July 30, 2007
The Los Angeles Times
Interior Ministry mirrors chaos of a fractured Iraq
The nerve center of the nation's police is not so much a government
agency as an 11-story powder keg of factions.
By Ned Parker
Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD -- The colonel pulls his Mercedes into the parking lot of
the drab, 11-story concrete building, scanning the scene for
suspicious cars.
Before reaching for the door handle, he studies the people loitering
nearby in hopes he will be able to recognize anyone still there
later in the day. He grips his pistol, the trigger cocked, wary of
an ambush.
He has arrived at his office.
This is Iraq's Ministry of Interior -- the balkanized command center
for the nation's police and mirror of the deadly factions that have
caused the government here to grind nearly to a halt.
The very language that Americans use to describe government --
ministries, departments, agencies -- belies the reality here of
militias that kill under cover of police uniform and remain above
the law. Until recently, one or two Interior Ministry police
officers were assassinated each week while arriving or leaving the
building, probably by fellow officers, senior police officials say.
That killing has been reduced, but Western diplomats still describe
the Interior Ministry building as a "federation of oligarchs." Those
who work in the building, like the colonel, liken departments to
hostile countries. Survival depends on keeping abreast of shifting
factional alliances and turf.
On the second floor is Gen. Mahdi Gharrawi, a former national police
commander. Last year, U.S. and Iraqi troops found 1,400 prisoners,
mostly Sunnis, at a base he controlled in east Baghdad. Many showed
signs of torture. The interior minister blocked an arrest warrant
against the general this year, senior Iraqi officials confirmed.
The third- and fifth-floor administrative departments are the domain
of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite group.
The sixth, home to border enforcement and the major crimes unit,
belongs to the Badr Organization militia. Its leader, Deputy
Minister Ahmed Khafaji, is lauded by some Western officials as an
efficient administrator and suspected by others of running secret
prisons.
The seventh floor is intelligence, where the Badr Organization and
armed Kurdish groups struggle for control.
The ninth floor is shared by the department's inspector general and
general counsel, religious Shiites. Their offices have been at the
center of efforts to purge the department's remaining Sunni
employees. The counsel's predecessor, a Sunni, was killed a year
ago.
"They have some bad things on the ninth," says the colonel, a Sunni
who, like other ministry officials, spoke on condition of anonymity
to guard against retaliation.
The ministry's computer department is on the 10th floor. Two
employees were arrested there in February on suspicion of smuggling
in explosives, according to police and U.S. military officials. Some
Iraqi and U.S. officials say the workers intended to store bombs
there. Others say they were plotting to attack the U.S. advisors
stationed directly above them on the top floor.
Months after the arrests, it's unclear whether the detainees are
Sunni insurgents or followers of Muqtada Sadr, the anti-U.S. Shiite
cleric whose portrait stares down from some office walls in a sign
of his spreading influence in the ministry.
Partitions divide the building's hallways, and gunmen guard the
offices of deputy ministers. Senior police officials march up and
down stairs rather than risk an elevator. They walk the halls
flanked by bodyguards, wary of armed colleagues.
"What is in their hearts? You do not know who they belong to," a
senior officer said.
The factionalization of the ministry began quickly after Saddam
Hussein's fall. As with most Iraqi government departments, deputy
ministers were appointed to represent each of the country's main
political parties. Deputies then distributed jobs among party
stalwarts.
The initial winners were the Kurdish Democratic Party and the two
Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which
sponsors the Badr Organization. The Kurdish party is one of two
factions that control Iraq's northern provinces.
Sadr's Al Mahdi militia started late in the patronage game but has
made significant inroads, particularly among the guard force that
surrounds the ministry compound.
Parties representing the Sunni minority, which controlled Iraq in
Hussein's day, have been almost entirely purged from the ministry in
the last two years. Three of the ministry's longest-serving Sunni
generals have been killed in the last year.
Interior Minister Jawad Bolani, a Shiite leader who took office last
summer, has attempted to repair the ministry's reputation. He has
removed the leaders of eight of nine national police brigades and 17
of 27 police battalions, which have been accused of killings and
mass kidnappings. But change has come slowly.
"There is a lot of pressure, there is influence from everywhere,
from everyone: political parties, religious groups, the government
itself, from familial and tribal influences," said U.S. Army Brig.
Gen. Dana Pittard, who supervised the U.S. advisors to the national
police until last month.
