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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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June 3rd,
2009 - Iraq’s New Death Squad |
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By Shane Bauer The Nation June 3, 2009 The light is fading from the
dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan re-enacts what happened to his family last
summer. We're standing in the courtyard of his concrete-block house, his
children are watching us quietly and his wife is twirling large circles of
dough and slapping them against the inside walls of a roaring oven. He walks
over to his three-foot-tall daughter and grabs her head like a melon. As she
stands there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to tie up her hands,
then pretending to point a rifle at her head. "They took the blindfold
off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying, 'Either you tell
us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.'" "They just marched into
our house and took whatever they wanted," Hassan's mother says, peeking
out the kitchen door. "I've never seen anyone act like this." As Hassan tells it, it was a
quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad's poor Shiite district of
more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and
the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before
Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head,
with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded. At first he couldn't tell
whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a
police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him
to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They
looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style
uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused
him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they
dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before
they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The
dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying. The Iraq Special Operations
Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the
United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments
employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of
Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US
Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis
with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret's
dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American
equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable
to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process. According to Congressional
records, the ISOF has grown into nine battalions, which extend to four
regional "commando bases" across Iraq. By December, each will be
complete with its own "intelligence infusion cell," which will
operate independently of Iraq's other intelligence networks. The ISOF is at
least 4,564 operatives strong, making it approximately the size of the US
Army's own Special Forces in Iraq. Congressional records indicate that there
are plans to double the ISOF over the next "several years." According to retired Lt.
Col. Roger Carstens, US Special Forces are "building the most powerful
force in the region." In 2008 Carstens, then a senior fellow at the
Center for a New American Security, was an adviser to the Iraqi National
Counter-Terror Force, where he helped set up the Iraqi counterterrorism laws
that govern the ISOF. "All these guys want to
do is go out and kill bad guys all day," he says, laughing. "These
guys are shit hot. They are just as good as we are. We trained 'em. They are
just like us. They use the same weapons. They walk like Americans." When the US Special Forces
began the slow transfer of the ISOF to Iraqi control in April 2007, they
didn't put it under the command of the Defense Ministry or the Interior
Ministry, bodies that normally control similar special forces the world over.
Instead, the Americans pressured the Iraqi government to create a new
minister-level office called the Counter-Terrorism Bureau. Established by a
directive from Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, the CTB answers
directly to him and commands the ISOF independently of the police and army.
According to Maliki's directive, the Iraqi Parliament has no influence over
the ISOF and knows little about its mission. US Special Forces operatives
like Carstens have largely overseen the bureau. Carstens says this
independent chain of command "might be the perfect structure" for
counterterrorism worldwide. Although the force is
officially controlled by the Iraqi government, popular perception in Baghdad
is that the ISOF - the dirty brigade - is a covert, all-Iraqi branch of the
US military. That reading isn't far from the truth. The US Special Forces are
still closely involved with every level of the ISOF, from planning and
carrying out missions to deciding tactics and creating policy. According to
Brig. Gen. Simeon Trombitas, commander of the Iraq National Counter-Terror Force
Transition Team, part of the multinational command responsible for turning
control of the ISOF over to the Iraqi government, the US Special Forces
continue to "have advisers at every level of the chain of command." In January 2008 the US
Special Forces started allowing ISOF commanders to join missions with them
and the ISOF rank and file. Starting last summer - when Hassan's family was
attacked - ISOF battalions began launching missions on their own, without
American advisers, in Sadr City, where political agreements forbid the
Americans from entering. Accusations of human rights abuses, killings and
politically motivated arrests have surfaced, including assaults on a
university president and arrests of opposition politicians. The US government has been
focused on turning out "as many men in arms as possible, as quickly as
possible," says Peter Harling, senior Middle East analyst at the
International Crisis Group. "There has been very little impetus to build
checks and controls to prevent abuse. It's been very much about building up
capability without the oversight that could prevent some of the units [from]
turning into proxies working for some politician." In Sadr City opposition to
the Iraqi government and the US occupation is strong. There is no longer any
visible militia presence, but pictures of anti-American cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr still stick to the US-built concrete walls that enclose the city, and
calls to prayer end with a demand for the hastened exit of "the enemy."
