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

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/683/7982IRAQ: 'Civil war' refrain hides US death-squad programBy Doug LorimerSeptember 13, 2006GreenleftOn September 3, Iraqi national security adviser Mouwafak al Rubaie told journalists that thealleged second-in-command of the tiny al Qaeda in Iraq group, Hamed Jumaa Farid al Saeedi,had been arrested a few days earlier in north-east Baghdad. Rubaie said he was the mostimportant leader of the group after Abu Ayyub al Masri, who is believed to have taken controlafter a US air strike killed Abu Musab al Zarqawi on June 7.Rubaie said Saeedi was “directly responsible” for the February 22 bombing of the Golden Domemosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad. This attack, Associated Press reported, “touched off thesectarian bloodletting between Shiite and Sunni Muslims pushing Iraq toward civil war”.The mosque was a symbol of cooperation between the two major Muslim sects in Iraq — aSunni-run mosque that housed the Shiite Askari shrine.The February 23 Washington Post reported that “witnesses said that interior ministrycommandos and Iraqi police were cordoning the shrine before the explosions took place”. Aresident who lived near the mosque told the Post: “I was leaving my house to go to work at 6am,but the [police] commandos did not allow me and said curfew is imposed. About an hour later,we heard the explosions.”Within hours, US officials in Baghdad blamed the bombing on Sunni insurgents “dressed aspolice commandos” — which is how the next day’s New York Times reported the event.Blaming the mosque bombing on “Sunni insurgents” provided a pretext for Washington’scollaborators among the Shiite political-religious establishment to whip up animosity towardIraqi Sunnis, who have been the main social base of the resistance movement’s guerrilla waragainst the occupation forces.Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, for example, issued a February 22 statementcalling for Shiite street protests. Tens of thousands of Shiites took to the streets, vowing revenge.Within a few hours, 168 Sunni mosques had been damaged.Later that day, Iraqi cleric Moqtada al Sadr, an outspoken Shiite opponent of the US-ledoccupation, read a message on Aljazeera TV denouncing attacks on Shiite and Sunni mosques.He warned that there was “a plan by the occupation to spark a sectarian war”.A week later US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad accused Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia of carryingout a wave of killings of Sunnis in the mosque bombing’s wake. The March 7 Los Angeles167