When you train, arm and otherwise encourage illegal militias, much more powerful than a country’s official security forces, what are the prospects for building peace and security? Wink at, support and make deals with ethno-religious commandos sent to attack other ethnic groups, and what do you have? The perfect mix for civil war. Despite the surprise continuously expressed by policymakers as violence grew, one thing is perfectly clear: the lion’s share of blame for the monumental bloodbath that is Iraq today lies squarely at the Pentagon’s feet. Our aces-up-the-sleeve, the illegal militias, provoked the exponential increase in sectarian violence, which now threatens to devour the country.
Kicking off this chain of events, the Pentagon prepared its first ‘ace’ in December 2002 recruiting and training a secret militia of well over 5,000 men outside of Budapest to be slipped into Iraq along with invasion forces.[1] The exiles and Arab mercenaries were intended to serve as a power base for its then-preferred choice for prime minister, Ahmed Chalabi, an effective mechanism for leverage.
Once resistance to the U.S. occupation took shape, the Coalition Authority formed a paramilitary unit directly tied to members of Iraq’s provisional government. They included gunmen of the Kurdish peshmerga, Shiite units- especially those of the SCIRI’s Badr Brigade- and of Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC). [2]
Desperate to put a lid on Iraqi insurgency before the Nov. 2004 elections, Cheney parlayed congressional authorization for $3 billion in covert funds hidden in year-end appropriations to finance secret police. [3] Assigned to head up a new counterinsurgency force of special police commandos was Colonel James Steele, former head of the U.S. Military Group in El Salvador, who developed special operating forces during the death squad era there. [4] Defense Secretary Rumsfeld termed Newsweek’s reports of a ‘Salvador Option’-death squads in Iraq- ‘nonsense,'[5] but the former head of all U.S. special forces, Gen. Wayne Downing, called it a ‘very valid strategy, a very valid tactic’ adding, ‘And it’s actually something we’ve been doing since we started the war back in March of 2003.'[6]
Astonishingly, Saddam’s General Security Directorate was revived by interim prime minister Iyad Allawi in July 2004, placing former members of the feared Mukhabarat in the country’s new intelligence organization. After Allawi’s intensive meetings at CIA headquarters in Langley in December 2003 to design the not-so-covert operations, [7] six police commando brigades made their debut in September 2004, complete with heavy-weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 assault rifles, mortars and 9 mm pistols.[8] Infinitely better armed and trained than the regular army and police and not yet officially part of the security forces, their impunity for extrajudicial killings was guaranteed.
‘We don’t call them militias. Militias are’¦illegal,’ said Maj. Chris Wales, sent to track down the ‘pop-up units’ camped out in bombed-out buildings around Baghdad. There were as many as 15,000 soldiers in a dozen units, whose first loyalty was to the unit’s commander and not necessarily to the central government. [9] Despite the fact that militias were declared illegal in May 2004, at least three were linked to Allawi. Former Ba’athist intelligence officer Gen. Thavit, headed up the Special Police Commandos, which has been singled out by the United Nations for conducting death squad strikes. When Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who was overseeing the U.S. effort to train and equip Iraqi military units, visited the Commando’s base, he agreed to provide the unit with funds for infrastructure, vehicles, ammunition, radios and more weapons. ‘When I saw them’¦I decided this was a horse to back,’ said Petraeus. ‘I want to get the hell out of here.'[10] The commandos were particularly attractive for their potential to reduce U.S. casualties, shifting the burden to zealous militiamen. So popular was the idea that the U.S. Marines proceeded to set up a private militia of their own, the Iraqi Freedom Guard, [11] to carry on ‘preemptive manhunts’ ahead of their forces.
As execution-style killings mounted throughout 2005, Shiite militias, police, and death squads linked to the SCIRI-dominated Interior Ministry were widely blamed.[12] Outgoing United Nations human rights chief John Pace declared that as many as 1,000 Iraqis per month were turning up in morgues, bound and gagged, with signs they had been tortured and executed. According to Pace, ‘The vast majority of bodies [in the Baghdad morgue] showed signs of summary execution’¦Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills.'[13]
Under the U.S.’s anointed instrument for counter-insurgency, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of many secret detention centers developed in the basement of the Interior Ministry. In Nov. 2005, some 170 severely malnourished prisoners, showing signs of torture and badly in need of medical attention, were found in the dungeon allegedly run by Badr Organization members. In congressional testimony on March 1, 2005, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, admitted that such militias are ultimately ‘destabilizing.’ [14] By mid-2005 as the slide to civil war began, the number of ethnic or sectarian killings had surpassed the number of deaths in the U.S.’s battle against the resistance.
Continuing the decades-long support for the Islamist right used to implement U.S. policy- such as the Afghan mujahideen led by Osama bin Laden- the administration was content to lay power at the SCIRI’s feet for more than two years. But it would come to regret its marginalization of Sunnis-who had enjoyed favored status by the United States under Saddam-when the aces began spinning out of control. In a dramatic shift in late 2005, the U.S. feverishly attempted to diminish Shiite power and pushed for Sunni participation in government-and for the return of Allawi.
