By Farah Stockman and Bryan Bender
The Boston Globe, 02 April 2006
WASHINGTON -- Nearly eight times as many Iraqis died last month in execution-style sectarian killings as in terrorist bombings carried out by insurgents, new US military statistics show.
US military officials and human rights monitors attribute much of the violence to Shi'ite militias that began targeting Sunnis to retaliate for the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shi'ite shrine.
Until now, the Sunni-led insurgency was seen as the greatest threat to US plans in Iraq, killing hundreds and at times more than 1,000 Iraqi civilians per month. But the new figures suggest that the Shi'ite militias, loyal to powerful Shi'ite politicians, are poised to become as great a threat to Iraq's security.
The military said 1,313 Iraqi civilians perished in sectarian murders in March, compared with 173 killed in suicide bombings. The victims, an average of 36 per day, included Sunni men found with holes drilled through their heads and Shi'ite men with the words ''traitor" written or carved across their bodies.
While sectarian strife has surged, US military deaths have declined. At least 29 US service members died in March -- the second-lowest monthly toll of the war.
The killings have worsened the political deadlock in the negotiations to form a unified Iraqi government. Some Sunni politicians accuse the Shi'ite bloc that controls parliament of supporting the militias' deadly campaign.
The violence also complicates the US plan to withdraw from Iraq. The same militias that provided new recruits for the US-trained police and military are now being accused of murder, giving rise to fears that the forces the United States are training to stabilize the country could eventually tear it apart.
An internal debate is stirring within the US military about how to deal with the politically explosive issue of the militias.
''These militias have infiltrated the military and taken action on their own, and they will be a fact of life after we are gone," said retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, former commander of US Central Command who later served as President Bush's special envoy to the Middle East. ''It's the 800-pound gorilla in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. No one seems to have a plan for the militias."
US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has asked for the militias to be disarmed, but Iraqi officials contend that doing so would create a violent backlash, and they have been left alone.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who some US officials accuse of refusing to compromise with Sunnis to form a unified government, says he plans to bring the militias under the umbrella of Iraq's security forces. He has argued that it would be better to include them and win them over than continue to let them act on their own.
Zinni said some at the Pentagon agree with this tactic, arguing that the United States should explore ways to coax the militias into the fold of government control.
''If disbanding them might cause more violence, can you legitimize them? Make them territorial guards -- much like our National Guard -- and give them state or provincial responsibility," he said.
Michael O'Hanlon, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, said another idea could be to ask the militias to perform less controversial jobs than guarding territory, such as protecting mosques.
But others warn that the militias, which previously operated as heavily armed neighborhood watch groups, have become as deadly as the insurgents, and that inviting them into the police force and the army carries great risks.
Michael Rubin, a former Coalition Provisional Authority official who is now at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the Pentagon must rein in the militias and prevent Shi'ite politicians from doling out posts in the security forces as political patronage to militia supporters. He said that up until now, the Pentagon has been too eager to accept the new recruits because they are under pressure to show that the numbers of Iraqi soldiers and policemen are rapidly growing.
''At every crisis, for the sake of short-term calm, we basically empower the militias . . . and then it's harder to uproot them," Rubin said. ''The insurgents and the militias have one thing in common: They seek to impose through force what they are not certain they could win through the ballot box."
Two rival Shi'ite militias have been blamed for much of the violence. The Badr Organization, formerly known as the Badr Brigade, is the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful party that once took refuge in Iran from oppression by Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime. The Mahdi Army, which has often clashed with American forces, was formed in 2003 by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to protect the holy shrines.
The Kurds, an ethnic minority who were also oppressed by Hussein's regime, formed their own militia in northern Iraq known as the Peshmerga, which US officials have not implicated in the recent spate of violence.
Allegations of Shi'ite ''death squads" have circulated for months, as bodies of Sunni men -- sometimes handcuffed or shot in the head -- turned up around the country and after the discovery of a prison associated with the Ministry of the Interior that tortured and starved Sunni prisoners. But since the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, the violence has widened to include public murders and abductions, often by killers dressed in the uniforms of Iraqi Army and police.
Last week, Army Major General Rick Lynch, spokesman for Multi-National Forces in Baghdad, released the data on the recent violence and said most of the murders could be attributed to ''ethno-sectarian violence."
Many of the assassinations have targeted Sunnis. In one case last month, men in bulletproof vests stormed a jail and separated Sunnis from Shi'ites, killing the Sunnis, according to a United Nations human rights report. In another recent case, men in highway patrol uniforms were caught as they were abducting a Sunni man, according to Lynch.
On Wednesday, men in police commando uniforms walked into an electronics store and lined 14 employees against a wall and shot them. It was unclear how many of the victims were Sunnis.
One Western diplomat reached by telephone in Baghdad said that the killings appeared to be revenge for the oppression of Shi'ites under Hussein and for the Sunni-led insurgency that has killed thousands of Shi'ites.
''These people have suffered for so many years, and now that they are in a position of authority, now taking the laws into their own hands," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
O'Hanlon, the Brookings researcher who compiles a monthly index of statistics on Iraq, said the new data on sectarian deaths suggest that the US military and the Iraqi government face a grave new threat.
''One could argue that this spasm of Shi'ite-perpetrated violence does not equal three years of a Sunni insurgency," he said. ''But I agree that there is the potential for this to continue and become the new norm. There is the potential for widespread 'ethnic cleansing.' "
US military officials say they are taking measures to counteract the violence, including a widespread push to have US military units embed in provincial Iraqi police forces.
A US Army officer advising Iraqi police in northern Iraq said embedding was meant to improve the professionalism of the Iraqi police, ensuring that ''the police do not evolve into sectarian hit squads."
Ann Bertucci, a spokeswoman in Baghdad for the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team, an arm of the US military that trains Iraqi police, acknowledged that militias are a worry. But she said that the US military believes the problem will eventually fade.
''We believe that at least some of the militias will disappear as Iraq's Security Forces instill trust and confidence in the citizens that they can protect them," she wrote in an e-mail.
''There are various reasons for someone to join a militia," she wrote, citing unemployment and a desire to protect one's community from danger.
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Citation: Farah Stockman and Bryan Bender. "Iraq Militias' Wave of Death: Sectarian Killings Now Surpass Terrorist Bombings," The Boston Globe, 02 April 2006.
Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2006/04/02/iraq_militias_wave_of_death/
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