Doug Lorimer
"The US commander in Iraq confirmed that a 3700-strong contingent of American combat troops equipped with armoured fighting vehicles is to be brought into Baghdad", Agence France Presse reported on July 29, adding: "General George Casey said the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, an Alaska-based unit which has just completed a 12-month tour in northern Iraq, would be deployed to stem a wave of violence in the strife-torn capital."
The redeployment of the Stryker Brigade from the northern city of Mosul to Baghdad will bring the number of US combat troops in the capital to almost 12,000.
Associated Press reported that "Pentagon officials have said plans call for adding [US] military police, armored vehicles and tanks to the streets of the capital to work alongside Iraq's US-trained police and army units. Those units are heavily Shiite, and the presence of Americans is intended to assure Sunnis that the Iraqi forces are not Shiite death squads in uniform.
"US and British officials have said Iraqi units, especially the police, have been infiltrated by Shiite militias and have lost the confidence of many Iraqi civilians."
On July 30, United Press International reported that in "a new message published Sunday", Casey attempted "to shift the discussion from violence undertaken by militias to that undertaken by 'death squads'".
"The Iraqi security forces are the only legitimate forces responsible for protecting the Iraqi people", Casey declared. He added: "These death squads are nothing but a terribly destructive element of society and, along with terrorists and other members of the insurgency, must be defeated and brought to justice."
UPI's report observed that the "difference between death squad and militia is an important semantic distinction to make as the new Iraqi government and the US military attempt to win back Baghdad, which for the last three years has been in the steady and growing stranglehold of armed fighters."
In reality, the "semantic difference" is aimed at obscuring the fact that the death squads are an integral part of the US-recruited, trained and run Iraqi puppet security forces, and the real target of Casey's "crackdown on death squads" is the Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, an outspoken opponent of the US-led occupation.
The July 26 Washington Post reported that pro-US Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki "has endorsed an aggressive strategy to retake Baghdad from the Shiite death squads roaming the streets. That means taking on militia gangs tied to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army ...
"The [US] military calls the new battle for Baghdad 'Operation Together Forward'. It began about two weeks ago, with raids by US and British special operations forces to capture or kill death squad leaders. So far, about 10 have been 'taken out', most of them members of the Mahdi Army, according to [Bush] administration officials ...
"In addition to targeting death squad leaders, the United States plans to retake Baghdad neighborhoods by starting with the city's 117 police stations. The plan is to install stronger Iraqi police leadership and embed US forces with them."
This will mean sending large numbers of US combat troops into Sadr City, Baghdad's 2-million strong eastern Shiite slum district, which since the failed US military offensive to kill Sadr in 2004 has been a Mahdi Army stronghold.
US officials have presented no evidence of death squads being operated by Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, and have ignored the evidence, including past public admissions by Iraqi officials, that the death squads function out of the US-controlled Iraqi security forces.
On March 12, for example, following the public exposure of one such death squad, then interior minister Bayan Jabr told a Baghdad press conference: "The deaths squads that we have captured are in the defence and interior ministries."
Reporting Jabr's admission, Knight Ridder Newspapers observed at the time "that Sunni Muslims have long complained about Shiite death squads that arrived wearing official uniforms and rode in official-looking vehicles to haul away victims.
"Knight Ridder first reported the accusation of death squads in February last year, and in June documented many cases in which victims were taken away allegedly by men wearing interior ministry commando uniforms were later found handcuffed and executed with a bullet to the back of the head."
The November 16 New York Newsday reported that the interior ministry's police commando units had been built up "over the past year under guidance from James Steele, a former [US] Army Special Forces officer who led US counterinsurgency efforts in El Salvador in the 1980s. Salvadoran army units trained by Steele's team were accused of a pattern of atrocities", including kidnappings, torture and assassinations of critics of the US-backed Salvadoran government.
The December 30 New York Times reported that "American advisers accompany Iraqi commando units as part of the vast American project here to train and equip Iraqi security forces to take over the fight against the guerrilla insurgency and maintain order in the country."