a Sunni, said three gunmen stopped him as he was talking toward a bus stop and demanded his identification. They let him go after he produced a fake ID with a Shiite name, but they seized two young men standing nearby.

Police and Shiite leaders speculated the rampage was carried out in retaliation for a Saturday night car bombing at a Shiite mosque that killed two people and wounded nine.

Clashes also broke out between gunmen and Iraqi police in at least three neighborhoods across the capital, police and residents said. Three Shiite militiamen were killed in fighting with security forces in one of them, police said.

The spokesman for a Sunni clerical association, Mohammed Beshar al-Faydhi, blamed the Jihad attack on the Mahdi Army militia, led by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Faydhi told Al-Jazeera television that he had documents to prove his allegation.

Al-Sadr denied responsibility and called on both Shiites and Sunnis to "join hands for the sake of Iraq's independence and stability." He assured Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, leader of the largest Sunni Arab party, that he would punish any of his militiamen if they were involved.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, has promised to disband Shiite militias and other armed groups, which are blamed for much of the sectarian violence. On Friday, Iraqi troops backed by U.S. jets raided a Shiite militia stronghold in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, killing and wounding dozens of people.

But militias have flourished in large part because of the inability of the police, the Iraqi army and coalition forces to guarantee security. Many in the Shiite majority believe the militias are their only protection against Sunni extremists such as al-Qaida in Iraq, responsible for many car bombings and suicide attacks against Shiite civilians.

The violence is likely to complicate U.S. and Iraqi efforts to encourage disaffected Sunnis to abandon the Sunni-dominated insurgency and join mainstream politics so U.S. troops can begin to go home.

Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie, a Sunni, described the Jihad attack as "a real and ugly massacre," and blamed Iraqi security forces, which are widely believed to have been infiltrated by Shiite militias.

"There are officers who instead of being in charge should be questioned and referred to judicial authorities," al-Zubaie told Al-Jazeera TV. "Jihad is witnessing a catastrophic crime."

The prime minister's office quickly distanced itself from al-Zubaie's comments, saying in a statement that they "do not represent the government's point of view."

Sunni politician Alaa Maki also blamed Shiite extremists, claiming they were out to wipe out the Sunni Arab minority.

"We demand the presidency, the prime minister and the parliament stand against this agenda," Maki said. "The situation is very serious. If it deteriorates, all of us will be losers."

Also Sunday, an American soldier died in a "non-combat related incident," the U.S. command said without giving further details.

In the western city of Ramadi, a car bomb exploded next to a U.S. convoy, wounding four American soldiers, the military said. The attack occurred as the convoy headed to the government center in the city, an insurgent hotbed 70 miles west of Baghdad.

———

Associated Press writers Kim Gamel, Bassem Mroue, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Bushra Juhi, Sameer N. Yacoub and Qais al-Bashir contributed to this report.

[Kristy]

[i]Originally posted by Nickdfresh

U.S. officials say they have known about Interior Ministry abuses for years but have done little to thwart them, choosing instead to push Iraqi leaders to solve their own problems.


Bush's own little experimental Muslim Gestapo for hire. Murder, rape and theft all in the name of "freedom" and "democracy" as long as they do it the atrocities to those who are not all that friendly to Ameirca. Of course, if one of them turns and goes bad, the US will gladly hunt them down and put a bullet in their skull calling them an "extremist" who is impeding the enfranchisement of Iraq.

[Nickdfresh]

July 11, 2006
Another Violent Day Kills at Least 50 in Baghdad
By KIRK SEMPLE

BAGHDAD, July 11 — At least 50 people were killed in Baghdad today in a stunning array of violence that included a double suicide attack near busy entrances to the fortified Green Zone, beheadings, shootings, a series of car bombs, mortar attacks and the ambush of a bus carrying Shiite mourners returning from a burial.

The day’s killings, many of them clearly carried out as sectarian vengeance, raised the three-day death toll in the capital alone to well over 100, and deepened the sense among residents that the violence was not going to ebb anytime soon — and that Iraqi and American security forces were powerless to stop it.

While responsibility was claimed for only one of today’s attacks, many bore the hallmarks of sectarian militias, both Sunni Arab and Shiite, which now appear to be dictating the ebb and flow of life in Iraq and that have left the new government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his American counterparts scrambling to come up with a military and political strategy to combat them.

Mr. Maliki has saturated the city’s streets with thousands of security forces and a constellation of new checkpoints, but neither those nor his recently proposed “reconciliation plan,� intended to disarm illegal militias, seems to have retarded the rampant violence.

The worsening security situation, which many Iraqis are now calling a low-grade civil war, prompted lawmakers to summon the interior and defense ministers to Parliament on Thursday to discuss the crisis, according to Agence France-Presse, quoting the deputy speaker of the legislature, Khalid al-Attiya.

