Iraqi death squad discovered
BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. and Iraqi authorities discovered an apparent death squad operating within the country’s Interior Ministry last month when Iraqi troops stopped a group of highway patrol officers from killing a Sunni Arab man they had arrested, an American military spokesman said Thursday.
The 22 men, dressed in the camouflage uniforms of special police commandos, were stopped by chance at an Iraqi army checkpoint in northern Baghdad, according to Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who gave a detailed account of the incident to the Chicago Tribune for an article published Thursday. When the soldiers asked the police what they were doing, they responded bluntly: They were going to execute their captive. Instead, they wound up in jail.
The men’s arrest was first reported this month in the New York Times, which also quoted Peterson, who oversees the training of Iraqi police. The general outlines of the incident were confirmed Thursday in an e-mail from Peterson and by Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman.
The incident is the first hard evidence to support the widely held suspicion among Sunni Arabs that vigilantes in the country’s Shiite-dominated police force are rounding up Sunnis and killing them.
The bodies of Sunni men – bound, shot in the head and left in dumpsters, on side streets and in patches of desert – have turned up frequently since the middle of last year, shortly after the Shiite-led government was named in April.
Such discoveries have been made almost daily in recent months, and police found four bodies on Thursday, two of them in Baghdad, according to the Reuters news service.
Sunni leaders estimate that 1,600 people have been killed in what they say is a campaign of sectarian violence.
Survivors often say their attackers were dressed in police uniforms and drove police vehicles. Interior Ministry officials have countered that the clothes are easily available on the street and suggest that the killings are committed by criminals or militia fighters posing as police.
But Peterson said the incident in late January was a clear-cut case. Four ringleaders in the group of men who posed as special police commandos are now in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib prison, Lynch said. The 18 others, along with the Sunni man, who is accused of murder, are in an Iraqi jail.
Peterson told the Tribune that the four men held by U.S. authorities were apparently loyal to the Badr Organization, which is affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most powerful party in the country’s ruling Shiite coalition.
The Interior Ministry “will investigate whether they actually work for the Interior Ministry or claim that,” said Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, a deputy head of the ministry. “It is a very important issue that needs time to be investigated.”
Shiite militias such as the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army, as well as the Kurdish peshmerga, function as the armed wings of political parties. They sometimes work openly with the police, but more often impose their own brand of justice on cities and neighborhoods.
Shiites and Kurds were violently oppressed under the rule of Saddam Hussein, who gave favorable treatment to Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority.