Iraq Civil War

The Badr Brigade is the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is one of the main parties in the Iraqi government and rivals to Sadr. According to 2 different reports, 14 police commandos were killed at a Sunni mosque in Baghdad by Mahdi Army militiamen. At another Sunni mosque in Baghdad, one group of Mahdi fighters holding the mosque was nearly overrun by another Mahdi militia. 

The initial spasm of bloodletting took place while Sadr was out of the country. He endorsed the violence at first, stating, “If the authorities can’t protect us, then we will defend our holy places with our blood.” Afterwards, he called for peace, organized joint prayer sessions with Sunnis, and told his followers to focus on ousting the occupation. The chaos, however, revealed that Sadr has a tenuous grip at best over his own forces. 

All together, renewed internecine warfare is unlikely to split neatly along sectarian lines and will involve jostling among various factions for power within religious and ethnic communities, various towns and cities, and the country as a whole. In Basra, for example, after Friday prayers on March 3, the New York Times reported that a crowd of “several thousand people marched to the headquarters of the state-owned South Oil Company, many of them chanting, ‘Southern oil for the South’.” They had been listening to a sermon by Sheik Sabah al Saeidi of the Shiite Fadhila Party, which has a puritanical base like Sadr’s party, but which has broken with Sadr. Sheik Sabah compared a prominent Sunni parliamentarian to Hussein. “There are some people who use the same words Saddam used, such as Tareq al Hashemi, when he uses the word ‘mob,’” Sheik Sabah said. “This word reminds me of the 1991 uprising, when Saddam used that word to describe us.So what is the difference today between Saddam and Tareq al Hashimi?” 

This super-heated rhetoric and extremist positioning increases the power of local power brokers and their factions at the expense of a central government. Basra is especially ripe for inter-Shiite warfare. 

Last August and September, Sadr’s forces fought gun battles with Badr militia in Basra, Nasiriyah, Hilla, and other cities in southern Iraq. In many cities, the security forces are even split between the Mahdi Army and Badr Brigade. According to the Economist , two southern provinces, Maysan and Dhi Qar, are no-go zones for the British and Italian troops stationed there. Sadr’s forces have also assumed many state-like powers, from running a vast network of charities and educational facilities to running courts in which the accused are tried, convicted, and punished by means that include torture and execution. 

In March 2005 the police chief in Basra told the Guardian that half of his 14,000-member force was allied with various party militias, an admission that cost him his job. Death squads involving the police are held to be behind “hundreds of assassinations” a month in the city, mainly against ex-Baathists. The day of the shrine bombing, “gunmen in police uniform” allegedly broke into a prison, kidnapped 12 Sunni prisoners, and shot them.  

What’s questionable about this account is whether they were really just gunmen impersonating police. Since the unmasking in April 2005 of death squads operating within the Interior Ministry, the Iraqi government and its U.S. patrons have denied the existence of death squads, claiming that they were either rogue forces or insurgents who stole police uniforms. Recent reports that U.S. troops unmasked a death squad operating in the Iraqi Highway Patrol are also suspicious as a plethora of Pentagon documents show the U.S. military has funded them, provided them with cars and weapons, and built an entire training academy for them. 

Many detailed reports of death squads in Baghdad revealed that they were equipped with 9 mm handguns, flak jackets, two-way radios, and Land Rovers, all supplied to the Interior Ministry by U.S. forces. In addition, the death squads operate at night and often in large convoys of 10 to 20 vehicles when it would have been impossible to evade the curfews and checkpoints. Sadr’s lieutenants have picked up on this trick and now say the bands of fighters clad in black conducting the latest killings are also imposters.  

The death squads were initially set up in 2004 with heavy U.S. backing and funding in the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos. The planning goes back to December 2003 when Allawi spent time at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia to discuss creating an intelligence service to spy on Iraqis. At first the commandos were former special forces and exBaathists recruited by Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s government. After the transitional government’s accession to power last April, Badr Brigade forces assumed control of the ministry and commandos under Bayan Jabr.

Most Sunnis appear to have been caught off-guard by the scale of the latest violence. But this is likely to seal their turn away from the government. Earlier this year, one poll found that 92 percent of Sunnis thought the Iraqi government was illegitimate and 88 percent endorsed attacks on U.S. forces. Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder reported that after the killings and attacks on mosques, Sunnis from across central Iraq “were sending weapons to Baghdad and were preparing to dispatch their own fighters to the Iraqi capital.” Even before the upsurge in violence, some Sunni groups announced that they were setting up a militia called the Anbar Revolutionaries to fight Shiite and Kurdish militias. 

President Bush, meanwhile, has remained firmly ensconced in his bubble, denying that there is even a civil war. The last argument for occupying Iraq—that only U.S. forces could prevent a civil war—proved hollow. U.S. commanders responded to the sectarian fury by sequestering troops inside their bases, instead of deploying them as a buffer between warring factions.  

U.S. military officials both denied the carnage—U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch declared, “we are not seeing civil war igniting in Iraq. We are not seeing 77, 80, 100 mosques damaged in Iraq. We are not seeing death on the streets” —and praised the ineffectual response: “I think what we have seen showed the capability of the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government in a difficult situation,” said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson. Yet a more accurate sentiment of the U.S. occupiers’ perspective might have been one made last October. Speaking to reporter Tom Lasseter, one anonymous “senior military official in Baghdad” said, “Maybe they just need to have their civil war. In this part of the world it’s almost a way of life.” 

Despite polls showing both the U.S. public and troops overwhelmingly in favor of a pullout, the mantra from the White House is “stay the course.” Senior officials have been talking about the concept of a “long war,” meaning 10 to 20 years of continuous combat, while in Iraq work continues on building permanent U.S. bases. 

According to an insidedefense. com report, the Army has requested $167 million this year to build an exclusive network of supply roads in Iraq that would bypass “high-threat areas” prone to roadside bombs. 

There is still the insurgency. A recent report from the International Crisis Group describes the armed resistance as gaining in confidence and capabilities. There has been a steady rise in the number of attacks during the past 3 years, averaging about 80 a day at present. The most recent Pentagon report on Iraqi security forces states outright that not one unit is capable of operating independently. 

Ironically, if there is any force holding the country together it is Sadr. His power base is in Baghdad so a breakup is against his interests. But that’s of no comfort to the Bush administration. Speaking of the occupiers, Sadr says, “Cut off the head of the snake, then the entire evil will go away.” So goes Operation Iraqi Freedom.