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The execution Thursday of 13 Iraqi political prisoners, including a
woman, was a calculated act of state terror against the resistance to the US
occupation. The executions, all by hanging, were ordered by interim Prime Minister
Ibrahim Jafari to underscore his determination to hold onto power amid a political
stalemate between rival factions in Baghdad.
The death sentences were carried out less than a week after rival Kurdish,
Sunni and secular political parties issued a public demand that the ruling Shiite
United Iraqi Alliance withdraw Jafari as its candidate for prime minister and
name a substitute. A Jafari adviser who witnessed the executions, Bassam Ridha,
declared, “The prime minister is not soft.” Ridha suggested that
deposed president Saddam Hussein could soon take his place on the gallows.
The executions were videotaped, which underscores the aim of using them as
a means of state intimidation. The 13 prisoners were all condemned to death
for their alleged role in armed actions against the US occupation forces or
their Iraqi allies. They were the first to be executed for participation in
such acts—previous executions under Jafari have been limited to charges
of rape and murder not linked to politics.
There are hundreds of prisoners already on death row in Baghdad, so a wave
of judicially sanctioned killings could soon supplement the mass murder being
carried out by the death squads of the US-established regime.
Mass murder is not too strong a term to describe conditions in this tortured
country. On March 9, the Washington Post published a front-page examination
of the explosion of death squad killings since the February 22 bombing of a
Shiite mosque in Samarra—a provocation for which no armed group, including
Al Qaeda in Iraq, has taken responsibility.
The Post had come under heavy criticism from the Bush administration, the Jafari
regime, and much of the rest of the US media for a February 28 report that some
1,300 people were murdered the week after the Samarra bombing, the vast majority
of them Sunni men kidnapped and executed by Shiite death squads.
Both the Jafari government and US military authorities in Iraq claimed the
death toll was far lower—fewer than 400—and questioning of the Post
figure became the starting point for a series of diatribes against alleged media
“exaggeration” of the carnage in Iraq, delivered by Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration spokesmen.
According to the detailed and convincing account by Post Baghdad correspondent
Ellen Knickmayer, the figure of 1,300 deaths was supplied by a worker at the
Baghdad morgue who was defying orders of Shiite leaders to downplay the post-Samarra
killings.
A Health Ministry official told the Post that a representative of the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq “ordered that government hospitals
and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents,
but not by execution-style shootings.” The bombings are frequently the
work of Sunni-led terrorist groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq, but the kidnappings
and executions are believed to be largely the work of the Mahdi Army, loyal
to the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and the militias of other Shiite parties
in the interim government.
The United Nations human rights department in Baghdad confirmed that at the
main city morgue, “the current acting director is under pressure by the
Interior Ministry in order not to reveal such information and to minimize the
number of casualties.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Jafari claimed that the death toll in Shiite-Sunni violence
the week after Samarra was 379, and General George W. Casey, the top US commander
in Iraq, claimed the report of 1,300 deaths was inaccurate. But sources at three
different agencies in Baghdad put the death toll at more than 1,000, the Post
said. One official said that a figure of over 1,000 was being widely circulated
within the government before Jafari denied it and the lower figure was issued.
The official estimate is highly implausible given the scale of the violence
during that week. “Morgue authorities now say that only 250 bodies were
received between Feb. 22 and 28,” Knickmayer explained. “That breaks
down to about 35 bodies a day, scarcely more than the daily average of roughly
30 corpses reported since the middle of last year. And it is unclear how, or
whether, the government includes execution-style militia killings in the tally.”
Knickmayer described one visit to the morgue when she counted the bodies of
84 males, ranging in ages from about 12 to more than 60, all victims of violent
death. Another Post reporter visited on another day and was told there were
more than 200 unclaimed bodies. During a third visit, on March 5, a Post reporter
saw five bodies of men with their hands bound, shot in the back of the head.
The deaths had not been mentioned in news reports.
The Post report represents another volley in the ongoing political conflict
in Washington over the deepening debacle in Iraq. It came two days after Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld denounced media reports from Iraq as exaggerated and inaccurate.
At a March 7 press conference at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said, “From what
I’ve seen thus far, much of the reporting in the US and abroad has exaggerated
the situation, according to General Casey. The number of attacks on mosques,
as he pointed out, had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been
exaggerated.”
The same day, the Los Angeles Times carried a remarkable interview with the
US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, in which he struck a far gloomier note.
He described the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as “opening Pandora’s
box” and admitted that “the potential is there now for sectarian
violence to become a full-blown civil war.”
By March 9, at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rumsfeld
had dropped his denials that civil war was a possibility, instead declaring,
as he testified alongside Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and General John
Abizaid, that dealing with such civil strife was the job of the Iraqi police
and army, not American and other foreign troops in Iraq.
General Abizaid, who heads the US Central Command, covering the entire Middle
East and Central Asia, said the situation in Iraq was “changing in its
nature from insurgency toward sectarian violence.” After the hearing,
Abizaid told the press, “The sectarian violence is a greater concern for
us security-wise right now than the insurgency.”
In the latest incident of the intensifying sectarian conflict, Shiite gunmen
wearing Iraqi police uniforms raided the offices of a Sunni-owned security firm
in Baghdad, arresting more than 30 employees and taking them away in unmarked
vehicles. The company, Al Rawafed, is owned by the family of Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar,
the Sunni tribal leader who was the first president of the interim government
and now serves as one of two vice presidents. The fate the men is still unknown,
but such kidnappings have nearly always ended in mass executions.
At the same time, the Iraqi Defense Ministry announced an investigation into
the murder of its most prominent Sunni officer, Maj. Gen. Mubdar Hatim Hazya
Dulaimi, who was shot to death by a sniper Monday. The commander of the Army’s
6th Division, which patrols much of Baghdad, Dulaimi was killed by a single
bullet as he opened his car door returning from a field visit. The gunman clearly
had knowledge of General Dulaimi’s schedule, suggesting that the officer
was the target of a sectarian assassination plot.