Sects & Violence: Death Squads and the Militias
"Anybody who has a militia now has power," said Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and member of the newly elected Parliament. "It's not a question of political personalities, but of arms and weapons."
--New York Times, February 25, 2006
In some ways, you have to think of it like the Catholics and Protestants, and the long bloody "troubles" between them in Ireland. On the surface, they work and play and raise their families and look pretty much the same when you pass them on the street. Under the secular rule of Saddam Hussein, even inter-marriage between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims was common. They mixed in neighborhoods and cities.
Another comparison would be the former Yugoslavia. Before the breakdown of Communism, Bosnians, Serbs, and Croatians were neighbors and friends. But the removal of one strong dictator and resulting power void opened up all sorts of sectarian rivalries and, eventually, "ethnic cleansing" and genocide.
This administration need only to have looked back TEN YEARS to realize that, and to assume that a similar situation might erupt in, of all places, the MIDDLE EAST, but no. Pentagon documents recently released through the Freedom of Information Act show a Defense Dept. plan to draw down American troops to a level of 20,000 by June of 2003, so sure were war-planners that we were going to be greeted with rose petals and the grateful Iraqis would immediately form an American-style democracy and we could be lauded the world over as heroic saviors with Bush as our messiah.
Didn't quite work out that way.
The sectarian animosities between Sunni and Shi'ite goes back centuries. The 10th and 11th imams--direct descendents of the Prophet Mohammed, were the father and grandfather of Imam Muhammed al-Mahdi.
The best way to explain it is this: al-Mahdi is Jesus to the Shi'ites. I'm not being sacreligious here. The Shi'ites, who were already being persecuted in the 10th and 11th centuries, still revere al-Mahdi as a messianic figure who did not die. They believe that he will return to earth one day and usher in an epoch of justice during a time of chaos.
The last place he was seen was at the Golden Mosque in Samarra, at the graves of his father and grandfather, before he fled to hide in caves. To the Shi'ites, the Golden Mosque is more than just a mosque. It is a holy shrine, one of the most sacred places in all of the Middle East.
To extremist Sunnis, called Salafis, such beliefs are heresies. Zarkawi (who is, I suspect, far more shrewd than religious), has made no secret of the fact that he wants to kill Shi'ites just for being Shi'ites, and wants to start a religious war in Iraq that would set one sect upon another.
But to the Shi'ites, the Sunnis are the murderers of their heroes.
The Shi'ites maintain about a 60% majority of the Iraqi populace. Saddam Hussein ruled a Sunni minority of only about 20% of the population, but they enjoyed unlimited powers, and the Shi'ites were persecuted frightfully, as were the Kurds.
The Shi'ites are also a much more organized religious sect than the Sunnis, who tend to be more secular. They formed militias to protect themselves because the Sunnis wouldn't do it. The Sunnis didn't need no steeenkin' militias because they had the power.
According to TIME Magazine, "The U.S.-led invasion upended the natural order."
The article does not mean to imply that there was anything natural about Hussein's brutal reign, but what happened was that the Sunnis were suddenly stripped of power and left fairly defenseless. The Shi'ites gained power in the elections (partly because the Sunnis refused to participate at first).
As the Sunni-led insurgency let loose the hounds of hell on the Shi'ite populace, (partly out of rage that they'd lost power and an attempt to regain it) and as the U.S. and Coalition forces failed to provide adequate security, the Shi'ite militias grew in strength and size.
One such militia became so powerful that they actually took on the Americans. Whipped up into murderous anti-American frenzy by the young cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, the "Mahdi Army" (named for the ancient imam), faced off against American troops in "Sadr City," a Baghdad slum.
Of course, religious zeal and angry young resentment are no match for the power and force of the United States military, and Sadr was forced to back down and embrace the political process. He was eventually elected to the new parliament, but he did not stop his rabble-rousing.
Another powerful, and far more insidious militia, was that of the Badr Brigade, led by a man named Bayan Jabr. After the January elections, when the new government took shape in April of '05, the new Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, appointed Jabr as head of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
The Interior Ministry is in charge of Iraqi security, police, and commando forces. The U.S. military has no control over decisions made by the Ministry.
A further complication was the American inability to comprehend the nature of the cleric/politician. Americans thought that if clerics were elected into political position, it would change the message they were preaching to their followers. Instead, the cleric/politicians would say one thing to placate Americans and then fan out to the mosques and preach fire and anti-American brimstone.