But it was too late. Both the State Department, in its 2005 Human Rights Report, and Iraq’s own Interior Minister admitted in early 2006 that death squads were operating out of Iraqi government ministries; policemen by day and hit men by night.[15]
Corpses found along roadsides and in shallow graves brought average monthly body counts in January and February 2006 to some 2,000, an unprecedented level of violence. Pressed for an assessment of the security situation in a March Senate hearing, Secretary Rumsfeld replied, ‘The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the’¦Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to.’ [16] In other words, Iraqis would be left to resolve the U.S. wreckage.
Following the Samarra shrine bombing in February, U.S. Ambassador Khalilzad’s declaration that ‘Militias are the infrastructure of civil war and the basis of warlordism,’ [17] was a further attempt to blame Iraqis for their plight, but it also reflected a fundamental truth: tragically, it should have been invoked three years sooner. In the height of cynicism, Khalilzad told reporters in August ‘that Iraq’s political leaders had failed to fully use their influence to rein in the soaring violence, and that people associated with the government are stoking the flames of sectarian hatred.’ The Pentagon’s own report to Congress showed Iraqi civilian casualties up 51% this summer, claiming a staggering 3,438 lives in July, more than in any previous month of the war. [18] But its latest ‘solution’ is beyond outrageous: to create a new Sunni militia, to win over a sector of the rebellious Sunnis and be used against the uncontrollable Shias! [19]
What could possibly come of this insanity-labeled-policy except total chaos? With militias now fighting militias, and death tolls above 100 a day, the country is being hurled into the storm of civil war.
What we need is a dose of honesty. The Department of Defense must own up to its responsibility in unleashing this ungodly carnage and take immediate steps to stop it! Admit that its ingenious plan
to prevail through secret advantage did not work and will never work-not if democracy is the aim-and has only left disaster in its wake.
The Iraqi people have paid too high a price for this chessboard game, endured for decades upon decades. They deserve true freedom now! The only way to pull them back from the brink of the abyss, is not through a coup d’état, but through U.S. disengagement. Now. And then will come the time to ask forgiveness, and attempt to make reparations, if that can ever be possible.
[1] ‘US paying Iraqi rebels at secret training camp’, Sunday Herald-UK, January 5, 2003, http://www.sunday herald.com/print30420. See also Michael J. Jordan, ‘Iraqi exile meeting rattles Hungarian town,’ Christian Science Monitor, January 14, 2003.
[2] Dana Priest and Robin Wright, ‘Iraq Spy Service Planned by U.S. to Stem Attacks: CIA said to be Enlisting Hussein Agents,’ Washington Post, Dec. 11, 2003.
[3] Robert Dreyfuss, ‘Phoenix Rising,’ The American Prospect, Princeton, January 2004, Vol. 15. Issue 1, p.11
[4] Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Letter to Secretary Rumsfeld, April 5, 2006, Congressional Record.
[5] Department of Defense Briefing, January 11, 2005
[6] ‘Today Show’, WNBC, January 10, 2005.
[7] Priest and Wright, Ibid.
[8] Sgt. Jared Zabaldo, ‘Iraq Interior Ministry Forms Police Commando Battalions,’ American Forces Information Service, October 20, 2004.
[9] Greg Jaffe, ‘Bands of Brothers-New Factor in Iraq: Irregular Brigades Fill Security Void,’ Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2005.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Reuters, ‘U.S. Marines hire private Iraqi force to hunt insurgents,’ January 3, 2005.
[12] Ellen Knickmeyer, ‘Official says Shiite Party Suppressed Body Count,’ Washington Post, March 9, 2006.
[13] Jonathan Steele, ‘Baghdad official who exposed executions flees,’ Guardian, March 2, 2006.
[14] A.K. Gupta, ‘Let a Thousand Militias Bloom,’ NYC Indymedia Center, April 22, 2005.
[15] US Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices- 2005, March 8, 2006, and Matthew Schofield, ‘Death squads operated from inside Iraqi government, officials say,’ Knight Ridder Newspapers, March 12, 2006.
[16] Tom Regan, ‘US Military officials now say civil war, not insurgency, greatest security threat to Iraq,’ Christian Science Monitor, March 10, 2006.
[17] Nelson Hernandez, ‘Diplomacy Helped Calm the Chaos,’ Washington Post, February 28, 2006.
[18] Department of Defense, ‘Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,’ August 2006, p.3
[19] Ali Al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail, ‘New Militias Push Govt Back Further,’ IPS-Inter-Press Service, October 3, 2006, http:ipsnews.net.
Victoria Furio has been dedicated to education for justice since 1976, having directed several regional and national programs within the religious community. She has also spent 15 years in Latin America in ecumenical human rights and reconstruction efforts, and is currently on staff at a major U.S. seminary. She can be reached at:
[email protected].
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