Political Crossfire Forums

[sherborne]

Up to 100 dead bodies are found in Iraq every day now, mostly in Baghdad having been dumped on rubbish tips and left in side alleyways. Most of them have been horribly mutilated and torture appears to have been commonplace with electric drill holes, acid burning and beatings the most common methods used. The most disturbing fact in the cases of tehse bodies is that many of the victims are still wearing the same handcuffs that the police themselves use.

The prisons that Saddam Hussein used to hole up his political, religious and racial enemies have been unofficially re-opened by corrupt police officials. These stinking hell holes are packed with people who are raped, tortured and maimed for no other crime than belonging to the wrong sect.

The various tribal, religious and clan loyalties that exist in Baghdad in particular are known by many people. But the knowledge that the police are a powerful force amongst these death squads is perhaps not known so well known.

The Badr brigade, a Shia orginisation that returned en mass after the American invasion, envisaged an Iraq that was pro Iranian operating with the support of Iraq's 60% or more Shia Muslims. A key part of their strategy for controlling Iraq has been to infiltrate the poolice force which they are now using as a system of oppression to brutally crush and intimidate their Sunni opposition. The former Deputy Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, Douglas Brand, was given the task of creating Iraq's new police force afetrthe American invasion. He has since criticized American planners for not seeing the inevitable problems of recruiting en masse for such an important organsations as the police. The man who had responsibilty for the police service in the early days of the department was Bayan Jabr.

Bayan Jabr swept away the former heads of the security services when he arrived in May 2005 and replaced them with members of his Shia Badr brigade. They then in turn recruited on the ground amongs their own people. A few months down the line large groups of Sunni men began to be found who had been tortured and then killed. When Douglas Brand tried to get the police to intervene, many refused pleading that it was members of the police who were the perpetrators and if they interfered then their life would be forfeit.

Mohammed al Dinni, a Sunni politician, has provided evidence of the abuses by people within Jabr's ministry. Official documents obtained by al Dinni tell of a case where police commandos were actually caught in the act of killing Sunni men. When asked why they were doing it, they told investigators that hey had been ordered to by their senior commanders.

It is clear that a fragmented form of ethnic cleansing is happening in Iraq. The death squads that roam the streets even have the gall and capacity to go into hospitals and shoot patients whose crime is to belong to a different sect and to shoot the doctors who treat them. The reality of life in Baghdad is brutal factionalism that is infested with sectarian violence, a large part of which is perpetrated by those who are supposed to stop it: the police.

Life in "liberated" Iraq is a sham that is likley more brutal now than it ever was under Saddam. The saddest part is that Bush and Blairs folly will take more than a generation to even go some way near to healing. Blair often argues that historians will judge the Iraq war to have been the right thing to do. But for the countless of people whose relatives and loved ones have been snatched away from them in the most brutal and horriffic fashion possible, that will come as scant consolation. I personally spit on the Iraq war and the criminals who prosecuted it.