Sunnis feel full force of Lightning strike By Awadh al-Taee and Steve Negus
For the past month, Iraqi troops backed by US forces have stormed through Baghdad's predominantly Sunni Arab neighbourhoods, arresting thousands in a series of sweeps aimed at deterring bomb attacks that have killed hundreds in the capital.
But while Iraqi military officers say that Operation Lightning is a necessary, if draconian, step aimed at sifting out insurgents from a civilian population that often protects them, many of those arrested claim that the campaign is a form of collective punishment against the Sunni community.
The campaign has sparked fears, a year to the day after the handover of sovereignty by Paul Bremer, the former US administrator, that Iraq's new rulers are cut from the same cloth as many other authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes.
Mass detentions and indiscriminate torture seem to be the main tools deployed to crush an insurgency that could last "five, six, eight, 10, 12 years", according to Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary.
Mustafa Mohammed Ali, a wall painter from the Sunni Arab town of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad who was arrested at the beginning of the operation, says he was held for 26 days and tortured with electricity by Interior Ministry commandos before being let go.
Iraqi interrogators prodded him with seemingly random questions, he says, before releasing him with a warning that his ordeal was a punishment for having supported the insurgents.
Although his story could not be independently verified, many details are similar to an account from another resident of the neighbourhood arrested in the same operation, as well as the Iraqi security commander's own version of the sweep.
Mr Ali says he was arrested in his home on May 22 by members of the Interior Ministry's feared Wolf Brigade, who had his name on a list of about 500 wanted suspects.
He spent the first day in a barbed wire enclosure with hundreds of other detainees without food, water, or toilet facilities. The detainees were separated by religion, with members of predominantly Shia tribes in one group, and Sunnis in the other.
On the fourth day, the interrogations began. Mr Ali says Wolf Brigade commandos attached electrical wires to his ear and his genitals, and generated a current with a hand-cranked military telephone.
Mr Ali says, that in their attempt to extract a confession, his interrogators told him his picture had been found on the camera phone of a man involved in the assassination of Iraqi politician Aqila al-Hashemi in September 2003. Other detainees told him that they had been accused of involvement in the February assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, in Beirut.
In addition, Mr Ali says, the interrogators told him that residents of Abu Ghraib and members of his predominantly Sunni tribe, the Dulaim, were known to be involved in the resistance.
''It was purely sectarian,'' Mr Ali says.
At one point, he overheard a visiting US officer upbraid an Iraqi counterpart for the indiscriminate nature of the arrests. "We capture one or two terrorists in six months,'' the officer said, "and then in three days you go and bring us 800?"
Over the next three weeks, Mr Ali says, he was transferred to a number of police and intelligence units across Baghdad, each of which tried to get him to confess, until at last an order came for his release.
Just before he was let go, he says, the batch of detainees was addressed by General Rashid Flayeh, head of the police commandos.
Gen Flayeh reportedly told the detainees that it was their right as Iraqi citizens not to be held for more than three days without charge, and he was sorry that they had been kept longer. Nonetheless, the general said, the Abu Ghraib detainees should think of their detention "as a punishment for those who sympathise with the terrorists".
A large majority of those arrested were released, Mr Ali says. "The fire burns the wet leaves as well as the dry ones," the innocent suffer alongside the guilty," the general reportedly told the detainees before letting them go.
In an interview with the FT, Gen Flayeh acknowledged that the Abu Ghraib sweep, which he said was based on information that insurgents were planning to seize control of west Baghdad, had led to lengthy detentions of citizens who were ultimately let free - an infraction for which he apologised on television.
Of the 474 arrested, he said, 22 were still in detention and would be referred to trial. But he suggested more would have been kept in detention were it not for limits on the space in Iraq's jails and the number of judges available for trial.
"Not everyone who was released was exonerated 100 per cent," he says.
He denied any of the suspects had been tortured with electricity, or that the raid had been motivated for sectarian reasons, pointing out that many of the officers involved were Sunni.
But he acknowledged some soldiers had beaten detainees who tried to resist arrest. Asked whether other suspects had been insulted, he said that "some of those released had pressed others to join the resistance''.
"I told them, this is a pinch on the ear as a reminder to whoever plans or advocates killing the police, or who co-operates with the gunmen," he said.