BF2S Forums Iraqi Death Squads: state sponsored terrorism or a few bad apples?

Thousands of civilians are being deliberately killed every month in Iraq - more than were killed in the final years of Saddam's regime. Working with local Iraqi journalists, reporter Deborah Davies shows how night after night death squads rampage through Baghdad's previously mixed neighbourhoods. Up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets, often showing signs of torture with electric drills. Whole areas of Baghdad have now been ethnically cleansed.

While the US and UK governments have been blaming Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda for the deaths, Dispatches reveals how the majority of these murders have been carried out by the Shia militia which have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and entire government ministries. And it highlights how the killers act with impunity - there's little investigation into their activities.

Dispatches has obtained disturbing video footage showing how the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry has run a network of secret prisons where Sunnis are imprisoned, horrifically tortured and killed. Mohammed Al Daini, a Sunni Iraqi MP describes to Davies how he recently discovered such a jail and found hundreds of terribly tortured prisoners. The men had been imprisoned when the current finance minister Bayan Jabr was interior minister and in charge of the police.

Aida Ussayran, a secular Shia and a Human Rights Minister in the last government reveals to Dispatches how she and her staff discovered dozens of prisoners were being tortured and abused inside the interior ministry, again while Jabr was the minister. She challenged Jabr but he said that although this had been happening inside his own ministry he had no knowledge of it.

Two of Jabr's former US advisors tell Davies that they repeatedly warned the US government about Jabr and their concerns that money was being siphoned off to fund a Shia militia called the Badr brigade, which was taking over the Housing ministry, and that the militias were growing in number and power to such an extent that today's slaughter was inevitable. The US authorities fired both of them.

Dispatches also reveals evidence linking sectarian killings to the special police commando units. Davies speaks to Gerry Burke, a senior US advisor in Iraq for most of 2005. He reveals that he saw entire units of the Badr Brigade enrolled in the police and special commando units. He also says that Jabr failed to implement proper investigations into killings which senior Iraqi policemen believed were being conducted by commando units under Jabr's direct control.

The Badr brigade is not the only powerful Shia militia. The Mahdi army, under their commander Moqtada al Sadr, controls large parts of Baghdad. They have infiltrated the health ministry and control many hospitals. An Iraqi doctor tells Davies how Sunni patients are often killed inside the hospitals.

And as the US troops prepare to leave for Iraq, Dispatches asks whether they will end up fighting forces controlled by the very people their own government has installed and funded.

Dispatches challenges Mowaffaq Al Rubaie, Iraq's national security advisor, an eyewitness to Saddam's execution and a key player in the Shia hierarchy that now dominates the Iraqi government, as to whether that government is genuinely committed to ending sectarian violence. Davies interviews Philip Zelikow, a former key policy maker in the administration who helped develop the new US strategy, about whether the administration understands the degree of militia control over the Iraqi government. And she speaks with former Iraqi Prime minister Iyad Allawi who tells Dispatches this Government is not committed to national reconciliation because the militias have penetrated the entire Iraqi system.