Sectarian Bloodshed Reveals Strength of Iraq Militias
By EDWARD WONG and SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
February 25, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 24 — The sectarian violence that has shaken Iraq this week has demonstrated the power that the many militias here have to draw the country into a full-scale civil war, and how difficult it would be for the state to stop it, Iraqi and American officials say.
The militias pose a double threat to the future of Iraq: they exist both as marauding gangs, as the violence on Wednesday showed, and as sanctioned members of the Iraqi Army and the police.
The insurgent bombing of a major Shiite shrine on Wednesday, followed by the wave of killings of Sunni Arabs, has left political parties on all sides clinging to their private armies harder than ever, complicating American efforts to persuade Iraqis to disband them.
The attacks, mostly by Shiite militiamen, were troubling not only because they resulted in at least 170 deaths across Iraq, but also because they showed how deeply the militias have spread inside government forces. The Iraqi police, commanded by a Shiite political party, stood by as the rampage spread.
Now, after watching helplessly as their mosques and homes burned, many Sunni Arabs say they should have the right to form their own militias.
For their part, Shiite political leaders and clerics say they are justified in keeping — and even strengthening — their armies, including those units in the government security forces, to prevent insurgent attacks like the one that destroyed the golden dome of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra on Wednesday.
That stance threatens to derail recent American efforts, especially those of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, to persuade Shiite leaders to dissolve their militias and weed out police officers and soldiers whose allegiances lie with their own sect and not with the state. That is essential for the process of forming a government that would be credible to all of Iraq's religious and ethnic groups.
Shiite leaders' denunciations of Mr. Khalilzad, who hinted Monday that Americans might not pay for security forces run by sectarian interests, made it clear that positions had hardened. "We have decided to incorporate militias into the Iraqi security forces, and we are serious about this decision," Hadi al-Amari, the head of the Badr Organization, a thousands-strong Shiite militia, said in a telephone interview. Since the Shiites took control of the Interior Ministry last spring, Badr members have swelled the ranks of the police.
Mr. Khalilzad was trying "to prevent the Shiites from getting the security portfolio," he added. "The security portfolio is a red line, and we will never relinquish it."
Since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, American officials tried unsuccessfully to disband Iraq's myriad private armies, from Kurdish pesh merga in the mountainous north to the black-clad Mahdi Army patrolling poor Shiite enclaves in Baghdad and Basra. The Coalition Provisional Authority had plans to force Iraqi leaders to dissolve their militias, but never followed through. Nor did the Americans press the case even after putting down two uprisings by the Mahdi Army in 2004.
The persistence of the Mahdi Army, the militia of Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric, illustrates the challenge facing the Americans in Iraq. A grass-roots organization, it operates both openly in the streets, as it did this week, when young men with Kalashnikov rifles attacked Sunni mosques, and inside the system, where members serve as police officers wearing uniforms and cruising around in patrol cars.
Though many Shiite leaders denounced the anti-Sunni reprisals this week, none of them chastised the Mahdi Army or called for disbanding it. That itself was a clear indication of how the politicians were looking to the militia as a protector of Shiite interests in the wake of the shrine attack.
Those political leaders who have no militias, particularly Sunni Arabs, say they feel more helpless than ever in this shifting landscape of private armies.
"Anybody who has a militia now has power," said Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and member of the newly elected Parliament. "The Mahdi Army, Badr, the insurgents, these are the ones who wield power. They have weapons, they can move around and they are determined. It's not a question of political personalities, but of arms and weapons."
Mahmoud al-Mashhadany, a senior official in the main Sunni political bloc, said the rampaging Shiite militiamen this week, and the passivity of the police, showed that "we have been left alone in the field." He added: "The Kurds have their militia, and they're part of the army. The Shiites run the government. We've been left alone with our mosques in the field."
Even before the eruption of violence, Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad were holding discussions about organizing their own neighborhood protection forces. In Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, the western stronghold of the insurgency, reports have emerged of people forming a private army called the Anbar Revolutionaries.
