The Dirty War in Iraq

Steven Casteel worked in Colombia with paramilitaries called Los Pepes that later joined forces to form the AUC in 1997 and who have been responsible for most of the violence against civilians in Colombia. Casteel is now credited with founding the Special Police Commandos in his capacity as senior advisor to the Iraqi Interior Ministry. 

Assigning responsibility for atrocities to particular units or individuals is complicated by the dual nature of the Iraqi security forces, which take orders both from their nominal superiors and from separate chains of command in the factional militias that most of them belong to. Ultimate responsibility for abuses is thus blurred by the fiction of the “government” and the militias as distinct entities when the same people are really involved in both all the way to the top. 

Reports of torture and extrajudicial killings have followed the Special Police Commandos around the country wherever they have been deployed, from Anbar province and Mosul since October 2004 to Samarra in March 2005 to areas around Baghdad since May 2005. The UN report highlighted an incident in Badhra on August 25, in which relatives of the victims identified the abductors as Interior Ministry forces. 

After Special Police Commandos were deployed in Baghdad, 14 farmers were found in a shallow grave on May 5, 2005 with their right eyeballs removed and other signs of torture after they were seen being arrested at a vegetable market. Another incident ten days later, in which eight bodies were found in a garbage dump, prompted Hareth al-Dhari, the secretary general of the Association of Muslim Scholars, to accuse the Interior Ministry directly. “This is state terrorism by the Ministry of Interior,” he claimed. The defense minister responded by blaming “terrorists wearing military uniforms.” 

In another twist, the bodies of 8 men from Sadr City were found in Yussufiah, 40 kilometers from their homes, dressed in army uniforms even though none were soldiers. Their killers obviously wanted their deaths to appear to have been the work of resistance forces. 

Then there is the work and tragic death of Yasser Salihee, the Iraqi physician turned journalist, who dared to launch an investigation into abuses by the Special Police Commandos. Knight Ridder posthumously published his work under the title, “Sunni men in Baghdad targeted by attackers in police uniforms” on June 27, 2005. The cautious language of the report verged on irony, but it described eyewitness accounts of numerous abductions by “large groups of men driving white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The men were wearing police commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9-millimeter Glock pistols and using sophisticated radios.” 

Knight Ridder actually interviewed Steven Casteel for their story. He predictably blamed “insurgents” impersonating commandos. As the article pointed out, this raised “troubling questions about how insurgents are getting expensive new police equipment. The Toyotas, which cost more than $55,000 apiece, and Glocks, at about $500 each, are hard to come by in Iraq, and they’re rarely used by anyone other than Western contractors and Iraqi security forces.” 

Faik Baqr, director of the central morgue in Baghdad, said, “It is a very delicate subject for society when you are blaming the police officers…. It is not an easy issue. We hear that they are captured by the police and then the bodies are found killed…. It’s obviously in- creasing.” 

Yasser Salihee died on his way to get gas to drive his family to a swimming pool on his day off. He was shot by a U.S. sniper at a “checkpoint.” His editor, Steve Butler, has told me he has no reason to think Yasser’s death was connected to his work and the U.S. Army’s account of the incident describes a “random” shooting based only on rules of engagement that greatly prioritize U.S. over Iraqi lives. However, as Italian investigators found in the case of Nicola Calipari, U.S. accounts of such incidents are not reliable and U.S. links to the forces Salihee was investigating cast a dark shadow over his death. 

Finally, the Iraqi death squads appear to have violated a dirty war taboo—they’ve killed a U.S. journalist. Steven Vincent was an award-winning art critic from New York who went to Iraq as a freelance writer for National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Harpers, and wrote a book, In the Red Zone, about the experiences of Iraqis in post-invasion Iraq. On July 29, 2005, he wrote in an op-ed piece in the New York Times that many of the police in Basra were also active in the Shiite militias that had killed hundreds of Sunnis in the city. Four days later, he was abducted by a group of men in a brand new white Chevy pick-up with police markings. His body was found by the side of a road outside the city with three gunshot wounds to the chest. 

The Associated Press has begun to track the numbers of corpses found and, as of October 7, they have tallied 539 since the “transitional government” took office in April. They are reporting that the majority are Sunnis, not Shiites or Kurds, and that “the count may be low since one or two bodies are found almost daily and are never reported.” Perhaps the UN report and the deaths, particularly of journalists will spur more of the media to start reporting and investigating this pattern of state terrorism.

Nicolas J.S. Davies is a student of U.S. history and foreign policy. He lives in Miami, Florida.