"It would be very difficult for anybody to operate as a leader in
this environment, and the Iraqis do," Pittard said.
No floor has posed more of a challenge than the seventh, which
houses the intelligence division. In theory, the intelligence office
should be key to tracking and combating the insurgents who bomb
Iraq's streets and marketplaces and attack U.S. soldiers. Instead,
the division has been hobbled by a power struggle between two of
America's nominal allies in Iraq, the Kurds and the Supreme Islamic
Iraqi Council.
The fight came to a head earlier this year with a death threat
against the Kurdish deputy minister in charge of intelligence,
Hussein Ali Kamal. The Kurdish leader, who controls the eastern wing
of the floor, was battling for control of the intelligence apparatus
with his deputy, a Badr militia commander who dominates the western
side.
Several months ago, U.S. advisors warned Kamal that his life was in
danger, most probably from the Badr militia, and advised him to stay
in the Green Zone, away from the ministry building in east Baghdad.
He stayed out of the ministry for several weeks.
The Shiite deputy, Basheer Wandi, better known as Engineer Ahmed,
was appointed in the spring of 2005. Around the same time, Shiite
militias began aggressive efforts to target and kill Sunnis in
Baghdad, often using police cover to detain Sunnis in secret prisons
and carry out assassinations.
They made little effort to hide their methods. A U.S. police advisor
recalled a visit to the seventh floor in the summer of 2005, a few
months after Engineer Ahmed took office.
"When we left Hussein Ali Kamal's office in the eastern wing of the
ministry building, we walked down to the other end to see someone
else. As we walked down, there was an Iraqi prisoner on the floor,
in handcuffs, hands tied behind him, the floor was just soaked in
clear fluid, he was still vomiting and gagging. It looked like he
had vomited gallons," the advisor recalled.
One of Engineer Ahmed's work sites was a secret prison set up in a
bunker in Baghdad's Jadriya neighborhood, U.S. officials said. In
November 2005, U.S. troops uncovered the prison, finding 169
detainees, many showing signs of torture.
After the bunker was found, U.S. officials documented Engineer
Ahmed's role. "There were case files written and prepared, presented
to Maliki by the Americans that laid out responsibility," said a
Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the
sensitivity of the subject.
Top American officials eventually decided to back off the effort to
hold Engineer Ahmed accountable because of the political problems
involved, two Western diplomats said.
Engineer Ahmed enjoyed almost untouchable status in the Badr militia
for his reputation as a fighter against Hussein.
"Someone like that is a real war hero for the Shiites. It's very
hard for Maliki to allow any action to be taken against them. From
our side, it becomes how much political capital do we possess in
doing something Maliki is going to find very, very difficult to do,"
the Western diplomat said.
After the threat on Kamal's life, Engineer Ahmed was transferred.
But U.S. and other Western officials, some of whom suspect Maliki's
government of playing a shell game to protect militant leaders, say
he is now working out of Maliki's security bureau. Shiite officials
insisted that Engineer Ahmed was innocent.
U.S. military documents viewed by The Times show that Engineer Ahmed
has had frequent contact with the prime minister. He even played a
role in drawing up the current U.S.-Iraqi security plan for Baghdad.
Kamal, the Kurdish deputy minister, says he believes the ministry
has started reining in Shiite militias but knows suspect figures
still operate openly in the ministry, including Gen. Gharrawi on the
second floor.
Fifty-seven warrants were issued in November after inspectors
discovered evidence of torture at the police base Gharrawi
controlled, but only two men have been arrested.
Interior Minister Bolani set up a committee to review the case but
blocked the arrest warrant against the general after American
officials failed to bring forward the accusing witnesses, Kamal
said. "Now [Gharrawi] thinks he is an innocent man. We couldn't
bring people to face him," Kamal said.
Western officials see Gharrawi's case as an indicator of whether the
Iraqi government is willing to hold senior Shiites accountable for
criminal behavior by their forces.
"He's senior enough that the question arises, if he went down, then
what's the next step? The next step is for other senior generals or
indeed ministers to go down as well," the Western diplomat said.
Even the remaining Sunni members of the police force respect Bolani
for trying to rein in the ministry. But they know he depends on a
web of fragile political alliances and wonder whether any political
figure can undo the effects of several years of recruiting hard-line
militia members to the ministry.
"Even if they brought the prophet Muhammad or Jesus, they couldn't
control them," said a senior ministry official. "They have an
agenda. They follow their parties."
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Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times