Mr. Khalilzad has been trying to assuage Sunni fears by pressing for conservative Shiites to give up control of the Interior Ministry, which oversees the 120,000-member police and commando forces. They are being trained by American military advisers who monitor them but do not directly control them.
The shrine attack has left the ambassador with considerably less leverage, because the Shiites now say their welfare depends on their command of the security forces. On Friday, Mr. Khalilzad, speaking to reporters, did not lay out any American plan to deal with the militias, and simply said the problem would have to be solved by the four-year Iraqi government, which has yet to be formed.
"The militias are an issue that the next government will have to deal with," he said. "Iraq needs a strong national army, a strong national police. It needs weapons in the hands of those who are authorized to have them."
On Friday, the Pentagon released a quarterly assessment report required by Congress that included a warning about the continued sectarian nature of the police forces. "Insurgent infiltration and militia influence remain a concern for the Ministry of the Interior," the report said. "Many serving police officers, particularly in the south, have ties to Shia militias."
The ascent of the militias inside the security forces was quick and quiet. Soon after the Shiite-led government swept into power last spring and Bayan Jabr, a senior Shiite politician, become interior minister, a housecleaning began, in which about 140 high-ranking officials were dismissed and political allies of the Shiites were put in their place, according to several former ministry officials who feared reprisals if they gave their names. In addition, recruitment drives brought hundreds of ordinary Shiites into the security forces, many of whom identified more strongly with their political parties than with the Iraqi state.
By summer, an American government adviser to the ministry, Mathew Sherman, recalled writing in his notes that "the ministry is quickly being infiltrated by militia and by Badr people."
When Mr. Sherman brought up his concerns, Mr. Jabr, a bookish, fluent English speaker, pledged to address them. Mr. Jabr has acknowledged that 2,500 members of the Badr Organization have been added to the payroll, but American and Iraqi officials say the number is far higher.
"There was a lot happening behind the scenes," said Mr. Sherman, who left his job in December. "By the time we put all the pieces together, everything was falling apart."
Even if it wants to do so, the new government will face a serious challenge in extricating the militias from the security forces. In the last two months, a new round of purges has taken place in the ministry, according to Mr. Sherman and three Iraqi officials who still work in the ministry. About 20 senior officials, mostly Sunni Arabs, have lost their jobs, including the Baghdad police chief, who was widely respected among Iraqis and American military officials. The move, the former officials said, was an attempt by Shiite parties to strengthen their grip on the ministry before the new government is assembled.
The militias use their police positions to further the ambitions of their political parties. Mahdi Army fighters — most often found in Baghdad among the city police and a paramilitary force called the Public Order Brigade, as well as in police units in the south — were discovered last fall using police patrol cars to enforce the rulings of so-called Islamist "punishment committees," according to a senior American military official whose forces discovered the practice but was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.
In addition, the official said, the transportation minister, a Sadr aide, tried to consolidate control over Baghdad International Airport by recruiting Mahdi members into security forces protecting it.
Beyond the now-familiar reports of death squads and torture chambers operated under government cover, there have also been instances of men dressed in police uniforms committing ordinary crimes, further undermining public confidence in an already weak institution.
Fatin Sattar, a homemaker in southeast Baghdad, said her husband was shot and killed last year by several men dressed as Iraqi policemen who were carrying out a robbery at a neighbor's home. Assuming they had come as police officers, the husband, himself an official in the Interior Ministry, had approached the men in a friendly manner.
Behind the scenes, the American military has been making efforts to rein in the police units heaviest with militiamen. American officials say they are considering a plan that would place more American advisers with the Iraqi police and commando units. Last fall, American officials even proposed transferring oversight of the often unruly commando forces from the Interior Ministry to the Defense Ministry, where the American military has direct operational control. Shiite leaders resisted.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Robert F. Worth, Qais Mizher and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi from Baghdad, and Thom Shanker from Washington.
