markfromireland

Yesterday

“Cruel irony and “not good good enough for ‘our boys’ ” is an understatement. I have no idea why any British reporter would put the word scandal in inverted comments as Brian Brady has done in today’s story. A scandal is exactly what it is. It is scandalous that both ordinary soldiers and bomb disposal specialists should be exposed to yet further danger while a pack of dirty mercenaries should be laughing all the way to the bank. “

Today

“Reuters - Mon Sep 4, 9:49 AM ET Danish soldiers carry the body of one of two British soldiers killed in a roadside bomb attack near Basra in southern Iraq, September 4, 2006. REUTERS/Atef Hassan”

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I think we’ve been all been expecting, and dreading, this. I’ve written about it repeatedly recently:

Back on July 27th I wrote about the Statement issued by Grand Ayatollah Najafi covered in this article in Al-Zaman [Arabic]:

“the situation in the south of the country is coming very badly unstuck for the green zone government. In particular this statement by Grand Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi is ominous:

“We fear the coming of a day when we cannot restrain a revolution of the people, with all its unsavory consequences.”

Al-Najafi is often thought to be second most important of the four Grand Ayatollahs living in Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani being “primus inter pares” (the fifth Grand Ayatollah Kazem al-Hairi lives in Iran.) Al-Najafi’s office would not under any circumstances have issued that statement unless the Grand Ayatollahs (who act collegially) were of the opinion that their ability to restrain their followers was slipping. … … … .”

On August 10th I wrote this:

“It remains to be seen whether the Grand Ayatollahs already deeply concerned that their ability to restrain their followers is slipping will succeed in holding them back one more time. Should they fail the bloodbath created by the American occupation’s policies in Iraq will pale into insignificance.”

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Yankee Poodle Tony’s Government The British The Blair Government has sold off 4½ million pounds worth of armoured personnel carriers for £44,000 including four to American mercenary firm Blackwater. British Ministers claimed that adaptations made to the Mamba Mine Protected Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC), which if you follow the chain of ownership is manufactured by a BAE (British Aerospace) subsidiary, made it unsuitable for its use in Iraq which included the transportation of bomb disposal teams, and too difficult to maintain. The ministers appear to be being more than somewhat “economical with the actualité.” The American mercenary firm that bought them for the princely sum of £2,933.33 apiece describes them as “the armoured personnel carrier of choice for Blackwater ops in Iraq” and clearly don’t have any problem maintaining them as they’re in daily use on Route Irish - “the most dangerous road in the world.” The British newspaper Scotland on Sunday first broke the story last Sunday and has an even more damning follow-up today.

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الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية: جنودٌ يتحدثون عن الإساءة إلى محتجزين في العراق
السلطات تسمح باستخدام الوسائل المسيئة وتتجاهل شكاوى الجنود

هذه الروايات تدحض ادعاءات الحكومة الأمريكية بأن التعذيب والإساءات في العراق لم
تكن بإيعازٍ من السلطات بل هي حالاتٌ استثنائية. فعلى العكس من ذلك، كانت تلك
الممارسات موضع تغاضٍ، وتستخدم على نطاق واسع.

جون سيفتون، الباحثٌ الرئيسي لقسم الإرهاب ومكافحة الإرهاب

نسخة للطباعة

“He wouldn’t say anything, and they kept screaming at him and screaming at him. And they picked him up and threw him against the wall—and it’s a concrete wall. They threw him up against the wall, they punched him in the neck, punched him in the stomach—you know, gut shot—they threw him down. [At one point,] they actually threw him outside—they had two guys [other detainees] outside watching—threw him outside the building, just threw him outside like that. And then they picked him up, dragged him back, pulling him by the hair and stuff. . . . They hold his arms like this [out behind his back] and then beat him down—enough so they could break it, to give you a little bit of the pain. Same with the kneecaps: kicked him in the kneecaps, you know, really hard, with those boots—combat boots.

They were [usually] very conscious of trying not to leave marks [on the body] most of the time, but with that guy—they really didn’t [i.e., they made no effort to avoid leaving bruises and cuts]. . . . [Later,] they took some of the sani-wipes from the MRE pack [Meals Ready to Eat], you know, clean his face off and stuff like that, but the next day, he was pretty bruised. “

[snip]

The detainee was beaten and interrogated for about two hours, Nick said. “He was there for a long time, a long time.” Later on, Nick said, the interrogators told guards and other soldiers that the detainee had inflicted the damage on himself: “They blamed it on him—a ‘falling-down-the-stairs’ deal or whatever.”

As it turned out, the detainee who was beaten was Iranian: Nick said he was a middle aged man, probably in his late 40s, and said he was probably a small-time businessman or smuggler who brought electronics to and from Syria and through Kurdish areas in Iran and Iraq. The fact that the man didn’t speak Arabic apparently made the interrogators beat him more severely

The guy didn’t speak Arabic at all; he spoke Farsi. And there was nobody who spoke Farsi on the post and he just kept getting the crap beat out of him because they thought that he was being silent when he only spoke Farsi.

