US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

After the commandos set up their headquarters at a bombed-out army base at the edge of theGreen Zone, Petraeus went for a visit. He was pleasantly surprised, he told me, to see a force thatwas relatively disciplined and well motivated. He knew the commandos were officers andsoldiers who had served Saddam Hussein, he knew many of them were Sunni and he certainlyknew they were not under American control. But he also sensed that they could fight. Hechallenged some of them to a push-up contest. He was not just embracing a new militaryformation; he was embracing a new strategy. The hard men of the past would help shape thecountry’s future.Petraeus decided that the commandos would receive whatever arms, ammunition and suppliesthey required. He also assigned Steele to work with them. In addition to his experience in ElSalvador, Steele had been in charge of retraining Panama’s security forces following the oustingof Gen. Manuel Noriega. When I asked him to describe Adnan’s leadership qualities, Steeledrew on the vocabulary he learned in Latin America. Adnan, he said approvingly, was a caudillo— a military strongman.Doing It the Iraqi WayAdnan’s offensive turned Samarra into a proving ground for this new strategy, the mostcomprehensive effort to date in which United States-backed Iraqi forces sought to retake aninsurgent city. Code-named City Market, the offensive has involved weeks of raids bycommandos and their American advisers. After the first wave of raids, a new corps of policeofficers and Interior Ministry troops known as Public Order Battalions were deployed to takecommand of the streets.Samarra has a population of a quarter million, though many have fled after two years of warfare.The population is divided among seven tribes whose rivalries created fertile soil for theinsurgency to take root. Since 2003, the city has often been under the control of the insurgents. InOctober, the United States launched an offensive to retake the city, but the moment the Bradleysand Humvees departed, the insurgents returned. (Voter turnout in the election in January was lessthan 5 percent.)When I arrived in March, the part of Samarra under American and commando control — CityHall and a Green Zone around it — was a small parcel of land ringed with a phalanx of concretebarriers, barbed wire and shoot-to-kill lookouts. The main roads into the city were blocked bycheckpoints at which Iraqi soldiers searched every vehicle. American and Iraqi forces rarely leftthe Green Zone on foot, conducting their patrols in heavily armed convoys, and the Green Zonewas hit by mortars almost every day.There were just a few hundred G.I.’s in Samarra, mostly living in the Green Zone on two bases,Razor and Olsen. The conditions were spartan; soldiers were housed in cramped rooms, theyused outdoor latrines and hot dinners were served just three nights a week. At Olsen, a formercasino that is home to troops of the Wisconsin Army National Guard and the Third InfantryDivision, the soldiers I met spent most of their off-hours lifting weights, e-mailing loved onesback home or playing Halo on Xboxes, unwinding from real combat by engaging in simulatedcombat. Three teams of a dozen or so G.I.’s went out on the raids with the Iraqi commandos.11