Sectarian violence or evidence of an orchestrated campaign to carry out religious cleansing? And provide the US with an excuse to attack Iran? The US is helping to create the Iraqi Ministry of Civil War, with death squads at its disposal.

The US intelligence services admitted on February 2, 2007, that the violence in Iraq constituted a "civil war", though the Bush Administration did not want to use that specific term. Robert Gates labelled it an "oversimplification", which may mean that a term like "civil war" is not approved by the "spin committee" and hence not in the Newspeak dictionary. Another unpopular term is "death squad", yet it seems that both words are going to be used more and more when trying to describe the real cause of the problem that is Iraq.

The situation in Iraq has dramatically worsened in the second half of 2006. Several factors have been blamed: a loss of commitment from coalition troops, a surge in sectarian violence from the Iraqis, etc. For the Bush Administration, the reason for the insurgency was the bombing of Samarra's Al Askari Golden Mosque on February 22, 2006. At the time, Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite and one of Iraq's two vice presidents, stated "this is as 9/11 in the United States."
Like 9/11, the incident is not without intrigue. For one, no official investigation of the destruction has occurred. The US blames Sunni extremists or Al Qaeda terrorists - though no hard evidence exists to blame either... or anyone else. It is known that holes were dug into the mausoleum's four main pillars and packed with explosives. The charges were connected together and linked to another charge under the dome. The wires were linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance. The installation lasted twelve hours, which was confirmed by one witness who had seen men dressed as personnel of the Iraqi Special Forces enter the building the previous night and had heard cars running throughout the night. At 6.30am the following morning, the vehicles outside the Mosque left. Ten minutes later the bombs exploded.
Such careful work is unlike most terrorist activities. Indeed, this was a controlled demolition, perhaps not unlike how the World Trade Center came down, the work of experts, not the short, violent act typical of a terrorist attack.

Whoever perpetrated it, the event was used as an opportunity to strengthen the party line that without a US presence in Iraq, the hatred between Shiites and Sunnis would escalate. Of course, it begs the question whether the act was specifically designed to drive the Muslims further apart and make the tension that existed between both groups explode. There was, however, another possible motive: Juan Cole, professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, called the bombing "an apocalyptic day in Iraq" and stated that "It's very clear that the Shiites are interpreting this chain of events as evidence that the Americans are weak and can't protect Shiite interests. And now Americans are having to come back to the Shiites and ask them to be magnanimous and give away a lot of what they've won in elections." So the bombing of the Mosque could not so much have been directed against the Shiites, but to weaken the US position in Iraq? Or to force the US's hand in favour of the Shiites? In which case the Shiites had a strong motive in blowing up their own Mosque.

Though seen as the act that escalated the violence in Iraq, the evidence suggests that the violence only escalated several months later, in July 2006, when in one month, 3190 people died a violent death (compared to 5,640 in the first six months together - the total for the second half of 2006 was a total of 17,310 dead). Indeed, the average death-toll from March to June remained unchanged, even though the US government was claiming the death-toll was rising.

So if not the blowing up of the Mosque, what could have been responsible for the rise in July 2006? Dare we ask whether the US government wanted to see the death-toll rise, to substantiate their previous claims? If so, let us note that the figures rose when the US occupying army began "Operation Together Forward", which involved joint US and Iraqi troops cordoning off some of the deadliest neighbourhoods. The main aim was to do a house-to-house search, and collect any weapons and explosives found inside.
The operation began on July 9, with a second phase launched in early August. Officially, the operation was "an effort to increase security and reduce violence in the Iraqi capital". In truth, the operation had the opposite effect and in September was labelled as a failure. There is no denying that a death-toll of 1000 civilians per month in early 2006 required action, but it appears that the chosen action increased - more than tripled - the death-toll. Even if this outcome was totally undesired (but why create a second phase if phase one had a disastrous outcome?), it seems the US itself is to blame for the rise in violence - which should hence no longer be labelled "sectarian". Rather than the peacekeeper, the US seemed to be the escalator.

