Iraqi Army or Mahdi Army?
Tom Lasseter of the McClatchy Newspapers reports that the Iraqi Army being “trained” and armed by the US are, to a great degree, actually loyal to al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army.
“Half of them are JAM. They’ll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night,” said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army’s 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia’s Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. “People (in America) think it’s bad, but that we control the city. That’s not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It’s hostile territory….”
So while Iraq’s other main Shiite militia, the Badr Brigade, concentrated in 2005 on packing Iraqi intelligence bureaus with high-level officers who could coordinate sectarian assassinations, al-Sadr went after the rank and file.
His recruits began flooding into the Iraqi army and police, receiving training, uniforms and equipment either directly from the U.S. military or from the American-backed Iraqi Defense Ministry.
The infiltration by al-Sadr’s men, coupled with his strength in Iraq’s parliament after U.S.-backed elections, gave him leeway to operate death squads throughout the capital, according to more than a week of interviews with American soldiers patrolling Baghdad. Some U.S.-trained units carried out sectarian killings themselves, while others, manning checkpoints, allowed militiamen to pass.
Al-Sadr’s gunmen got another boost in 2005 and 2006 when American commanders handed over many Baghdad neighborhoods east of the Tigris River to Iraqi units, transitions that often were accompanied by news releases that contained variations of the phrase “Iraqis in the lead.”
Lasseter has done excellent reporting in the past, so I put a fair amount of stock in this article. This vignette illustrates the consequences of US actions:
One of the men, who said his name was Abbas al Dulaimi, asked, “When the Mahdi Army comes here, why does the Iraqi army help them shoot people?”
“I was behind a car at the checkpoint on the bridge. I saw an Iraqi army soldier open the trunk,” said another man, who gave only his first name, Ahmed. “There were two men in there. The driver showed the soldier his Mahdi Army ID, and the soldier saluted him and let him drive away.”
No wonder they want to go after Iran now. They (the top US officials, starting with Bush and Cheney) need a way to protect themselves from awareness of what an absolute disaster their every decision has been. The whole world will suffer as a consequence.
Add comment February 1st, 2007