Torture of Iraqis part of US dirty war
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The revelation by WikiLeaks of a United States military order
directing US forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis
has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the
US military about detainee abuse.
But the deeper significance of the order, which has been missed by the news
media, is that it was part of a larger US strategy of exploiting Shi'ite
sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when
Sunnis had rejected the US war.
And General David Petraeus was a key figure in developing the strategy of using
Shi'ite and Kurdish forces to suppress Sunnis in 2004-2005.
The strategy involved the deliberate deployment of Shi'ite and
Kurdish police commandos in areas of Sunni insurgency, in the full knowledge
that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by WikiLeaks
show.
That strategy inflamed Sunni fears of Shi'ite rule and was a major contributing
factor to the rise of al-Qaeda's influence in the Sunni areas. The escalating
Sunni-Shi'ite violence it produced led to the massive sectarian warfare of 2006
in Baghdad in which tens of thousands of civilians - mainly Sunnis - were
killed.
The strategy of using primarily Shi'ite and Kurdish military and police
commando units to suppress Sunni insurgents was adopted after a key turning
point in the war in April 2004, when Civil Defense Corps units throughout the
Sunni region essentially disappeared overnight during an insurgent offensive.
Two months later, the US military command issued "FRAGO [fragmentary order]
242", which provided that no investigation of detainee abuse by Iraqis was to
be conducted unless directed by the headquarters of the command, according to
references to the order in the WikiLeaks documents.
The order came immediately after Petraeus took command of the new Multinational
Security Transition Command in Iraq (MNSTC-I). It was a clear signal that the
US command expected torture of prisoners to be a central feature of Iraqi
military and police operations against Sunni insurgents.
Petraeus knew that it would take more than two years to build a competent Iraqi
military officer corps, as he told Bing West, author of the The Strongest Tribe,
in August 2004. Meanwhile, he would have to use Shi'ite and Kurdish militias.
In September 2004, Petraeus adopted a plan to establish paramilitary units
within the national police. The initial units were from non-sectarian former
Iraqi special-forces teams. In October, however, Petraeus embraced the first
clearly sectarian Shi'ite militia unit - the 2,000-man Shi'ite "Wolf Brigade" -
as a key element of his police commando strategy, giving it two months of
training with US forces.
In November 2004, after 80% of the Sunni police defected to the insurgents in
Mosul, the US command dispatched 2,000 Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen to Mosul,
and five battalions of predominantly Shi'ite troops, with a smattering of
Kurds, were to police Ramadi. But a few weeks later, after the completion of
its training, the Wolf Brigade was also sent to Mosul.
Hundreds of Shi'ite troops from Baghdad and southern areas of the country were
also sent into Samara and Fallujah.
It did not take long for the Wolf Brigade to acquire its reputation for torture
of Sunni detainees. The Associated Press reported the case of a female detainee
in Wolf Brigade custody in Mosul who was whipped with electric cables in order
to get her to sign a false confession that she was a high-ranking local leader
of the insurgency.
But an official of the US command later told Richard Engel of NBC that the Wolf
Brigade had been a very effective unit and had driven the insurgents out of
Mosul.
The Wolf Brigade was then sent to Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, where the
Association of Muslim Scholars publicly accused it of having "arrested imams
and the guardians of some mosques, tortured and killed them, and then got rid
of their bodies in a garbage dump."
The Wolf Brigade was also deployed to other Sunni cities, including Ramadi and
Samarra, always in close cooperation with US military units.
The war logs released by WikiLeaks include a number of reports from Samarra in
2004 and 2005 describing how the US military had handed their captives over to
the Wolf Brigade for "further questioning". The implication was that the
Shi'ite commandos would be able to extract more information from the detainees
than would be allowed by US rules.
General Martin Dempsey, who succeeded Petraeus as the commander responsible for
training Iraqi security forces in September 2005, hinted strongly in an
interview with Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News three months later that the US
command accepted the Wolf Brigade's harsh interrogation methods as a necessary
feature of using Iraqi counterinsurgency forces.
Dempsey said: "We are fighting through a very harsh environment. These guys are
not fighting on the streets of Bayonne, New Jersey." Contrary to the Western
notion of "innocent until proven guilty", he said the view in Iraq was "close”
to the "opposite".
Vargas reported: "For Dempsey, a big part of building a viable police force is
learning to accept, if not embrace, the cultural differences."
A second stage of the strategy of sectarian war against the Sunnis came after
the new Shi'ite government's takeover of the Interior Ministry in April 2005.
The Shi'ite minister immediately filled the Iraqi police - especially the
commando units - with Shi'ite troops from the Badr Corps, the Iranian-trained
forces loyal to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
Within days, the Badr Corps, along with the Wolf Brigade, began a campaign of
mass arrests, torture and assassination of Sunnis in Baghdad and elsewhere that
was widely reported by news agencies.
The US command responded to that development by issuing a new version of the
previous order on what to do about Iraqi torture, according to the WikiLeaks
documents. On April 29, 2005, the US command issued FRAGO 039, requiring
reports through operational channels on Iraqi abuse of prisoners using a format
attached to the order. But no follow-up investigation was to be made unless
directed by higher headquarters.
The former minister of interior, Falah al-Naquib, later told Knight-Ridder
correspondent Tom Lasseter that he had personally warned Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials about the sectarian violence by Badr
police commandos against Sunnis. "They didn't take us seriously," he lamented.
In fact, the US military and the US embassy were well aware of the serious risk
that the strategy of relying on vengeful Shi'ite police commandos to track down
Sunnis would exacerbate sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shi'ite. In May
2005, Ann Scott Tyson wrote in the Washington Post that US military analysts
did not deny that the US strategy "aggravates the underlying fault lines in
Iraqi society, heightening the prospects of civil strife".
In late July 2005, when Petraeus was still heading the command, an unnamed
"senior American officer" at MNSTC-I was asked by John F Burns of the New York
Times whether the US might end up arming Iraqis for a civil war. The officer
answered: "Maybe."
The US-sponsored Shi'ite assault on the Sunnis gave al-Qaeda a new opportunity.
In mid-2005, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, announced the
creation of a special unit, the Omar Brigade, to combat the Shi'ite commando
torture-and-death squads. That led to the massive sectarian bloodletting in
Baghdad in 2006, when thousands of civilians were dying every month.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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