Of course, Operation Together Forward in itself did not make the death-toll rise. It created the right framework which allowed death squads to go into these territories and carried out their kidnapping and killing. They knew that as all the inhabitants had had their weapons confiscated, they had carte blanche.
Remarkably, some observers argue that these death squads are sponsored by the US. Though this may seem farfetched, the US has a history of such techniques, from Honduras, Guatemala, Argentine, Chile to the Contras in Nicaragua and the Phoenix program in Vietnam; all either operated with direct US support or US approval.

Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, fled Iraq in early 2006 in fear of his life after reporting that more than 7000 people had been killed by Iraqi Interior Ministry death squads. John Pace, former head of the UN Human Rights Office in Iraq, said that the Baghdad morgue had been receiving 700 or more bodies a month. "The vast majority of bodies showed signs of summary execution - many with their hands tied behind their back. Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills." Pace argued that these killings had been happening long before the spate of sectarian killings following the February 22 bombing. The US Administration was blaming 2/22 for a problem that had in truth been growing for much longer.
Faik Bakir was not a lone voice. The man who has exposed some of the flagrant abuses of power in Iraq is Sunni MP Mohammad Al-Daini. He reminds people that inspections of two detention centres in December 2005 found around 800 inmates, many of them teenagers, living in cramped conditions under Interior Ministry guard. Dozens had to be sent to hospital for injuries administered by guards. Almost none of them had ever been charged with any crime and one of the people incarcerated had been there for more than a year. Almost all of them were Sunnis.
According to Al-Daini, the militias and government "death squads" make use of curfews to carry out killings and displace Iraqi citizens. It is here that we learn why Operation Together Forward aided the death squads: first, Iraqi and US forces cordoned off largely Sunni neighbourhoods which had been "identified" as problem areas. These were then disarmed. But under the cover of night, the guards at the checkpoints (whose true allegiance lies with the death squads) let the death squads inside, whom can then kidnap and/or kill people whom, if they ever had any weapons, had just been disarmed by the US and Iraqi troops. And this suggests that "Operation Together Forward" wittingly or unwittingly helped these death squads to carry out their killing sprees. 

Rather than the US, Al-Daini identified then Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr as the main instigator of the death squads. Jabr was once one of America's favourite Iraqi people, part of the Iraq government it had established to take power after the 2003 invasion. But by December 2005, following the discovery of the secret prisons, the US was pressing for his sacking.
The scandal of Sunni prisoners kept without trial in inhumane conditions confirmed Sunni claims that the Baghdad police had become an arm of the Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq (also known as Sciri). One of its "executive arms was the Badr Brigade, based in Iran for two decades during the rule of Saddam Hussein and largely consisting of several thousand Iraqi exiles, refugees, and defectors who fought alongside Iran in the Iran-Iraq War.
Jabr was a Sciri official and has been accused of converting a Badr brigade without any training but purely through change of costume into a new police unit - or should that read "death squad"?

All observers agree that the rise of the death squads corresponds almost precisely to the April 2005 appointment of Bayan Jabr as Interior Minister in Iraq's transitional government. Despite US calls to remove Jabr from his post in December 2005, in May 2006, Jabr was promoted to the role of Finance Minister in the new government headed by Nuri al-Maliki. From his new post, Jabr did acknowledge that some death squads had operated from within the Interior Ministry while he headed it, but he insisted that they were few in number. That was not everyone's opinion. General Muntazar al-Samarrai, a former Special Forces Commander at the Interior Ministry, stated that Jabr had personally condoned the torture of many detainees.

The current crisis in Iraq can thus apparently be traced back to one person and his rise to power. And it is not, as the US would believe, Saddam Hussein, nor his allies. Though the US Administration will claim they called for Jabr's removal, in truth, the US has known all along what was really happening. US military leaders and observers in Iraq claim that then Minister of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was told, but seemed uninterested in "such details". As early as September 2004, "The Economist" reported that "the chairman of the council's security committee, Ayad Allawi, has begun creating a new version of the feared secret police. Iraq may well need a counter-insurgency force, but Mr Allawi's rivals accuse him of recruiting former torturers to man a new apparatus of oppression."

