News about the Arab part of Iraq
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Militias, armed gangs rule streets of Iraq 28.2.2006
By Lin Noueihed
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BAGHDAD (Reuters)
- Look in the pockets of Iraqis whose jobs take them
around Baghdad every day and you are likely to find
a clutch of passes and identity cards, one for every
police, military or militia checkpoint they may run
into.
"This one is says I'm Badr, this one I show to
police, and I have the American press pass and my
ordinary ID. I applied for a Mehdi Army pass on
Friday but it hasn't arrived yet," said one Iraqi
driver working for a foreign media organisation.
"I am Sunni so these passes mean I don't get in
trouble with anyone while I'm out and about."
The sheer proliferation of armed groups -- some
official, some unofficial and some that operate in
the murky middle ground -- underscores the
lawlessness of Iraq, where neither U.S. forces who
invaded in 2003 nor the Iraqi armed forces they
trained have been able to impose their authority on
the whole country.
Add to that the militias, most drawn up on ethnic or
religious lines, and the mix is potentially
explosive as the sectarian violence that brought
Iraq to the brink of civil war last week showed all
too clearly.
Wednesday's attack on a major Shi'ite shrine
prompted reprisals against Sunni mosques by gangs of
armed men. The Shi'ite militias blamed by many
minority Sunnis for some of the attacks have denied
any role, but the bloodshed was only quelled by a
three-day curfew and ban on carrying weapons in the
street.
The chaos raised questions over Iraqi politicians'
commitment or ability to impose central control.
"With no central apparatus that can rely on its own
non-partisan security forces to stand in the way of
parties and militias holding ethnic, sectarian and
even separatist agendas, the most likely outcome is
the gradual erosion or perhaps disintegration of the
state," said a report released by the International
Crisis Group (ICG) think-tank on Monday.
OUTSIDE THE LAW
With rival political forces building up militias,
U.S. officials have struggled to create effective
Iraqi national forces so Washington can pull its
136,000 troops out.
In some areas, analysts say, it is only the U.S.
military that has kept militias with their own
sectarian, ethnic and political agendas from
attacking each other.
The ICG report said any assessment of the
consequences of a withdrawal "should take into
account the risk of an all-out war," although it
added the question of a troop drawdown was likely to
be determined by domestic U.S. concerns.
Iraqis already pay the price of the militia
proliferation.
Ali Issa's story is typical. The 30-year-old told
Reuters 20 men dressed as Interior Ministry forces
stormed his Baghdad office and seized him and two
business partners, handing them to a kidnapping ring
that demanded a ransom from their families.
A day after the attack on the Shi'ite shrine in the
northern city of Samarra, an Iraqi reporter working
for Reuters received a call to say black-clad gunmen
had stormed his sister-in-law's housing compound in
Baghdad and shot her dead.
The middle-aged woman was a Sunni from Samarra and
while it is virtually impossible to ascertain who
was behind the murder, her family and neighbours
have blamed it on Shi'ite militiamen.
In 2004, nine militias with over 100,000 fighters
agreed to disband and join the new security forces
or return to civilian life.
It is not clear how far that process got, but with
the Interior Ministry now run by the Shi'ite Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI),
many Sunnis complain that police, commando and
counter-insurgency units are no more than bands of
its Badr militia in national uniform.
The Interior Ministry denies accusations it
sanctions death squads targeting Sunnis but admits
that gunmen wearing its uniforms are behind a spate
of abductions and murders.
Badr leader Hadi al-Amery said five percent of his
20,000-strong militia -- formed in Iran in the early
1980s to topple Saddam Hussein from exile -- had
been integrated into the Iraqi forces, with the rest
engaged in political work.
"We say to our members who go to the armed forces
that when you go to be a part of the armed forces
your relationship with us will be severed," said
Amery, now a member of parliament. "No one is above
the law."
VOLATILE MIX
Much of last week's chaos was blamed on gunmen
dressed in black -- an image many Iraqis associate
with the Mehdi Army, a Shi'ite militia loyal to
radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Sadr denies the Mehdi Army, which mounted two
rebellions against U.S. forces in 2004, was involved
in the attacks.
There are also several nationalist Sunni militant
groups, formed after Saddam's overthrow to drive out
U.S. forces.
Sunni fighters, many of whom feel marginalized since
the formation of a government led by formerly exiled
Shi'ite politicians, recently formed their own
militia -- the Anbar Revolutionaries.
Designed to oppose Shi'ite and Kurdish militias and
foreign militant groups such as al Qaeda, who have
carried out devastating attacks against Shi'ites,
the new Sunni force is mainly made up of Saddam
loyalists and Iraqi Islamists and nationalists who
have been fighting U.S. and Iraqi soldiers.
Kurds have mainly stayed out of the recent violence
but they have up to 140,000 "peshmerga" fighters in
the north even though the militia has been
officially disbanded and thousands of fighters have
joined Iraq's new army, mostly in Kurdistan.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said last week that
Washington would not tolerate sectarianism or
militias in the new government.
"To build a functioning democratic society you need
authoritative police forces, security forces and
military and militias ... are threats to a
successful democratic order,' Khalilzad said.
Reuters
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