Iraqi National Police Problems

Iraqi National Police Problems

The bodies began to show up early last week. On Monday,
34 corpses were found. In the darkness of Tuesday morning, 15 more men, between
the ages of 22 and 40 were found in the back of a pickup truck in the al-Khadra
district of western Baghdad. They had been hanged. By daybreak, 40 more bodies
were found around the city, most bearing signs of torture before the men were
killed execution-style. The most gruesome discovery was an 18-by-24-foot mass
grave in the Shi'ite slum of Kamaliyah in east Baghdad containing the bodies
of 29 men, clad only in their underwear with their hands bound and their mouths
covered with tape. Local residents only found it because the ground was oozing
blood. In all, 87 bodies were found over two days in Baghdad.
Why
Iraq's Police Are A Menace (h/t Juan
Cole)

Iraq's Shiite dominated police evidently has a butcher as a boss. Iraq's Interior
Minister, Bayan Jabr, supervises the police, if you can call it that. However, he doesn't
seem to have any goals in mind other than killing whom he considers riff raff,
which just so happens to be all Sunni. There's another problem. Iranian militias
run rampant and rule the ministry, with Jabr's approval and blessing.

According to Time magazine, Jabr has remade the “paramilitary
National Police into Shi'ite shock troops.” Jabr is a member of
SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is backed
by Iran. He also seems to have an intense hatred for Sunnis, born out of a time
when he fled Saddam's power grab, back in the 1970s.

Militias were supposed to be disbanded under Paul Bremer, but it never happened.
When Iyad Allawi came in, he let it go as well, not dealing with the armed militias,
with the “DDR — “demilitarization, demobilization and reintegration,”
let to lag.

… The U.S. State Department, in a report released
two weeks ago, documented numerous incidents in 2005,
dating back to early May when Jabr was first appointed Interior Minister,
where Sunni men were killed execution-style by Interior Ministry police or
Shi'ite militias. In each case, Jabr ordered an investigation, and in each
case the investigation had yet to report any findings.

Thanks in part to the Interior Minister's “nonfeasance,”
said Burke, the former Interior Ministry adviser, Jabr was at least indirectly
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of military-age Sunni men whose bodies
have turned up at the sewage plant in southeast Baghdad since late December.
Men in police uniforms and vehicles routinely travel through the city in daylight
hours with bodies in the back of trucks for disposal at the sewage plant,
he said. Prisoners often disappear, Burke said, because they're picked up
at night and no one has an accurate account of who is arrested and where they
are taken. “The Special Police Commandos,” he said, using their
old name, “are most definitely out of control.” …

CHRISTOPHER
ALLBRITTON/BAGHDAD

In fact, Jabr's National Police are so notorious that it's believed
by Sunnis that they're the ones who bombed the Askariya shrine in Samarra, in
order to escalate the Iraqi civil war.

The irony of it all is that our military police are training the
Iraqi National Police, adding to the “sectarian slaughterhouse,” as
Allbritton reports. So just maybe we're stoking the civil war Bush won't admit
is raging.