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Police or Terrorists With Badges?

On Sunday, the BBC reports 12 Iraqi men were arrested after they had taken a colleague to hospital in Ameriya with gunshot wounds. A local resident, thinking they were insurgents, called the police, who sent commandos to arrest the men. The Special Police Commandos lost 9 people today after leaving the suspects in a closed metal container for over 14 hours in the burning desert sun.


This has just been the latest in a string of alleged abuses by mercenary commandos increasingly in the employ of the understaffed Iraqi police. It is clear that the US Pentagon is quietly implementing the "Salvador Option" that was kicked around back in January. By providing money to these mercenary squads, neither the Iraqi government nor its US sponsor need worry about dirtying their hands in stomping out the insurgency.

As Fuller reports, the Iraqi Special Police Commandos have been executing the "Salvador Option" in Iraq at full throttle for quite some time:

The Police Commandos are in large part the brainchild of another US counter-insurgency veteran, Steven Casteel, a former top DEA man who has been acting as the senior advisor in the Ministry of the Interior. Casteel was involved in the hunt for Colombia's notorious cocaine baron Pablo Escobar, during which the DEA collaborated with a paramilitary organization known as Los Pepes, which later transformed itself into the AUC, an umbrella organization covering all of Colombia's paramilitary death squads (cocaine.org; ciponline).

Like Colombia's death squads, Iraq's Police Commandos deliberately cultivate a frightening paramilitary image. During raids they wear balaclavas and black leather gloves and openly intimidate and brutalize suspects, even in the presence of foreign journalists (see the report by Peter Maass). Significantly, many of the Commandos, including their leader, are Sunni Muslims.

In the last few weeks, with the discovery of several mass graves in and around Baghdad, evidence of multiple extra-judicial killings has started to become much more visible, but, in fact, even a cursory review of such archives as the one compiled by Iraq Body Count reveals that mass executions have been taking place commonly in Iraq over at least the last six months. What is particularly striking is that many of those killings have taken place since the Police Commandos became operationally active and often correspond with areas where they have been deployed.

The clearest correlation is in Mosul, where the Police Commandos began operating in late October (Stryker Newsl ). In mid-November it was reported that insurgents were conducting an offensive and had managed to drive most of the (regular) police from the city. There followed what was described as a joint counter-offensive by US forces and Police Commandos. The Police Commandos conducted raids inside the old quarter starting on 16 November in which dozens of suspects were arrested. During one such raid on a mosque and a tea shop, detainees, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs, were seen being taken away by commandos (link ). In the weeks and months that followed over 150 bodies appeared (bbc news), often in batches and frequently having obviously been executed, usually with a bullet to the head.

The US government would do well to remember the results of the state-sponsored terror in the original "Salvador Option" and attempt to mitigate the onset of a civil war rather than push it forward. As the death of Archbishop Romera proves, the answer to terrorism is not more terrorism, but the strength to wage peace.

Outraged? Contact some US senators and let them know what you think.

posted by the prisoner @ 11:36:00 AM