An Eye For An Eye
The dead do tell stories--of abduction, torture, execution--And it's not just the insurgents who are on a killing streak
In a gesture to ease Sunni complaints, Iraq's most influential Shiite politician, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, used a televised speech just ahead of the Ashura holiday to urge "faithful security services ... to continue strongly confronting terrorists but with more consideration to human rights." Earlier, incumbent Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari told Sunni leader Hashemi that he had formed a new government committee to study the issue of security abuses, but Hashemi said Jafari dismissed claims that the Interior Ministry might be behind the killings and instead blamed "criminals and ex-Baathists."
Who's who. It's hard to tell at a glance the difference between criminals, government forces, and militias. Iraqi police and soldiers wear black ski masks and balaclavas to protect their identities. The various branches of the security forces wear dozens of different uniforms, which can also be bought on the black market, making it hard for even U.S. soldiers to quickly spot bad guys. Says one U.S. officer: "It's not easy to identify that some operation tonight was legitimately directed by somebody in a security organization of the Ministry of Interior or Ministry of Defense or whether it was some people in stolen uniforms or somebody's posse, somebody's militia ... that decided to go attack the opposite number in some other tribe, religion, or neighborhood."
U.S. officials have become increasingly concerned about the level of police abuses, particularly by counterinsurgency commando units assembled quickly and, as a result, populated with Shiite militia members. President Bush last month acknowledged as much when he announced a new effort to give "human rights and ethics" training to Iraqi police, noting that some have used their positions "to take it out on others because of past grievances."
Across Iraq, the U.S. military has been working to step up the training and create new teams of military police to partner with Iraqi police officials. The problem is that while there are thousands of police officers who need training, the American MPs are one of the most overstretched categories of soldiers, and there are far too few to go around.
For now, it's a murderous free-for-all. "It's basically gang warfare," says the U.N.'s Pace. "The real cause is a breakdown of law and order in the absence of any effective police force that can do the job of protecting people."
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