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US occupation force in Iraq recruiting former Iraqi secret
police
By Alex Lefebvre
26 August 2003
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Faced with extensive terrorist and sabotage campaigns as well
as growing popular anger over US military occupation and catastrophic
social conditions, US officials in Iraq are reconstituting elements
of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Husseins secret police,
the Mukhabarat, and integrating them into the US occupation authority.
On August 24, the Washington Post published an article
by Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams quoting extensively from
interviews with unnamed Iraqi and US officials concerning US recruitment
amongst Mukhabarat operatives. It wrote: Officials are reluctant
to disclose how many former agents have been recruited since the
effort began. But Iraqi officials say they number anywhere from
dozens to a few hundred, and US officials acknowledge that the
recruitment is extensive.
The Post added that the Mukhabarat is not the
only target for the US [recruitment] effort, quoting another
unnamed official as saying, Were reaching out very
widely.
The Mukhabarat was charged with surveillance of state agencies
(army, secret police, government bureaucracy) and non-governmental
organisations (religious, womens, and labor movements) in
Iraq, as well as foreign spying, notably on Syria, Iran, Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and the US. It evolved in 1973 from the Jihaz al
Khas secret police, headed by Saddam Hussein between 1964 and
1966. During the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, it analyzed intelligence
on Iran provided by the CIA.
During the 1980s and 1990s, it carried out a number massacres
and assassinations of Iraqis opposed to the Hussein regime, both
in Iraq and abroad. It coordinated the suppression of anti-Hussein
uprisings in the Shiite south and Kurdish north of Iraq in the
immediate aftermath of the 1990-1991 Gulf war. It received Washingtons
tacit support for these massacres, reflected in the decision by
US forces to temporarily suspend enforcement of the no-fly zones
in northern and southern Iraq. According to the think-tank Global
Security, As a direct result of the Gulf War, the external
department was reduced to less than half of its pre-1990 size,
while the internal department was enlarged to deal with increasing
anti-regime activities in Iraq.
US officials interviewed by the Post recognised that
the Mukhabarat was loathed by most Iraqis and renowned across
the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation,
rape, and torture.
US moves to reconstitute the Mukhabarat, announced in the aftermath
of the bombing of UN headquarters in Iraq, reflect concerns that
US occupation forces have insufficient manpower and experience
in Iraq to maintain order there. According to the Post,
Iraqis on the Governing Council found that US officials
lack the means to recruit effective [spy] networks and are overwhelmed
with information of dubious quality.
An unnamed senior US official told the Post
that it might require 500,000 US troops, perhaps far more,
to secure every potential target in the countryroughly
quadruple the current deployment of 132,000 troops and more than
the total number of regular US Army soldiers, which stands at
480,000. The official concluded: The key is to stay ahead
of this game. US officials say they intend to use the Mukhabarats
knowledge and experience to stay ahead of the game.
This is only one of several reported attempts by US occupation
forces to preserve, rebuild, or use the Mukhabarat. On March 25,
2003, at the height of fighting in south-central Iraq during the
US invasion, the Washington Times reported that US officials
were trying to contact Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad to arrange
for the preservation of the Mukhabarats extensive files.
After Baghdad fell to US forces, journalists with the conservative
British Daily Telegraph, working closely with US and British
officials, used suspicious documents they claimed to have found
in Mukhabarat headquarters to smear opponents of the Iraq warthe
Russian, German, and French intelligence services, as well as
a British Labour MP opposed to the war, George Galloway. They
were accused of either having collaborated with or received payoffs
from Hussein.
On July 21, the New York Times reported that the US
was attempting to resurrect the parts of the Mukhabarat that monitored
Iran, Turkey and Syria. It said that the Iraqi National Congress,
the party of convicted bank embezzler and Pentagon protégé
Ahmed Chalabi, had held talks with former Mukhabarat officials
and representatives of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld over
the last several weeks.
