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Claim: U.S.-Trained Iraqi Police Abetting Massacres

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Posted on Mar 23, 2006

Time magazine says evidence is mounting that the Shiite-dominated police force has become a corps of shock troops bent on killing Sunnis.

This, at a time when Rumsfeld is boasting about the ability of Iraqi troops to quell the violence wracking the country.


Time:

The bodies began to show up early last week. On Monday, 34 corpses were found. In the darkness of Tuesday morning, 15 more men, between the ages of 22 and 40 were found in the back of a pickup truck in the al-Khadra district of western Baghdad. They had been hanged. By daybreak, 40 more bodies were found around the city, most bearing signs of torture before the men were killed execution-style. The most gruesome discovery was an 18-by-24-foot mass grave in the Shi’ite slum of Kamaliyah in east Baghdad containing the bodies of 29 men, clad only in their underwear with their hands bound and their mouths covered with tape. Local residents only found it because the ground was oozing blood. In all, 87 bodies were found over two days in Baghdad.

The grisly discovery was horrible enough, the latest and perhaps most chilling sign that Iraq is descending further into butchery—and quite possibly civil war. But almost as disturbing is the growing evidence that the massacres and others like it are being tolerated and even abetted by Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated police forces, overseen by Iraq’s Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr. On his watch, sectarian militias have swelled the ranks of the police units and, Sunnis charge, used their positions to carry out revenge killings against Sunnis. While allowing an Iranian-trained militia to take over the ministry, critics say, Jabr has authorized the targeted assassination of Sunni men and stymied investigations into Interior-run death squads. Despite numerous attempts to contact them, neither Jabr nor Interior Ministry spokesmen responded to requests for comment on this article.

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By Yoyo Tambien, March 23, 2006 at 10:40 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Why is anyone surprised by this? Did anyone think for a second that when the Shi’ites finally got a chance to exert power over the Sunnis (who had previously oppressed them) that there wouldn’t be a period of bloody revenge and “payback” oppression?

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By Joe Citizen, March 23, 2006 at 10:43 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Your headline says “US-trained” but your quoted excerpts from TIME do not. In any event, ever since Democracy Now! reported, some months ago now, that death squads were said to be forming in Iraq modelled on alleged clandestine US activities in Central America, I have had to wonder just who was behind some of these continuing reports of yet more bodies found tortured and murdered at various locations in Iraq.

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By page, March 23, 2006 at 4:56 am Link to this comment
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why doesn’t anyone remember the name NEGRAPONTE?  when you think of his purposeful involvement, isn’t this the logical outcome?

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