There, the ISOF uses a policy of collective punishment, aimed at intimidating
civilians, charges Hassan al-Rubaie, Sadrist member of the parliamentary
Security and Defense Committee. "They terrorize entire neighborhoods
just to arrest one person they think is a terrorist," he says.
"This needs to stop." US Special Forces advisers
have done little to respond to allegations of abuse. Civilian pleas, public
protests, complaints by Iraqi Army commanders about the ISOF's actions and
calls for disbanding it by members of Parliament have not pushed the US
government to take a hard look at the force they are creating. Instead, US
advisers dismiss such claims as politically motivated. "The enemy is
trying to discredit them," says Carstens. "It's not because they
are doing anything dirty." On the same night Hassan
Mahsan's house was raided, 26-year-old Haidar al-Aibi was killed with a
bullet to the forehead. His family says there was no warning. They tell me
how it happened as we drink tea on the floor of their living room, furnished
only with thick foam cushions and mournful depictions of the Shiite martyr
Hussein. A woman weeps loudly in the corner, the sleeping child of her dead
son almost obscured by the folds of her black garments. Fathil al-Aibi says the
family was awakened around midnight by a nearby explosion. His brother Haidar
ran up to the roof to see what had happened and was immediately shot from a
nearby rooftop. When Fathil, his brother Hussein and his father, Abbas, tried
to bring Haidar downstairs, they were shot at, too. For about two hours he
lay lifeless on the roof while his family panicked as red laser beams from
rifle scopes danced on their windows. "We had tests the next day at the
university," Hussein says. "We didn't think he would go like
this." Down the road, around the
same time that night, police commando Ahmed Shibli says he was also being
fired on. He illuminates two bullet holes in his house with a kerosene lamp
as we talk. The men who busted open his front door called themselves the
dirty brigade, he says, and they were carrying American weapons, not the
AK-47s or PKCs the National Police use. When they entered, they fired
immediately. "It wasn't a warning shot. They shot at me like they wanted
to kill me as I was getting down on the ground. It was like we were
first-degree terrorists." They fired again, he says, fatally shooting
his ailing 63-year-old father. As blood poured from the old man's hip, Ahmed
says the men held a gun to his little boy's head and forced his wife to search
the room for the police-issued weapon he had left at work. Ahmed and his brother were
hauled to the outskirts of the city, along with Hassan, where they were lined
up with other men in the dark. Hassan insists on substantiating his story by
showing me an official complaint issued by a local army commander named
Mustafa Sabah Yunis, alleging that an "unknown armed squadron"
entered the area and arrested him. Meanwhile, the Iraqi Army
was rushing in to respond to the gunfire, and according to Hussein al-Aibi,
these soldiers were shot at as well. He tells me the army got Haidar off the
roof and drove him to the hospital. On the way, Fathil says, the vehicle was
stopped by a dirty brigade operative, who asked Iraqi Army Major Abu Rajdi
where they were going. According to Fathil, Rajdi told the operative,
"This is a college student who has nothing to do with anything, and you
shot him recklessly." The operative responded by hitting Rajdi and
saying, "Turn around and go back, or we'll shoot him and we'll shoot you
too." At Haidar's funeral, Fathil
asked Rajdi to testify. "You are a representative of the government, and
you saw it all happen," he told the major. "You saw that he didn't
have a weapon in his hand." Fathil says the major declined. "This
is the dirty brigade," he recalls Rajdi saying. "We are afraid of
them. When we see them, we retreat. If I testify against them, I'll be killed
the next day. They kill and no one will hold them accountable, because they
belong to the Americans." Major Rajdi's fear and
distrust of the ISOF are echoed by other members of the regular Iraqi Army.