According to articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the British newspaper The Independent, once he took over the Interior Ministry, Bayan Jabr quietly began a wholesale purging, firing every Sunni he could find, even those who were doing a good job providing security for their regions, even those who were popular with the people.
He replaced them with his own hand-picked Badr Brigaders, who then formed infamous "Death Squads." Under cover of darkness and even in broad daylight, gangs of men dressed in police and commando uniforms swept into Sunni villages and into households and rounded up entire families, or three generations of male relatives, or resident clerics, killed them, and dumped their bodies in mass graves, or left them to rot in the desert sun.
In one month alone--July of '05, the Baghdad morgue alone reported some 1300 dead, and of those, some 900 had been tortured and executed, their hands still tied behind their backs.
In addition, according to the New York Times, the transportation minister, who happens to be a Sadr aide, tried to consolidate control over Baghdad International Airport by recruiting Mahdi members into security forces protecting it.
As police more and more became "either participants or observers" in these events, according to one eyewitness quoted in the Washington Post, Sunnis begged for protection from the U.S., but what could the Americans do? To turn their guns on one segment of the population at the request of the other would be taking sides, a deadly choice.
The Shi'ite-led administration of the Iraqi government denied that Death Squads existed and claimed that, anyway, the militias were only protecting Shi'ites from Sunni insurgents.
Some of the Sunni dead were no doubt insurgents, but just as many were simply turned into the militias by disgruntled neighbors or tribal enemies.
The situation dragged on for six more months, until the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, made a statement on Tuesday, February 21, that, "The United States is investing billions of dollars," in Iraqi police and army. "We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian." He also urged the new government to include Sunnis.
Furthermore, he insisted that the militias be purged from the police and the army altogether.
Khalilzad was trying to emphasize the importance to Iraq of a strong central government and of an army loyal to the country, not the tribe or sect.
These demands were not unreasonable from a Western perspective, but Shi'ites considered them very threatening, because it seemed to them as if the Americans were coddling the insurgency, and because they depended upon the militias to protect them. They were also highly suspicious of international pressures on the U.S. from Sunni countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, just as the U.S. was suspicious of undue influence of the Iranians on the Shi'ites.
The very next day, the Golden Mosque was utterly and completely destroyed by a bomb set by Sunni insurgents, and all of Iraq burst into flame.
--New York Times, February 25, 2006
In some ways, you have to think of it like the Catholics and Protestants, and the long bloody "troubles" between them in Ireland. On the surface, they work and play and raise their families and look pretty much the same when you pass them on the street. Under the secular rule of Saddam Hussein, even inter-marriage between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims was common. They mixed in neighborhoods and cities.
Another comparison would be the former Yugoslavia. Before the breakdown of Communism, Bosnians, Serbs, and Croatians were neighbors and friends. But the removal of one strong dictator and resulting power void opened up all sorts of sectarian rivalries and, eventually, "ethnic cleansing" and genocide.
This administration need only to have looked back TEN YEARS to realize that, and to assume that a similar situation might erupt in, of all places, the MIDDLE EAST, but no. Pentagon documents recently released through the Freedom of Information Act show a Defense Dept. plan to draw down American troops to a level of 20,000 by June of 2003, so sure were war-planners that we were going to be greeted with rose petals and the grateful Iraqis would immediately form an American-style democracy and we could be lauded the world over as heroic saviors with Bush as our messiah.
Didn't quite work out that way.
The sectarian animosities between Sunni and Shi'ite goes back centuries. The 10th and 11th imams--direct descendents of the Prophet Mohammed, were the father and grandfather of Imam Muhammed al-Mahdi.
The best way to explain it is this: al-Mahdi is Jesus to the Shi'ites. I'm not being sacreligious here. The Shi'ites, who were already being persecuted in the 10th and 11th centuries, still revere al-Mahdi as a messianic figure who did not die. They believe that he will return to earth one day and usher in an epoch of justice during a time of chaos.
The last place he was seen was at the Golden Mosque in Samarra, at the graves of his father and grandfather, before he fled to hide in caves. To the Shi'ites, the Golden Mosque is more than just a mosque. It is a holy shrine, one of the most sacred places in all of the Middle East.
To extremist Sunnis, called Salafis, such beliefs are heresies. Zarkawi (who is, I suspect, far more shrewd than religious), has made no secret of the fact that he wants to kill Shi'ites just for being Shi'ites, and wants to start a religious war in Iraq that would set one sect upon another.