The New York Times
February 25, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 24 — The sectarian violence that has shaken Iraq this week has demonstrated the power that the many militias here have to draw the country into a full-scale civil war, and how difficult it would be for the state to stop it, Iraqi and American officials say.
The militias pose a double threat to the future of Iraq: they exist both as marauding gangs, as the violence on Wednesday showed, and as sanctioned members of the Iraqi Army and the police.
The insurgent bombing of a major Shiite shrine on Wednesday, followed by the wave of killings of Sunni Arabs, has left political parties on all sides clinging to their private armies harder than ever, complicating American efforts to persuade Iraqis to disband them.
The attacks, mostly by Shiite militiamen, were troubling not only because they resulted in at least 170 deaths across Iraq, but also because they showed how deeply the militias have spread inside government forces. The Iraqi police, commanded by a Shiite political party, stood by as the rampage spread.
Now, after watching helplessly as their mosques and homes burned, many Sunni Arabs say they should have the right to form their own militias.
For their part, Shiite political leaders and clerics say they are justified in keeping — and even strengthening — their armies, including those units in the government security forces, to prevent insurgent attacks like the one that destroyed the golden dome of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra on Wednesday.
That stance threatens to derail recent American efforts, especially those of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, to persuade Shiite leaders to dissolve their militias and weed out police officers and soldiers whose allegiances lie with their own sect and not with the state. That is essential for the process of forming a government that would be credible to all of Iraq's religious and ethnic groups.
Shiite leaders' denunciations of Mr. Khalilzad, who hinted Monday that Americans might not pay for security forces run by sectarian interests, made it clear that positions had hardened. "We have decided to incorporate militias into the Iraqi security forces, and we are serious about this decision," Hadi al-Amari, the head of the Badr Organization, a thousands-strong Shiite militia, said in a telephone interview. Since the Shiites took control of the Interior Ministry last spring, Badr members have swelled the ranks of the police.
Mr. Khalilzad was trying "to prevent the Shiites from getting the security portfolio," he added. "The security portfolio is a red line, and we will never relinquish it."
Since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, American officials tried unsuccessfully to disband Iraq's myriad private armies, from Kurdish pesh merga in the mountainous north to the black-clad Mahdi Army patrolling poor Shiite enclaves in Baghdad and Basra. The Coalition Provisional Authority had plans to force Iraqi leaders to dissolve their militias, but never followed through. Nor did the Americans press the case even after putting down two uprisings by the Mahdi Army in 2004.
The persistence of the Mahdi Army, the militia of Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric, illustrates the challenge facing the Americans in Iraq. A grass-roots organization, it operates both openly in the streets, as it did this week, when young men with Kalashnikov rifles attacked Sunni mosques, and inside the system, where members serve as police officers wearing uniforms and cruising around in patrol cars.
Though many Shiite leaders denounced the anti-Sunni reprisals this week, none of them chastised the Mahdi Army or called for disbanding it. That itself was a clear indication of how the politicians were looking to the militia as a protector of Shiite interests in the wake of the shrine attack.
Those political leaders who have no militias, particularly Sunni Arabs, say they feel more helpless than ever in this shifting landscape of private armies.
"Anybody who has a militia now has power," said Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and member of the newly elected Parliament. "The Mahdi Army, Badr, the insurgents, these are the ones who wield power. They have weapons, they can move around and they are determined. It's not a question of political personalities, but of arms and weapons."
Mahmoud al-Mashhadany, a senior official in the main Sunni political bloc, said the rampaging Shiite militiamen this week, and the passivity of the police, showed that "we have been left alone in the field." He added: "The Kurds have their militia, and they're part of the army. The Shiites run the government. We've been left alone with our mosques in the field."
Even before the eruption of violence, Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad were holding discussions about organizing their own neighborhood protection forces. In Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, the western stronghold of the insurgency, reports have emerged of people forming a private army called the Anbar Revolutionaries.
