http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/bauer
June 3, 2009 [June 22, 2009 edition] The Nation.
Iraq's New Death Squad By Shane Bauer
The light is fading from the dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan
re-enacts what happened to his family last summer. We're standing in
the courtyard of his concrete-block house, his children are watching us
quietly and his wife is twirling large circles of dough and slapping
them against the inside walls of a roaring oven. He walks over to his
three-foot-tall daughter and grabs her head like a melon. As she stands
there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to tie up her hands,
then pretending to point a rifle at her head. "They took the blindfold
off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying, 'Either you
tell us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.'"
"They just marched into our house and took whatever they wanted,"
Hassan's mother says, peeking out the kitchen door. "I've never seen
anyone act like this."
As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr
City, Baghdad's poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people,
when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door
exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew
it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with
eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.
At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He
says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before
they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move
like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his
countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying
American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a
commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him
off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they
identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade,"
Hassan recalls them saying.
The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest
special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free
of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such
lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after
the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army's Special
Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no
prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret's
dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with
American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and
be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.
According to Congressional records, the ISOF has grown into nine
battalions, which extend to four regional "commando bases" across Iraq.
By December, each will be complete with its own "intelligence infusion
cell," which will operate independently of Iraq's other intelligence
networks. The ISOF is at least 4,564 operatives strong, making it
approximately the size of the US Army's own Special Forces in Iraq.
Congressional records indicate that there are plans to double the ISOF
over the next "several years."
According to retired Lt. Col. Roger Carstens, US Special Forces are
"building the most powerful force in the region." In 2008 Carstens,
then a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, was an
adviser to the Iraqi National Counter-Terror Force, where he helped set
up the Iraqi counterterrorism laws that govern the ISOF.
"All these guys want to do is go out and kill bad guys all day," he
says, laughing. "These guys are shit hot. They are just as good as we
are. We trained 'em. They are just like us. They use the same weapons.
They walk like Americans."
When the US Special Forces began the slow transfer of the ISOF to Iraqi
control in April 2007, they didn't put it under the command of the
Defense Ministry or the Interior Ministry, bodies that normally control
similar special forces the world over. Instead, the Americans pressured
the Iraqi government to create a new minister-level office called the
Counter-Terrorism Bureau. Established by a directive from Iraq's prime
minister, Nuri al-Maliki, the CTB answers directly to him and commands
the ISOF independently of the police and army. According to Maliki's
directive, the Iraqi Parliament has no influence over the ISOF and
knows little about its mission. US Special Forces operatives like
Carstens have largely overseen the bureau. Carstens says this
independent chain of command "might be the perfect structure" for
counterterrorism worldwide.
Although the force is officially controlled by the Iraqi government,
popular perception in Baghdad is that the ISOF--the dirty brigade--is a
covert, all-Iraqi branch of the US military. That reading isn't far
from the truth. The US Special Forces are still closely involved with
every level of the ISOF, from planning and carrying out missions to
deciding tactics and creating policy.
<snip>
The effective head of the American ISOF project is General Trombitas of
the Iraq National Counter-Terror Transition Team. A towering man with a
gray mustache and a wrinkled brow, Trombitas spent nearly seven of his
over thirty years in the military training special forces in Colombia,
El Salvador and other countries. On February 23 he gave me a tour of
Area IV, a joint American-Iraqi base near the Baghdad International
Airport, where US Special Forces train the ISOF. As we walk away from
the helicopter, he cracks a boyish smile. Though he's worked with
special forces all over the world, he tells me the men we are about to
meet are "the best."
Trombitas says he is "very proud of what was done in El Salvador" but
avoids the fact that special forces trained there by the United States
in the early 1980s were responsible for the formation of death squads
that killed more than 50,000 civilians thought to be sympathetic with
leftist guerrillas. Guatemala was a similar case. Some Guatemalan
special forces that had been trained in anti-terrorism tactics by the
United States during the mid-1960s subsequently became death squads
that took part in the killing of around 140,000 people. In the early
1990s, US Special Forces trained and worked closely with an elite
Colombian police unit strongly suspected of carrying out some of the
murders attributed to Los Pepes, a death squad that became the backbone
of the country's current paramilitary organization. (Trombitas served
in El Salvador from 1989-90 and in Colombia from 2003-2005, after these
incidents took place.)
"The standards get looser when the Americans aren't with [the local
special forces], and they can eventually become death squads, which I
believe actually happened in Colombia," says Mark Bowden, author of
Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, a book about the hunt for Colombian
drug lord Pablo Escobar by CIA and US Special Forces. The tactics
taught in each country are the same, Bowden says. "They teach the same
kind of skills. They use the same equipment."
Trombitas told the official blog of the Defense Department that the
training missions used in Latin America are "extremely transferable" to
Iraq. Salvadoran Special Forces even helped train the ISOF, he tells
me.
<snip>
Shane Bauer is a freelance journalist and Arabic speaker living in the
Middle East.
Full at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/bauer
Michael