"Sometimes we are surprised when the Special Forces enter," says
Lt. Colonel Yahya Rasoul Abdullah, commander of the Third Battalion of the
Forty-second Brigade in Sadr City. "Bad things happen. Some people
steal, and some abuse women. They don't know the people on the streets like
us. They just go after their target. We have suffered from this
problem." Accounts of older ISOF
operations I heard around Baghdad suggest that the Americans may have
knowingly allowed violence against civilians. In Adhamiya, long the
stronghold of the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad, two hospital employees
described their 2006 run-in with the ISOF to me. According to both witnesses,
a self-identified ISOF operative named "Captain Hussam" unloaded
his machine gun in the Al Numan Hospital after seeing the body of his
superior, who had died under the hospital's care. An American operative with
a red beard stood by silently watching. According to one witness, the Iraqi
operative demanded his commander's death certificate, threatening to
"torture you, kill you and kill the people of Adhamiya" if they
didn't comply. The witnesses said the eight operatives who entered the
hospital were driving Humvees, vehicles that only the Americans and the ISOF
use. The next day, Captain Hussam returned, a witness said, offering a box of
bullets as an apology. The effective head of the
American ISOF project is General Trombitas of the Iraq National
Counter-Terror Transition Team. A towering man with a gray mustache and a
wrinkled brow, Trombitas spent nearly seven of his over thirty years in the
military training special forces in Colombia, El Salvador and other
countries. On February 23 he gave me a tour of Area IV, a joint American-Iraqi
base near the Baghdad International Airport, where US Special Forces train
the ISOF. As we walk away from the helicopter, he cracks a boyish smile.
Though he's worked with special forces all over the world, he tells me the
men we are about to meet are "the best." Trombitas says he is
"very proud of what was done in El Salvador" but avoids the fact
that special forces trained there by the United States in the early 1980s
were responsible for the formation of death squads that killed more than 50,000
civilians thought to be sympathetic with leftist guerrillas. Guatemala was a
similar case. Some Guatemalan special forces that had been trained in
anti-terrorism tactics by the United States during the mid-1960s subsequently
became death squads that took part in the killing of around 140,000 people.
In the early 1990s, US Special Forces trained and worked closely with an
elite Colombian police unit strongly suspected of carrying out some of the
murders attributed to Los Pepes, a death squad that became the backbone of
the country's current paramilitary organization. (Trombitas served in El
Salvador from 1989-90 and in Colombia from 2003-2005, after these incidents
took place.) "The standards get
looser when the Americans aren't with [the local special forces], and they
can eventually become death squads, which I believe actually happened in
Colombia," says Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing
Pablo, a book about the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar by CIA and
US Special Forces. The tactics taught in each country are the same, Bowden
says. "They teach the same kind of skills. They use the same
equipment." Trombitas told the official
blog of the Defense Department that the training missions used in Latin
America are "extremely transferable" to Iraq. Salvadoran Special
Forces even helped train the ISOF, he tells me. "It's a world of
coalitions," he says. "The longer we work together, the more alike
we are. When we share our values and our experiences with other armies, we
make them the same." Trombitas guides me into a
warehouse where ISOF operatives, most of them in black masks, have been
preparing for our arrival. He walks me through a special display of their
American equipment - machine guns, sniper rifles, state-of-the-art
night-vision equipment and fluffy desert camo that makes soldiers look like
teddy bears. He takes me up a catwalk overlooking a fake house stocked with
cartoonish posters of big-breasted women pointing pistols, a couple of real
men dressed as "terrorists" with kaffiyehs wrapped around their
faces and a 10-year-old boy playing hostage. As we stand in the
observation area, the door explodes. After a minute of constant shooting, the
operatives march out with the "terrorists," the boy and a poster of
an '80s-style villain, wearing a jean jacket and holding a woman hostage.
More than twenty bullet holes are centered on his forehead. "Look at that
marksmanship," Trombitas says, smiling proudly. Trombitas gets to the issue
of human rights before I do. He assures me that US Special Forces take
allegations of human rights abuses very seriously - two Iraqi men were let go
for prisoner abuse since he took over in August last year, he says - but he
won't comment on specific cases. I raise the issue of accountability and
bring up one well-documented mission that caused waves in the Iraqi
Parliament: in August the ISOF raided Diyala's provincial government
compound, reportedly with the support of US Apache helicopters. They arrested
a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Iraq's main Sunni Arab party. They also
arrested the president of the university, also a Sunni, and killed a
secretary and wounded four armed guards during the night. I barely get the word
"Diyala" out of my mouth before the American operatives standing
around us start to grumble nervously and a translator jumps in. "For the
reputation of the ISOF, please, let's cut that off," he says. Abdul-Karim al-Samarrai, a
member of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance and the parliamentary Security and
Defense Committee, says that what happened in Diyala was one of many signs of
the prime minister's bad intentions for the ISOF. "Politicians are afraid
because this force can be used for political ends," he says. In response
to outrage from members of Parliament over the arrest of politicians by the
ISOF, Maliki, who is officially required to approve every ISOF target, denied
any knowledge of the Diyala mission. His claim of innocence raises important
questions. If the man who is supposed to be in charge of the ISOF has no
knowledge of its missions, then who is ultimately responsible for the force?