Amid the spike in violence, however, Mr. Maliki himself has been remarkably quiet. On Monday, he made an appeal for unity during a speech in Iraqi Kurdistan, and late today his office issued a brief written statement condemning the attack on the bus carrying the mourners. Efforts to seek additional comment from his office today were unsuccessful.

The country’s largest Sunni bloc said that in the interest of promoting calm, it would end its boycott of Parliament. Sunni legislators suspended their participation early last week after a colleague, Tayseer Najah al-Mashhadani, was kidnapped. Many Sunnis have blamed the abduction on the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Mr. Sadr and his deputies, however, have denied any involvement.

Alaa Makki, a Sunni leader, said in a telephone interview that the bloc’s decision was influenced by Mr. Sadr, who on Sunday issued an appeal for harmony and the convening of a special meeting of Parliament to address the sectarian bloodshed.

The sudden surge in violence began Sunday morning when a group of Shiite gunmen appeared on the streets of a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad and began executing people. This vigilantism, astonishing even in Iraq’s culture of relentless violence, was followed by seemingly retributive car bomb attacks against a Shiite mosque.

Estimates of the number of killings in Baghdad on Sunday range from at least 30 to more than double that number. And at least 30 died in violence on Monday, officials said.

In today’s most deadly attack, two pedestrians wearing vests fashioned with explosives blew themselves up near a restaurant outside the walls of the Green Zone yet within a few hundred yards of three busy entrances, Iraqi and American officials said. Soon after the initial blasts, a hidden bomb was detonated nearby, adding to the carnage, officials said.

At least 15 Iraqi civilians and one Iraqi police officer were killed in the blasts, and four people were wounded, according to the American military command.

In an Internet posting, an insurgent group called the Islamic Army in Iraq claimed responsibility for the triple attack and said it had struck in revenge for the rape and slaying of an Iraqi girl in Mahmudiya, a crime in which at least five American soldiers and one recently discharged American soldier are suspects.

According to the SITE Institute, which monitors jihadist postings on the Internet, this attack appeared to be the first suicide operation by the Islamic Army.

In a predominantly Sunni area of the Dora district in southern Baghdad, gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Shiites mourners from the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where they had buried a relative, government officials and relatives said. The gunmen pulled 10 people from the bus and executed them, according to an Interior Ministry official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

An hour earlier, in Taji, north of Baghdad, gunmen ambushed another bus, killing one person and wounding five, the ministry official said. It was unclear whether the two bus attacks were related.

Two mortar grenades hit a Shiite mosque in Dora, killing 9 and wounding 11 civilians, the Interior Mnistry official said.

In other violence, a family of five — a father and mother and their grown daughter and two teenage sons — were found beheaded in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Mahdiya in Dora, according to an official at Yarmouk Hospital, the main medical facility in western Baghdad.

The police and hospital officials also reported that four car bombs around Baghdad killed at least 7 people and wounded at least 18.

Gunmen raided a company’s offices in the upper middle class Mansour neighborhood, killing three employees and wounding another three, officials said.

According to the official at Yarmouk Hospital, five bodies were discovered early today in Jihad, the neighborhood where dozens of people were reportedly executed by marauding gunmen on Sunday. It was unclear when the victims had been killed.

Wisam Jabir Abdullah, Iraq’s envoy to Iran, who was on vacation in Baghdad, was kidnapped by gunmen from his home today, the Interior Ministry official said.

Violence also inflicted casualties outside Baghdad.

In Baquba, north of Baghdad, the mayor of the Um Al Nawa district was assassinated by gunmen, the ministry official said. In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a drive-by shooting killed two workers in the central market, according to the Interior Ministry official.

An engineer and his bodyguard were assassinated on their way to work in Kirkuk this morning, according to Col. Adel Zain Alabdin of the Iraqi Police.

Wijdan Michael, Iraq’s minister of human rights, said in a telephone interview that a government commission had been formed to study the possibility of scrapping a law that granted American troops immunity from Iraqi prosecution. The prime minister said last week that he was considering whether to seek the abolishment of the rule in light of the revelations that American military personnel have come under investigation in connection with the recent killings of unarmed Iraqis.

Also today, two defendants in the trial of Saddam Hussein, both of them low-level Baath Party officials, delivered their closing arguments. The judge adjourned the trial until July 24 to resolve a boycott by the lawyers representing Mr. Hussein and his three key co-defendants.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Qais Mizher, Hosham Hussein and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/world/middleeast/11cnd-iraq.html?hp&ex=1152676800&en=1da96d5832d78d70&ei=5094&partner=homepage) from Baghdad, and by an Iraqi employee of The Times from Kirkuk.