|
BAGHDAD, Iraq --
The murder scene had the markings of a gangland
slaying, but the motive was not money, revenge or a
drug deal gone sour.
Hadi Saleh, a 56-year-old labor rights advocate and
official of Iraq's Communist Party, affectionately
known by friends as "Abu Furat," was found strangled
in his home with a steel wire, his face beaten to a
pulp, his hands bound behind his back.
Saleh's files, containing the names and addresses of
colleagues in both the party and the labor
federation he led, were stolen, his humble home
ransacked.
The scene resembled the interrogation rooms of
deposed President Saddam Hussein's security forces,
whom officials suspect. Saleh may or may not have
given them information; his files certainly did.
"The people who did this are very clearly members of
the Baath Party from the former regime," said
Mohammad Jassem Abad, a leader of the Communist
Party, which is participating in the upcoming
parliamentary elections that the insurgents
violently oppose.
"The way they killed him makes it very clear they're
the ones who did this," he said. "It is their
methods. His assassination wasn't random. It was
perfectly chosen."
Twenty months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the
country's increasingly brutal insurgency remains a
shadowy phenomenon. But its tactics and targeting
are becoming more sophisticated and precise, leading
many Iraqi and U.S. officials to believe that
Saddam's old security apparatchiks have asserted
control to settle old scores and destabilize the
Jan. 30 elections.
"These people have blood on their hands and are
murderers," said one high-level justice ministry
official, who asked not to be named. "They want
everyone hiding behind walls, so they can control
the streets."
Most of the targets are Shiites and Kurds in the new
Iraqi security forces or political leadership,
including the Communists. Saddam drew his allies
from among his fellow Sunnis, who know that the
majority Shiites and the Kurds in northern Iraq will
assume control of the national government if the
elections come off in three weeks as planned.
After a brief respite following Ramadan and the
U.S.-led assault on Fallujah in early November, the
violence in Iraq has returned to fever pitch.
Last week, gunmen assassinated the governor of
Baghdad in a professional hit that was filmed and
posted on the Internet. They also killed the police
chief of the capital's huge Shiite neighborhood of
Sadr City.
In Mosul, the bodies of 18 young men from Baghdad
believed killed last month were discovered, all shot
in the head with their hands bound. In Basra, police
turned up two charred, beheaded bodies in the office
of election organizers. Suicide car bombers killed
at least 100 members of the Iraqi security forces
over the course of the week.
Insurgents issue no public statements, save for
their spectacular acts of violence. They offer no
political agenda, aside from driving U.S. troops out
of the country.
Officials and analysts are left to divine their mix
of motives and their manpower. Figures range wildly
from 5,000 to 40,000 to 200,000 fighters and
supporters. The Interior Ministry estimates the
number of former hard-core Iraqi intelligence
officials as no more than 10,000.
Even top U.S. military officials often sound
bewildered by the insurgency.
"There are hard-core terrorists fighting for an
ideology. There are young impoverished men looking
to make some money," said Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz,
commander of all forces in Iraq, at a recent news
conference. "It would change by province. It changes
by time of year. It changes by the illumination of
the moon. It changes by the weather."
The bulk of Saddam's supporters came from Sunni Arab
communities in Tikrit, Mosul and Fallujah. A
majority of insurgents captured or killed have been
Iraqi Sunnis -- up to 95 percent of those detained,
wrote military expert Anthony Cordesman of the
Center for Strategic International Studies in
Washington, in a draft report dated Dec. 22.
The insurgents are an ideologically mixed lot,
Cordesman and other experts say. Aside from Saddam's
henchmen, they include Sunni nationalists enraged by
the U.S. occupation and foreign Islamic extremists
-- possibly followers of Osama bin Laden or
Jordanian terror leader Abu Musab Zarqawi -- who
would like to drive the United States out of all
Muslim lands. Some appear to be career criminals or
young men willing to kill for money.
They are organized into loose cells and keep
electronic communication to minimum to avoid
detection. And they follow traditional insurgent
tactics, Cordesman wrote.
They attack the security forces, public officials
and economic infrastructure to sap public confidence
in their leaders. They attack the United Nations,
embassies and aid organizations to drive out the
international community.
They hope their acts of savagery provoke equally
violent responses from occupation and interim
government forces, which, in turn, would breed more
insurgents and more anger toward the Americans. "The
more horrifying the attack, or incident, the
better," Cordesman wrote.
The insurgents' main weakness may be the diversity
of their goals. All want the Americans out, but what
would come afterward is unclear.
Some wish to establish an Islamic utopia modeled on
the teachings of puritanical Salafi and Wahabbi
strains of Sunni Islam. Others wish to reassert the
secular supremacy of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.
Others may simply want anarchy to protect themselves
from the wrath of those they tormented for decades.
If the insurgency has a brain, U.S. and Iraqi
officials increasingly believe, it belongs to
well-trained intelligence operatives of the Saddam
regime, like the men believed to have tortured and
killed Saleh, or the men who apparently tied up the
18 young men -- some as young as 14 -- and coldly
executed them one by one.
"The violence is part of a big plan to end the
democratic process and stop the elections so they
can establish a new dictatorship like during Saddam
Hussein's time," said Abad, of the Communist Party.
"Those criminals are wanted by the Iraqi justice
system," he said. "They're very afraid that Iraq is
going to have a justice system and they're going to
have to stand before that justice system and be
charged with killing all of our comrades."
http://www.post-gazette.com
(Borzou Daragahi is a
journalist based in Tehran, Iran, who writes
frequently for the Post-Gazette.
Top |
® 