Was Maliki lying to cover up the fact that he is using the force for
political purposes? Or was someone else - namely the Americans - calling the
shots? Diyala was only the first
publicized case of possibly politically motivated arrests. In December the
ISOF arrested as many as thirty-five officials in the Interior Ministry who
were thought to be in opposition to Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party. This past
March the ISOF arrested at least one leader of the Awakening Councils,
semiofficial Sunni neighborhood militias that have been increasingly at odds
with Maliki over his failure to keep a promise to incorporate the councils
into the military or give them other employment. The Maliki government has
developed a "culture of direct control," says Michael Knights, a
Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute and the head of its Iraq program.
Knights visits Iraq regularly and has close contact with the country's
security services. He says the people in charge of the ISOF at the regional
levels are "personally chosen loyalists or relatives of Maliki. It
reminds me of Saddam." Knights says that Maliki is only supposed to
approve or reject missions that come to him, but occasionally he will
"assert his prerogative as the commander in chief and tell the ISOF to
do something or not to do something." Knights raises the possibility
that the ISOF will become Maliki's personal death squad. "The prime
minister is looking for re-election, and there are not that many restraints
on his ability to target political opponents, as [his government] has been
doing with the Sadrists for years now." Samarrai, along with other
members of Parliament, is calling for disbanding the Counter-Terrorism
Bureau. He says there is no legal basis for an armed brigade to exist outside
the control of the Interior or Defense ministry. "People are afraid of
the existence of an organization with such dreadful capabilities that reports
directly to the prime minister," he says. Member of Parliament Hassan
al-Rubaie is concerned about the close relationship between the ISOF and the
Americans. "If the US leaves Iraq, this will be the last force they will
leave behind," he insists. He is worried that such a powerful and
secretive force that is closely tied to the Americans could turn Iraq into a
"military base in the region" by allowing the United States to continue
to conduct missions in Iraq with the cover of the ISOF. "They have
become a replacement" for the Americans, he says. President Obama has said he
plans to increase reliance on the US Special Forces; Defense Secretary Robert
Gates's recent appointment of Stanley McChrystal as commander of Afghanistan
suggests that he is keeping his word. From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal was the
head of the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the Army's most
secretive forces and is responsible for the training of special forces
abroad. McChrystal was also commander of US Special Operations Forces in Iraq
for five years, during which time, according to the Wall Street Journal, he
commanded "units that specialize in guerrilla warfare, including the
training of indigenous armies." "The eventual drawdown
in Iraq is not the end of the mission for our elite forces," Gates said
in May 2008. Gates hasn't spoken on the issue since Obama took office; but
Obama says he will institutionalize irregular warfare capabilities, and the
White House stresses the need to "create a more robust capacity to
train, equip and advise foreign security forces, so that local allies are
better prepared to confront mutual threats." Bowden says those
"local allies" are often used for covert operations. "The
United States Special Operations Command cultivates relationships with
special forces in other countries because it gives the United States the
opportunity of intervening militarily in a covert way," he says.
"The ideal covert op is one that is actually carried out by local
forces." As I stand on the tarmac
with Trombitas in Area IV, waiting for our helicopter to return and fly us
back to the Green Zone, I ask him how long the United States will be involved
with the ISOF. "Special forces are special because we do maintain a
relationship with foreign forces," he says. "Part of our
theater-engagement strategy is to maintain a relationship with those units
that are important to the security of the region and to the world." As
our helicopter appears in the lightly clouded sky, he chooses his next words
carefully: "We are going to have a working relationship for a
while," he says. External link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/bauer |