Nick said that one of the Special Forces soldiers on the base—who was not trained as an interrogator or part of a military intelligence unit—was responsible:

The guy who was doing most of the roughing up in that case, I’m pretty sure that he was one of the SF [Special Forces] guys that just rotated through, and was just helping out in the interrogation. But they really thought this guy had a bunch of information, and he never opened his mouth except to scream incoherently, when he was getting hit.

As described earlier, Nick and MPs he worked with were under orders to keep newly arrived detainees awake and standing in the metal container. But Nick ordered the enlisted soldiers working under him not to hit detainees:

[I told them:] this is what I expect, this is how I do things. I don’t care what the other guys do, the rules are “don’t bring a camera,” so don’t bring a camera, you don’t hit the guys. I try to tell them to treat them the way you wanna be treated and stuff like that. . . Geneva Conventions, that’s what I do—I remind them of Geneva Conventions—this is what we do, this is what we don’t do to prisoners.

Nick said that neither he nor any of his troops had training in detention operations, or Geneva Conventions standards on treatment of detainees:

Geneva Conventions—I mean, a lot of people’s knowledge—99 percent of people’s knowledge extends to “hey, there’s a Geneva Conventions Category one in the back of my ID card,” [referring to the classification written on soldiers identification cards]. Or: “Geneva’s a town in Switzerland.” For a lot of people, you know, that’s what it extends to. I knew a little bit more, you know, as far as that goes: Those are rules governing warfare and stuff like that. But I didn’t know a lot of specific information or anything like that. I looked up specific information based on the treatment of POWs, detainees, etc. etc. That’s what I was looking for. And right now, I couldn’t quote you much. . . .

That’s pretty much how it went. That’s the prevailing thought [process] and it was mentioned that, “Oh, that’s an antiquated set of rules.”

“You can’t get information out of people these days without breaking them”—that kind of thing. That was the prevalent attitude. That was voiced by the E6. That was the quote: “You cannot get information out of them without breaking that stuff.”

From Nick’s perspective, the interrogators did not appear professional. He believed that much of the abuse stemmed from racist attitudes toward detainees. Many of the guards and interrogators called Iraqi’s “Hajis,” and would often mock or taunt them. Nick also said he didn’t believe that abusive interrogation tactics worked:

“No Blood, No Foul” Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq - Human Rights Watch [WEB]

“No Blood, No Foul” Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq - Human Rights Watch [PDF]

There are two horrific stories in today’s azzaman.com (Al-Zaman) the first which can be found here [Arabic text] says that the militias who conducted what is best described as a pogrom on July 9th in Baghdad’s Jihad neighbourhood knew who they were looking for. Here’s what Juan Cole has to say about the same story.

“Shiite militamen who undertook the killings had with them long lists of ex-Baathists who had held office under the old regime but had been purged by the Debaathification Committee. The Debaathification Committee has been dominated by Ahmad Chalabi, and much of the documentation for its work was turned over to Chalabi by Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki also played a central role in the Debaathification Committee.”

For more on Chalabi see the Sunday Herald:

Unveiled: the thugs Bush wants in place of Saddam

‘I examined my notes of the interviews I conducted with 82 Iraqi opposition leaders, and began identifying those on my list whose thinking resembles Saddam’s. To my horror, I decided 75 of the people I interviewed were men who would kill to achieve their goal.’ One can only wonder whether Washington has come to the same conclusion, or indeed really cares.”

also see this Sourcewatch profileGo read the whole posting on “Informed Comment,” Cole entirely correctly discusses the role of the Debaathification Committee and explains its connection both to Ahmed Chalabi and Nour al-Maliki but I think that Cole is missing the significance of some very important points towards the end of the story.

The first is that according to the witnesses quoted in the story the killers were young, relatively well armed, well dressed, and not particularly choosy about who they killed - if they couldn’t find the person they were looking for from their list they just killed somebody else in their place. The second though is a bit more telling. According to al-Zaman they co-ordinated their actions using walkie-talkies and radios, NOT, mobile ‘phones and that they were observed using these apparently to “screen” people whom they had captured, the implication of the story being that they were asking for and getting orders about who to kill. That doesn’t sound like any of the various groups loosely associated with Muqata al-Sadr’s movement to me, and it certainly doesn’t sound like his Mahdi Militia.

The membership of the Mahdi militia are young, true, but they’re also impoverished and have to buy their weapons and other equipment out of their own pockets - even allowing for a certain amount of racketeering and “protection” money they just don’t have the cash to equip themselves with sophisticated comms equipment. ‘Nor is it likely that such equipment was “borrowed” from, for example the Ministry of Health, (which is under Sadrite control) because to the best of my knowledge and belief they don’t have a plethora of such equipment either. Furthermore involvement by the Mahdi militia in such a pogrom would put the kybosh on al-Sadr’s efforts to reach out to Sunnis. It’s far more likely that this pogrom is associated with much more avowedly sectarian elements within the green zone government, some have suggested Badr brigade involvement which is far more intuitively plausible.