It is with Ayad Allawi that the hand of the US in the formation of these death squads begins to reveal itself. Organising death squads was nothing new for Allawi, for a group of former CIA agents told "The New York Times" that in the mid 1990s, the CIA had backed an Allawi campaign of car bombs and other explosive devices intended to destabilise Iraq. A US-backed coup attempt in 1996 involving Allawi ended in failure after it was infiltrated by Saddam. The alliance between the man who is seen as a prime mover of the death squads and the US government was thus seeded more than a decade ago.

Is there any hard evidence that the US are active participants in these death squads? On June 24, 2005, journalist Yasser Salihee was killed by a single bullet to the head as he approached a checkpoint that had been thrown up near his home in western Baghdad by US and Iraqi troops. It is believed that the shot was fired by an American sniper and according to eyewitnesses, no warning shots were fired. Though his employer believed that the murder had nothing to do with his assignment, over the past month, Salihee had been gathering evidence that US-backed Iraqi forces had indeed been forming death squads, carrying out extra-judicial killings of alleged members and supporters of the anti-occupation resistance - what in Newspeak is translated as "counter terrorism".
Salihee wrote that the US military had modelled the Iraqi interior ministry police commandos, known as the Wolf Brigade, on the death squads unleashed in the 1980s to crush the left-wing insurgency in El Salvador. He added that the Wolf Brigade was recruited by US operatives and the US-installed interim government headed by none other than Ayad Allawi during 2004. A majority of its officers and personnel had served in Saddam Hussein's Special Forces and Republican Guard and the unit had been used against the resistance in rebellious cities such as Mosul and Samarra, and, over the past six weeks, had played a prominent role in the massive crackdown ordered by the Iraqi government in Baghdad codenamed "Operation Lightning" - a precursor to the 2006 "Operation Together Forward".
Salihee had also interviewed the central Baghdad morgue director Faik Baqr, on record as stating that some people had "been killed in a methodical fashion. Their hands had been tied or handcuffed behind their backs, their eyes were blindfolded and they appeared to have been tortured. In most cases, the dead men looked as if they'd been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and shot to death, often with single bullets to their heads." Salihee had apparently also gathered evidence that as many as 500 people had died during Operation Lightning. One year later, with Operation Forward Together, the death-toll escalated.

That was 2005. Did the US kill Salihee so that the truth about the death squads would not come out? Let us note that it was a US soldier who shot Salihee, apparently without any warning.
Interestingly, the existence of Iraqi death squads broke in the international media on February 16, 2006.The media, including the BBC, stated that "Sunni Arab Iraqis have long complained about death squads. Iraq has launched an investigation into claims by the US military that an Iraqi interior ministry 'death squad' has been targeting Sunni Arab Iraqis. The probe comes after a US general revealed the arrest of 22 policemen allegedly on a mission to kill a Sunni." The arrest, of a police force death squad sponsored by the interior ministry, clearly pointed out who was truly responsible for the precarious situation in Iraq. But the news quickly disappeared in the aftermath of the Samarra Mosque bombing less than a week later. It was an attack, it should be noted, for which Sunnis were seen as the primary culprits, without any supporting evidence. And we really need to wonder whether the proximity in time between the major news that the existence of death squads had just been proven on February 16 and the Samara Mosque bombing of February 22 is coincidence, or design. Rather than headlines of death squads operating within Iraq, the attention was diverted to talk about "sectarian violence".

Observer Max Fuller has identified that the increase in killings in Baghdad has indeed "coincided" with the police commandos becoming operationally active. What should have brought crime down, actually increased it.
It is the US who is training the Iraqi police force and opponents of the US would blame the US as solely responsible. Still, it was the US general in charge of this training who announced the detention of a death squad. It may therefore be that the Iraqi regime is playing the US for fools, letting the US train and arm their death squads, then send them to kill innocent Sunnis, acts which have brought Iraq to civil war, with the US trying to restore peace.
But the truth is that the US cannot plead ignorance. It knew who Ayad Allawi was. It trained and organised the Wolf Brigades. Indeed, the main US advisor to the Wolf Brigade from the time of its formation until April 2005 was James Steele. Steele's own biography states that "he commanded the US military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerilla war" and "was credited with training and equipping what was acknowledged to be the best counter-terrorist force [read: death squad] in the region." The people he trained killed over 70,000 people over twelve years.
And in early January 2005, it was widely reported in the international media that "the Pentagon is considering forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago."  

