IRAQ: US military trained government death squads

March 22, 2006
Issue 

David Spratt

On February 26, Andrew Buncombe and Patrick Cockburn reported in the British Independent: "Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.

"John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told the Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior... Pace said the Interior Ministry was 'acting as a rogue element within the government'. It is controlled by the main Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri); the interior minister, Bayan Jabr, is a former leader of Sciri's Badr Brigade militia, which is one of the main groups accused of carrying out sectarian killings.

"Not only counter-insurgency units such as the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpions and the Tigers, but the commandos and even the highway patrol police have been accused of acting as death squads."

Pace's comments lifted the lid on one of the horrible secrets of Iraq today — death squads operating in Iraq are not, as many journalists, commentators and Iraqi officials claim, simply private militias operating separately from the government but are forces directly under the control of the Iraqi interior ministry, which is funded by the occupation forces and advised by US counter-insurgency experts well-practised in the use of death squads — from the CIA's Operation Phoenix during the Vietnam War to the US-backed and trained death squads of Honduras and El Salvador in the 1980s.

The promises of the Iraq government to "disband the militias" is a distraction because at least some the death squads under question are under the command of the interior ministry, not independent of it.

The Special Police Commandos (SPC) is an elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit, formed in August 2004 under the operational control of Iraq's interior ministry by Falah al Naqib (believed by many to have been a major CIA "asset"), then interior minister under the interim government of Iyad Allawi.

After their formation, US Lieutenant-General David Petraeus, the US military commander in charge of training and arming the Iraqi security forces, visited the SPC training camp and decided that the commandos would receive whatever arms, ammunition and supplies they required, and assigned Steve Casteel to work with them. Casteel is the senior US adviser to Iraq's Ministry of Interior. He is a former top official in the US Drug Enforcement Administration who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America, working alongside local forces in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.

The SPC is advised by James Steele, counsellor to the US ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces and one of the US military's top experts on counter-insurgency. Steele honed his tactics leading a US Army Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980s.

The SPC, along with US advisers and elite troops, have been involved in counter-insurgency operations especially in the Sunni triangle towns of Samarra, Baqubah, Fallujah and Ramadi.

In Mosul, the police commandos began operating in late October 2004. The police commandos conducted raids inside the city's old quarter starting on November 16, 2004, in which dozens of suspects were arrested. During one such raid on a mosque and a tea shop, detainees, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs, were seen being taken away by commandos. In the weeks and months that followed over 150 bodies appeared, often in batches and frequently having obviously been executed, usually with a bullet to the head.

This case, and evidence for other SPC death squad operations, especially in Baghdad, up to May 2005, are documented by Max Fuller in his article "For Iraq, 'The Salvador Option' Becomes Reality", available at <http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html>.

Fuller writes that the case of the 10 bricklayers suffocated in the back of a police van last July 10, to his knowledge and at the time of his writing, the only case in which members of the security forces have been securely identified, with a survivor who had feigned death able to provide first-hand testimony. The unit responsible was the Wolf Brigade.

This commando unit, specifically named by Pace as a death squad, is one component of the interior ministry's Special Police Commandos. According to a June 9 US Council for Foreign Relations report, the Wolf Brigade is the "most feared and effective commando unit in Iraq, experts say. Formed last October by a former three-star Shiite general and SCIRI member who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Walid, the Wolf Brigade is composed of roughly 2000 fighters, mostly young, poor Shiites from Sadr City."

Abu Walid is likely General Rashid Flayyih, a Shiite who held senior intelligence posts under Saddam Hussein and was in charge of the suppression of the Shia uprising in Nasiriya following the 1990-91 Gulf War.

The Wolf Brigade is responsible for running the interior ministry detention and torture chambers, as documented by a report in the July 3 London Observer.

The February 21 Los Angeles Times reported that a "1500-member Iraqi police force with close ties to Shiite militia groups has emerged as a focus of investigations into suspected death squads working within the country's interior ministry. Iraq's national highway patrol was established largely to stave off insurgent attacks on roadways. But US military officials, interviewed over the last several days, say they suspect the patrol of being deeply involved in illegal detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings."

But then comes the plausible deniability: "We don't train them, we don't give them equipment, we don't conduct site visits over there. They are just bad, criminal people", the LA Times reported a high-ranking US military officer who advises the interior ministry as saying.

And then came the admission: "The officials said that in recent months the US has withdrawn financial and advisory support from the patrol in an effort to distance the American training effort from what they perceived to be a renegade force."

At the same time, occupation and Iraqi officials were still peddling the line that the killings were being carried out by militias "outside" of government control, even though most of those militias belong to parties now in the government, such as SCIRI and Dawa.

Typical of the spin-doctors was Iraqi human rights minister Nermine Othman, who said she believed lower-level interior ministry officials were assisting criminals involved in killing Iraqis: "I think there are many people inside the interior ministry involved with these deaths or giving the uniforms of colleagues to criminals... These officials are helping the criminals by informing them on where targeted people are going or where people are living. They are helping them in different ways."

Fuller concludes: "Clearly the purpose of stating or implying that unaccountable militias are behind the extrajudicial executions and/or that sectarian rivalries, especially Shia control of the interior ministry ... are to blame, is to distance the US from the almost unthinkable ongoing crimes against humanity.

"Comparable disinformation strategies have been employed in every counterinsurgency conflict with which the US has been involved; it is known as establishing 'plausible deniability'. For example, in Colombia, where the US has been deeply involved for decades, paramilitary death squads are invariably described in the media as a third force in the armed conflict, despite the fact that their victims are typically civilian opponents of the government, their members are drawn directly from serving members of the armed forces and they are only able to operate with the active complicity of the army (Human Rights Watch: The 'Sixth Division'). In reality, they function as part of a shadow state, which exists to implement policies that must remain unaccountable."

[David Spratt is an organiser with the Victorian Peace Network.]

From Green Left Weekly, March 22, 2006.
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