IRAQ: US military trained government death squads

[XXPANTHAXX]

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.