In practice, it seems that what is truly happening is religious cleansing of the Sunni minority by government sanctioned death squads. And though the US cannot be solely blamed, it is clear they are far more than innocent bystanders. If sordid details of collusion between the US and the death squads ever do see the light of day (read: the White House having full knowledge if not active support of their formation), let us remember that in the early 1980s, President Reagan's Administration funded and helped to train Nicaraguan contras based in Honduras with the aim of ousting Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. The Contras were equipped using money from illegal American arms sales to Iran, a scandal that almost toppled Reagan. Is it a coincidence that in 1982, the Badr Brigade was sponsored by the Iranian regime to fight against Hussein's troops... and that the links between the Badr Brigade and the US were always very friendly, as proven with Jabr's inclusion in Iraq's provisional government after the 2003 invasion?

Meanwhile, the CIA pretends its nose bleeds. It claims that Iran has penetrated the Iraqi Interior Ministry and holds these moles responsible for the creation of the death squads. But a National Intelligence Estimate was delayed in December 2006, as the CIA's "beliefs" could not be backed up with any hard evidence.
The White House therefore has to - or can - make up its own mind as to whether Iran is behind Iraq's civil war or not. The outgoing director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, said that the old view was that Iran does not want a civil war in Iraq, but said that this assessment was changing. Mounir Elkhamri in his paper titled "Iran's Contribution to the Civil War in Iraq" says that Iran's Quds Force has worked to create a rump Shiite state in southern Iraq since shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and that the Shiite militias killing Sunni civilians in Iraq are working at the behest of Iranian intelligence and Saddam's former Revolutionary Guard. But, again, evidence is lacking... and the available evidence points to a different truth.

With America trying to substantiate a "need" to attack Iran, we can only wonder whether it has allowed, or has actively supported, the creation of these death squads, giving the Badr Brigade what they want - religious cleansing of Sunnis - causing an escalation in violence, which allows the US to blame Iran... so that it can then mount a campaign against Tehran, in efforts to "stop the Iraqi insurgency".

So, what if the Iraqi regime bombed the Samarra Mosque on 2/22, in the hope that a furious nation would identify the act as perpetrated by Sunnis and would take revenge on them? It would be yet another example of the state carrying out terrorist acts on its own soil.
Let us note that the Mosque held the tombs of two revered 9th century imams of the Shiite branch of Islam, including Hassan al-Askari, father of the "hidden imam", the Mahdi. Like the return of Jesus Christ for Christians, many Shiites believe that the Mahdi will one day signal the beginning of the end of the world. Destroy the Mosque and you touch at the heart of the Shiite future - if not religious political agenda.
The Shiite faith is larger than Iraq and the act indeed caused outrage throughout the Arab world. Whereas the Bush Administration officially seemed to misunderstand the effect of the bombing throughout the Shiite world, blaming "Sunnis", it also blamed that usual and rather undefined suspect, Al Qaeda. If it was Al Qaeda, it was indeed evidence that this network was not at all religious, but instead dangerously politically motivated, not merely trying to bring down the fall of the Western world (as the West likes to think), but equally trying to ignite the Middle East, setting one Arab country up against its neighbour.
Indeed, Al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has stated that one of his goals is to incite a civil war between Iraq's Shiites and Muslims. But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad instead blamed the United States and his usual culprit Israel for the Samarra attack. He claimed that "these heinous acts are committed by a group of Zionists and occupiers". Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah echoed the opinions of Ahmadinejad, but somewhat more logically accused the United States of attacking the mosque to cause tension between the Muslims and Shiites. Equally, Iran's top military commander Brigadier General Mohammad-Baqer Zolqadr stated that the US needed those attacks to justify the continuation of its military presence in Iraq - which is of course precisely what the US did. Thus, in early 2007, Bush argued for an increase in troops for Iraq as he is "required" to separate two groups embroiled in civil war. But the truth is that he is pouring oil on the fire. With the US's active or passive support of the death squads, it has set Iraq ablaze. The question is why. The answer may be Iran.  

> To learn more about the Mahdi and his role in Iraq, as well as the "coming crisis" involving the Iranian regime, don't miss the first issue of the REAL NEWSpaper Conspiracy Times on March 18.