Doug Lorimer
On March 12, Iraqi interior minister Bayan Jabr announced that four employees in his ministry had been arrested for being members of a death squad. This was the first time that the US-backed Iraqi government had admitted the existence of such death squads.
Reporting Jabr's announcement on March 12, the US Knight Ridder Newspapers chain added: "Although Jabr appeared to confirm the existence of death squads, the scale of the operation uncovered would appear to be far smaller than critics had alleged."
The execution of large numbers of Sunnis by US-trained, Shiite-dominated government death squads — up to 7000 over the last few months, according to morgue records obtained by outgoing head of the human rights office in Iraq John Pace — demonstrates that the threat of civil war in Iraq stems from the US-led occupation. It disproves the official White House line, peddled by the Western corporate media, that it is only the presence of these occupation forces that is holding back Shiites and Sunnis from slaughtering each other.
Parroting the White House line, Brigadier Paul Symon, the commander of Australian forces in the Middle East, told Australian reporters on March 9 that there was little danger of a "civil war" because the US-led foreign occupation forces had the Iraqi insurgents "on the run".
"We are seeing an insurgency that is diminishing in effectiveness in its tactics and techniques", Symon claimed.
Only three days earlier, an Iraqi resistance sniper had killed General Mubdar Hatim Hayza al Dulaim, one of the top commanders of Washington's puppet Iraqi army. Trained by the US military, Dulaim was in charge of all the puppet Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad.
Reuters reported on March 8 that Dulaim was hit in the head by a single bullet as he emerged from his armoured car, one of 14 in his convoy, upon returning to his headquarters on March 6. It was the only bullet fired at the convoy.
"Fellow Iraqi generals", Reuters reported, "said it was an assassination that needed inside information and proved the army, recruited by US officers over the past two years, had been infiltrated" by the resistance. "The insurgents are everywhere", said one Iraqi general.
From Green Left Weekly, March 22, 2006.
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