Given the cloak of secrecy that hangs over US attempts to resurrect
the Iraqi secret police, it is difficult to state precisely what
role these forces would play in the US occupation. However, the
explanation that the mainstream US media has tried to implythat
it is simply a matter of using Iraqi intelligence to watch and
identify potential terrorist activity in the region, in particular
foreign terrorists entering Iraqis certainly the least plausible.
For example, the Washington Post commented: The
Mukhabarat, whose name itself inspired fear in ordinary Iraqis,
was the foreign intelligence service... Within that service, officials
have reached out to agents who once were assigned to Syria and
Iran, Iraqi officials and former intelligence agents say. For
years, US relations with both Syria and Iran have remained tense...
L. Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator of Iraq, has openly
accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to enter Iraq.
The issue goes beyond the blatant misrepresentation of Husseins
internal security apparatus as a foreign intelligence service.
The title of the Posts articleUS recruiting
Husseins Spies; Occupation forces hope covert campaign will
help identify resistanceprovides a more honest insight
into Washingtons intentions. US occupation officials are
trying to use the Mukhabarats knowledge and experience to
help focus their repression of anti-US activity in Iraq.
The timing of the announcement of the Mukhabarats revival,
shortly after a massive bomb attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad
on August 19, further suggests that a new Iraqi secret service
would watch and target inhabitants of Iraq. The attack, which
has persuaded many international organisationscharities,
the Red Cross, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fundto
scale back their Iraq operations, appears to have been at least
in part the work of former Iraqi army personnel.
The Los Angeles Times wrote on August 21: The
bomb that devastated the United Nations complex in Baghdad was
a potent blend of Soviet-era artillery shells, mortar rounds,
and grenades packed around a powerful centerpiecea 500-pound
bomb meant to be dropped from an aircraft, the FBI said Wednesday...
The use of weaponry once part of the largely Soviet-equipped Iraqi
arsenal strongly suggests a connection to Hussein loyalists.
The attack also came on the heels of an August 14 warning in
the French news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur by the number-two
UN official in Iraq, Ghassan Salameh: Many influential Iraqis
who at first felt liberated from a hated regime assured me that
they were going to take up arms if coalition troops do not get
results.
Irrespective of who in fact carried out the bombings, concern
is mounting within US ruling circles over the morale of former
Iraqi soldiers. An August 24 Los Angeles Times article
implicitly criticised the US occupation authority for disbanding
the Iraqi army, writing that this decision may even have
provided recruits for the insurgency by alienating trained officers
and enlisted men. In this context, one cannot simply ascribe
the US decision to revive the Mukhabaratthe section of the
Iraqi intelligence apparatus originally charged with surveillance
of the armed forces and the repression of political dissentto
the desire to monitor terrorists flowing into Iraq.
However, to the extent that the rebuilt Iraqi secret police
is to be used to pursue Islamist resistance groups, this exposes
the lie that served to justify the invasion and occupation of
Iraq, according to which Saddam Hussein was an ally of these very
forces and was preparing to hand them weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, having provided the perfect target for such movementsa
US occupation force in Iraqthe US government is now turning
to a force that previously proved itself capable of watching and
repressing these groups: Saddam Husseins secret police.
This decision also explodes another lie to which US ruling
circles retreated after having failed to find any substance to
their allegations on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or links
to terrorism: that US forces were liberating Iraqis
from a brutal dictatorship and bringing democracy to Iraq. Faced
with daily demonstrations and attacks on coalition personnel,
as well as a wave of hostility throughout the Middle East, the
US government is ruling Iraq through a repressive neocolonial
military occupation that will now be assisted by the former regimes
secret police.
See Also:
The Iraq quagmire
[21 August 2003]
Washingtons war of terror
in Iraq
[18 June 2003]
Faced with growing resistance:
US prepares military repression in Iraq
[30 May 2003]
US recruits Ba'athist police
and functionaries for new Iraqi state
[24 April 2003]
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