The second story can be found here [Arabic text] it describes how residents in Amiriyah, Al-Dura (Dora), Ghazaliyah, Khadra, Jihad, and Sayyidiyah which are largely Sunni districts in Western baghdad have formed vigilante associations to keep deathsquads out. Cole has picked up on this article too but his posting is short, and some context is needed here’s what he has to say:

“Al-Zaman/ DPA say that Sunni Arabs in the West Baghdad districts of Amiriyah, Khadra, Jihad, Ghazaliyah, Sayyidiyah and Al-Dura (Dora) have formed emergency neighborhood patrols for fear that Shiite militias from nearby Shiite-dominated districts to the east will make further raids into their areas. Muezzins or callers to prayer in the Sunni mosques of the Khadra district used amplifiers to call for volunteers, and dozens of young men responded by taking up arms. They especially hastened to do so after armed militiamen attacked the Muluki Mosque in al-Amiriyah District near Karkh late on Wednesday. They set up concrete blocks as barriers barring entry to the Khadra District. As soon as the callers to prayer broadcast the attack on the Muluki Mosque, shopkeepers and merchants in the commercial district closed their establishments.

This narrative of innocent Sunni Arabs policing their neighborhoods from predatory Shiite attacks on mosques obscures those other processes that PM al-Maliki described, whereby the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement is trying to take over these districts politically and extend its sway to Karkh [see: sidebox - mfi]. In a civil war, disentangling offense and defense is no easy task.”

I don’t agree with Juan that this is a case of a narrative being obscured. In a sense there’s nothing particularly new about this development. Vigilante groups in Baghdad’s middle-class and upper-class suburbs first sprang up in as a defense against looters in the chaos immediately following the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Residents manned checkpoints to protect their homes and shops. It makes sense in the current climate for residents particularly residents who feel themselves to be under threat to mount checkpoints again. This needs to be seen as part of post-Samarra Iraq. The post-Samarra bombing violence has come in two waves:

• The first targeted Sunni mosques and the offices of political parties.
• The second wave is targetting people and it is in response to this second wave of violence that these vigilante neighbourhood defense groups are re-forming.

As you might expect these groups are almost exclusively centred around mosques. There are three reasons for this:

1. Mosques are social focal points, even in “secular” areas. They make natural storage points for arms and medical supplies.
2. Their architecture (high rooves and minarets,) make them natural vantage points from which to keep watch.
3. Mosques typically have reasonably powerful public loudspeakers (business for these is booming) also and these can be and are used to broadcast alerts to residents to get their guns and rush to defend the barricades.

As yet these groups aren’t large armed formations. They typically operate as small separate groups of up to about 50 volunteers who take guard duty in shifts. So far they are are primarily defensive and are not formally linked to the anti-occupation fighters. I have no idea why on earth Juan Cole thinks Maliki’s claims in this regard are reliable. When you read the article on azzaman.com it’s describing a very typical “neighbourhood watch”/protection scheme. There are concrete and wire barricades put up to control access to the neighbourhood. These are typically manned by young volunteers. In the event of an attempted incursion or of an attack a combination of calls for defenders broadcast from the mosque and mobile telephone alerts issued by the perimeter defenders causes residents to pick up their guns, rush to close the roads into the neighbourhood, and repel the attackers. This pattern is identical to that everywhere else in Baghdad, Sunni, Shia, and mixed alike. In the light of the horrific events in Jihad on the 9th it is completely unsurprising that residents in Amiriyah, Dora, Ghazaliyah, Khadra, Jihad, and Sayyidiyah would step up their defenses. It is also completely unsurprising that people in those areas would ask why it is that many of these death squads seem to know who to look for and where they live. The article quotes one resident in particular - 75 year old Abu Omar as saying that the increasing attacks on mosques, especially after nightfall, have made these precautions necessary. Saying that there had been repeated attacks in Amiriyah, Jihad, and Sayyidiyah by attacksers wearing the uniform of the police. The article quotes other residents as saying that it was their duty to repel attacks by militia elements and that the absence of the State [would] create a law of the jungle and the rule of organised crime syndicates, the forces of terrorism and subversion, and out-of-control militias. It’s worth noting that in al-Jihad, Sheikh Hussein, like al-Sadr preaches unity saying “It’s the occupation which wants us to fight each other,” and that the same is being said by community leaders in al-Furat, which unlike al-Jihad is almost entirely Sunni.

Cole and other western commentators seem absolutely determined to decree that full scale civil war has erupted. Baghdadis are by no means convinced of this, what they are convinced of is that it is the occupation itself which is driving the country towards one.

ends @ crosspost

markfromireland