But to the Shi'ites, the Sunnis are the murderers of their heroes.
The Shi'ites maintain about a 60% majority of the Iraqi populace. Saddam Hussein ruled a Sunni minority of only about 20% of the population, but they enjoyed unlimited powers, and the Shi'ites were persecuted frightfully, as were the Kurds.
The Shi'ites are also a much more organized religious sect than the Sunnis, who tend to be more secular. They formed militias to protect themselves because the Sunnis wouldn't do it. The Sunnis didn't need no steeenkin' militias because they had the power.
According to TIME Magazine, "The U.S.-led invasion upended the natural order."
The article does not mean to imply that there was anything natural about Hussein's brutal reign, but what happened was that the Sunnis were suddenly stripped of power and left fairly defenseless. The Shi'ites gained power in the elections (partly because the Sunnis refused to participate at first).
As the Sunni-led insurgency let loose the hounds of hell on the Shi'ite populace, (partly out of rage that they'd lost power and an attempt to regain it) and as the U.S. and Coalition forces failed to provide adequate security, the Shi'ite militias grew in strength and size.
One such militia became so powerful that they actually took on the Americans. Whipped up into murderous anti-American frenzy by the young cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, the "Mahdi Army" (named for the ancient imam), faced off against American troops in "Sadr City," a Baghdad slum.
Of course, religious zeal and angry young resentment are no match for the power and force of the United States military, and Sadr was forced to back down and embrace the political process. He was eventually elected to the new parliament, but he did not stop his rabble-rousing.
Another powerful, and far more insidious militia, was that of the Badr Brigade, led by a man named Bayan Jabr. After the January elections, when the new government took shape in April of '05, the new Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, appointed Jabr as head of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
The Interior Ministry is in charge of Iraqi security, police, and commando forces. The U.S. military has no control over decisions made by the Ministry.
A further complication was the American inability to comprehend the nature of the cleric/politician. Americans thought that if clerics were elected into political position, it would change the message they were preaching to their followers. Instead, the cleric/politicians would say one thing to placate Americans and then fan out to the mosques and preach fire and anti-American brimstone.
According to articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the British newspaper The Independent, once he took over the Interior Ministry, Bayan Jabr quietly began a wholesale purging, firing every Sunni he could find, even those who were doing a good job providing security for their regions, even those who were popular with the people.
He replaced them with his own hand-picked Badr Brigaders, who then formed infamous "Death Squads." Under cover of darkness and even in broad daylight, gangs of men dressed in police and commando uniforms swept into Sunni villages and into households and rounded up entire families, or three generations of male relatives, or resident clerics, killed them, and dumped their bodies in mass graves, or left them to rot in the desert sun.
In one month alone--July of '05, the Baghdad morgue alone reported some 1300 dead, and of those, some 900 had been tortured and executed, their hands still tied behind their backs.
In addition, according to the New York Times, the transportation minister, who happens to be a Sadr aide, tried to consolidate control over Baghdad International Airport by recruiting Mahdi members into security forces protecting it.
As police more and more became "either participants or observers" in these events, according to one eyewitness quoted in the Washington Post, Sunnis begged for protection from the U.S., but what could the Americans do? To turn their guns on one segment of the population at the request of the other would be taking sides, a deadly choice.
The Shi'ite-led administration of the Iraqi government denied that Death Squads existed and claimed that, anyway, the militias were only protecting Shi'ites from Sunni insurgents.
Some of the Sunni dead were no doubt insurgents, but just as many were simply turned into the militias by disgruntled neighbors or tribal enemies.
The situation dragged on for six more months, until the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, made a statement on Tuesday, February 21, that, "The United States is investing billions of dollars," in Iraqi police and army. "We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian." He also urged the new government to include Sunnis.
Furthermore, he insisted that the militias be purged from the police and the army altogether.
Khalilzad was trying to emphasize the importance to Iraq of a strong central government and of an army loyal to the country, not the tribe or sect.
These demands were not unreasonable from a Western perspective, but Shi'ites considered them very threatening, because it seemed to them as if the Americans were coddling the insurgency, and because they depended upon the militias to protect them. They were also highly suspicious of international pressures on the U.S. from Sunni countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, just as the U.S. was suspicious of undue influence of the Iranians on the Shi'ites.
The very next day, the Golden Mosque was utterly and completely destroyed by a bomb set by Sunni insurgents, and all of Iraq burst into flame.
posted by Deanie Mills at 9:12 PM
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