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Written by Chris Floyd   
Monday, 06 March 2006 16:22
From the Sunday Times: "Driller Killers" Spread a New Horror in Iraq
Excerpts: THERE was no sign of danger as Mohammed Sammarai arrived at his brother Mustafa’s home for lunch last week, no hint that this would be their last meal together. It was not until after they had been joined by their old friend Ali Ahmad that they heard a commotion outside and realised something was wrong. Even then, the three men — all government employees, all Sunnis — had no inkling of the terrifying events that were about to overwhelm them.

First two police vehicles pulled up outside their house in the Hay al-Jihad district of Baghdad’s sprawling southern suburbs. Then came a convoy of up to 10 black BMWs and Opels — the favoured cars of the Shi’ite militias. Suddenly masked men brandishing Kalashnikov automatic rifles were storming inside. Ahmad was arrested. Mustafa protested. Mohammed fled upstairs. There was no escape, however, as Ahmad recalled...

“One of the men grabbed Mustafa’s one-year-old son and put him between his legs and threatened to kill him unless Mohammed came downstairs,” he said. “Another man grabbed the boy’s mother and placed a machinegun on her chest and threatened to shoot her.” Then he banged her head against a chair, loudly cursing her...“We are from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,” one of the men is said to have shouted.

The Sunni brothers and their friend were bundled back into the car boots and driven off again. The next person they saw was an imam, but he was not there to save them. “I saw an imam peer into the boot with a policeman,” Ahmad said. According to his account, the imam condemned Mustafa and Mohammed with the chilling words: “Kill any identified suspect immediately.” Ahmad was freed on the imam’s orders, apparently because he had merely been a guest of the brothers and had not been suitably identified....

Two days later he found his friends’ bodies in the city’s Teb al-Adli mortuary. Mustafa’s right eye had been gouged out and his right leg broken. Other parts of his body appeared to have been penetrated by an electric drill, an increasingly common tool of torture in Iraq. Mohammed’s body bore similar injuries. Both men had been shot in the head...

John Pace, the outgoing head of the UN human rights office in Baghdad, said the vast majority of the bodies arriving at the mortuary showed signs of summary execution and many had their hands tied behind their backs. “Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills,” said Pace, a Maltese official.

He claimed that militias were integrated with the police and were wearing police uniforms. One in particular was singled out: the Badr organisation that used to be the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the political party mentioned by one of the men in the Sammarais’ home.

The Badr organisation, as it is known today, was founded in Iran in the 1980s with the aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and is thought to number 20,000 men. It was once led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who now heads SCIRI, one of the main parties in the Shi’ite alliance that won last December’s election. The interior minister, Bayan Jabr, was also a member.

According to Pace, the cases of torture and extrajudicial executions now exceed those under Saddam’s rule. “Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less okay,” he said. “Now you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone.” .
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