City of vengeance

A savage outbreak of retaliatory killings has pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war. In the first of three exclusive reports, our correspondent investigates the Mahdi Army's Baghdad death squads.

Editor's note: This is the first of three parts.

By Phillip Robertson

Read more: Politics, News, Iraq, Baghdad, Phillip Robertson, Mahdi Army

Photo by Reuters/Namir Noor-Eldeen

Two men lie on the road shortly after they were shot by gunmen in Baghdad July 9, 2006.

July 12, 2006 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq is accelerating toward civil war. Over the weekend and on Monday, July 10, Baghdad witnessed the most savage outbreak of revenge killings to date. Shiite militiamen, who witnesses claimed were members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, set up checkpoints in the city's al-Jihad neighborhood, inspected ID cards and killed 42 people they identified as being Sunnis. They also broke into homes and killed their inhabitants. Corpses were found in the street with drill holes and pierced by nails and bolts. These attacks, which took place after sunrise, were clearly acts of revenge for two earlier car bombings near Shiite mosques. In turn, the checkpoint killings spurred two more huge Sunni car bomb attacks in the Sadr-dominated neighborhood of Talbiyeh, killing 25 and wounding 41.

On Tuesday, violence flared again, as suicide bombers detonated bombs across the street from the heavily-guarded Green Zone in Baghdad, killing as many as 16 people. Across Iraq, about 60 were killed, including 10 Shiites who were gunned down on a bus as it left for a funeral.

The killings are ominously similar to the "Black Saturday" massacre in December 1975 that helped precipitate the Lebanese civil war, when Christian Phalangist militiamen stopped 40 unsuspecting Muslims at a checkpoint in Beirut and cut their throats. In retaliation, Muslim militiamen set up their own checkpoint and slaughtered Christians.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appealed for calm, but the situation is beyond his ability to control. Sunni politicians accused Iraqi police of collaborating with the attacks, and said Iraq's two key security ministries were also infiltrated. Iraq's deputy prime minister for security affairs, Salam al-Zobaie, told Al-Jazeera, "Interior and Defense ministries are infiltrated, and there are officials who lead brigades who are involved in this."

At the same time as the sectarian killings erupted, Maliki began his most serious attempt to rein in violent Shiite militias. On Friday, July 7, Iraqi troops joined Americans in raids in Baghdad's vast Sadr City neighborhood, Sadr's stronghold. U.S. helicopters and Iraqi troops engaged in a fierce battle, killing seven militiamen and wounding 34. According to news reports, the troops succeeded in capturing a dreaded Shiite commander named Abu Dereh. Dereh is closely linked to death squads that kidnap, torture and murder Iraqis who are accused of taking part in bombings of Shiite shrines. Sunni leaders have also accused him of being involved in the kidnapping of Taiseer al-Mashhadani, a Sunni lawmaker abducted on Saturday. U.S. officials said that Dereh was setting up a breakaway insurgent operation and was involved in smuggling weapons from Syria into Iraq.

Dereh is a shadowy figure who has deep connections with the Mahdi Army. A spokesman for the group, Abdel Hadi Al Darragi, has stated that Abu Dereh is not part of the Mahdi Army, but this is implausible. Anyone operating openly in Sadr City would almost certainly have at least tacit support from Sadr's men. Sadr City is tightly controlled by the Mahdi Army and other groups are not allowed to operate there. For its part, the Mahdi Army condemned the joint American and Iraqi attack as a major escalation and disavowed knowledge of any death squad activities.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stated that he wants to bring the militia groups under the control of the government, but it is not clear how he will be able to control forces that have so deeply infected Iraqi institutions.

I recently left Baghdad after a month, my fourth assignment in Iraq. I was looking into the culture of revenge that has gripped the country, and the role played by militias like the Mahdi Army. Again and again, Abu Dereh's name came up. So did a vacant lot at the edge of Sadr City called al-Seddeh.

Al-Seddeh is the place where the Mahdi Army dumps the bodies of the people it has killed. Iraqis have given it a macabre nickname: the "Happiness Hotel." For months, the Baghdad police have regularly found bound corpses there, although it is likely that the victims were not killed at the site. The executions probably took place at a secret, improvised sharia (Islamic) court in Sadr City. Victims, usually buried in shallow graves, are always discovered bound and bearing signs of torture.

When I arrived in Baghdad on May 25, I looked out from my hotel across Jadriyah Boulevard. It was 2 in the morning and a dark reef of palms and blacked-out houses spread out like the edge of a dead continent. The moon lay in the center of the sky, shining dully through a shroud of dust. It was the only steady light now that the power had failed. Across the street there was the sound of a Kalashnikov. Someone was emptying an entire magazine at a target, and then after pausing to reload, unloaded a second clip for good measure. There was no answering rifle, no further information. A donkey woke and began to scream.

The Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias have filled a power vacuum in Iraq. With U.S. forces and the Iraqi government unable to prevent Sunni bombings that cause mass casualties, the militia group offers a measure of protection from such attacks and a means of retribution. The rise of sectarian militias represents a sea change in Iraqi society, one marked by a steady increase in the flow of corpses to the Baghdad morgue. Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that 40 people a day, not including bomb victims, were killed during the first four months of the year. But the true numbers are likely to be higher. Not all bodies make their pilgrimage to the morgue.

The mode of killing varies with the group and the area, but most of the bodies of victims are found in shallow graves in fields, or simply abandoned where they were executed.

"You know the difference between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni groups?" a young filmmaker named Haidar said recently. "The Mahdi Army bury the dead, and the Sunni militias throw them on the trash."

Next page: An ordinary Iraqi praises Zarqawi "because he protected Sunnis"