Mr. Khalilzad has been trying to assuage Sunni fears by pressing for conservative Shiites to give up control of the Interior Ministry, which oversees the 120,000-member police and commando forces. They are being trained by American military advisers who monitor them but do not directly control them.
The shrine attack has left the ambassador with considerably less leverage, because the Shiites now say their welfare depends on their command of the security forces. On Friday, Mr. Khalilzad, speaking to reporters, did not lay out any American plan to deal with the militias, and simply said the problem would have to be solved by the four-year Iraqi government, which has yet to be formed.
"The militias are an issue that the next government will have to deal with," he said. "Iraq needs a strong national army, a strong national police. It needs weapons in the hands of those who are authorized to have them."
On Friday, the Pentagon released a quarterly assessment report required by Congress that included a warning about the continued sectarian nature of the police forces. "Insurgent infiltration and militia influence remain a concern for the Ministry of the Interior," the report said. "Many serving police officers, particularly in the south, have ties to Shia militias."
The ascent of the militias inside the security forces was quick and quiet. Soon after the Shiite-led government swept into power last spring and Bayan Jabr, a senior Shiite politician, become interior minister, a housecleaning began, in which about 140 high-ranking officials were dismissed and political allies of the Shiites were put in their place, according to several former ministry officials who feared reprisals if they gave their names. In addition, recruitment drives brought hundreds of ordinary Shiites into the security forces, many of whom identified more strongly with their political parties than with the Iraqi state.
By summer, an American government adviser to the ministry, Mathew Sherman, recalled writing in his notes that "the ministry is quickly being infiltrated by militia and by Badr people."
When Mr. Sherman brought up his concerns, Mr. Jabr, a bookish, fluent English speaker, pledged to address them. Mr. Jabr has acknowledged that 2,500 members of the Badr Organization have been added to the payroll, but American and Iraqi officials say the number is far higher.
"There was a lot happening behind the scenes," said Mr. Sherman, who left his job in December. "By the time we put all the pieces together, everything was falling apart."
Even if it wants to do so, the new government will face a serious challenge in extricating the militias from the security forces. In the last two months, a new round of purges has taken place in the ministry, according to Mr. Sherman and three Iraqi officials who still work in the ministry. About 20 senior officials, mostly Sunni Arabs, have lost their jobs, including the Baghdad police chief, who was widely respected among Iraqis and American military officials. The move, the former officials said, was an attempt by Shiite parties to strengthen their grip on the ministry before the new government is assembled.
The militias use their police positions to further the ambitions of their political parties. Mahdi Army fighters — most often found in Baghdad among the city police and a paramilitary force called the Public Order Brigade, as well as in police units in the south — were discovered last fall using police patrol cars to enforce the rulings of so-called Islamist "punishment committees," according to a senior American military official whose forces discovered the practice but was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.
In addition, the official said, the transportation minister, a Sadr aide, tried to consolidate control over Baghdad International Airport by recruiting Mahdi members into security forces protecting it.
Beyond the now-familiar reports of death squads and torture chambers operated under government cover, there have also been instances of men dressed in police uniforms committing ordinary crimes, further undermining public confidence in an already weak institution.
Fatin Sattar, a homemaker in southeast Baghdad, said her husband was shot and killed last year by several men dressed as Iraqi policemen who were carrying out a robbery at a neighbor's home. Assuming they had come as police officers, the husband, himself an official in the Interior Ministry, had approached the men in a friendly manner.
Behind the scenes, the American military has been making efforts to rein in the police units heaviest with militiamen. American officials say they are considering a plan that would place more American advisers with the Iraqi police and commando units. Last fall, American officials even proposed transferring oversight of the often unruly commando forces from the Interior Ministry to the Defense Ministry, where the American military has direct operational control. Shiite leaders resisted.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Robert F. Worth, Qais Mizher and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi from Baghdad, and Thom Shanker from Washington.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 5:16 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home