Gunmen kidnap 25 Iraqi Red Crescent workers

AT least 25 Iraqi staff working in a major branch of the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad were kidnapped at gunpoint by hostage-takers dressed in police uniforms.

About 50 gunmen in 10 pickup trucks raided the Red Crescent office in the capital's upmarket Karada neighbourhood during broad daylight, snatching more than 20 men but leaving women behind, a local security source said.

Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), part of the same movement as the Red Crescent, confirmed the kidnapping at what she said was one of the organisation's biggest offices in Baghdad.

“There were at least 25 people kidnapped, because there were 25 Red Crescent workers and we fear that some other people who were visiting the office were taken along with them,” she said.

The group's Iraqi operations are manned by around 1000 salaried employees and another 200,000 volunteers. It is one of the few humanitarian aid groups still working in the war-battered country, said another ICRC official.

Brazen daytime kidnappings have become a prominent feature of daily life in Baghdad, engulfed in bitter sectarian warfare as lawlessness increasingly takes over the battered city.

Just three days earlier, gunmen wearing military uniforms snatched dozens of businessmen from a commercial street in central Baghdad in broad daylight, but later released about 29 hostages, all Shiites.

Last month, gunmen in Interior Ministry commando uniforms abducted scores of men from a Higher Education Ministry office building. The Education Ministry is predominantly Sunni Arab. About half of the victims were released.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/World/2006/12/17/2842068.html

Jun. 28, 2005

Sunni men in Baghdad targeted by attackers in police uniforms

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Days after Iraq's new Shiite-led government was announced on April 28, the bodies of Sunni Muslim men began turning up at the capital's central morgue after the men had been detained by people wearing Iraqi police uniforms.

Faik Baqr, the director and chief forensic investigator at the central Baghdad morgue, said the corpses first caught his attention because the men appeared to have been killed in 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.

Marks on the bodies were similar to the injuries found on prisoners who were rescued from secret Interior Ministry jails by representatives of the Iraqi ministry for human rights, according to family accounts and medical records.

Iraqi and American officials said the murders aren't being investigated systematically, but in dozens of interviews with families and Iraqi officials, and a review of medical records, a Knight Ridder reporter and two special correspondents found more than 30 examples of this type of killing in less than a week. They include 12 cases with specific dates, times, names and witnesses who said they might come forward if asked by law enforcement.

The Interior Ministry, which oversees the Iraqi police, denies any involvement in the killings. But eyewitnesses said that many of the dead were apprehended by large groups of men driving white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The men were wearing police commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9-millimeter Glock pistols and using sophisticated radios, the witnesses said.

U.S. officials, who have advisers in the Interior Ministry, have said that they're aware of the abductions and killings, but that they think the murders are the work of insurgents posing as police.

"The small numbers that we've investigated we've found to be either rumor or innuendo," said Steven Casteel, a senior U.S. adviser to the ministry and former Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief. "You can buy a police uniform in 20 different places in the market."

While he admitted that Interior Ministry troops have at times abused detainees, Casteel said he knew of only one instance in which they falsely detained an Iraqi and beat him. And in that case, the troops and their commander were convicted and jailed, he said.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a Shiite, had family members killed by Saddam Hussein's regime and has little patience for human rights violations, Casteel said.

16 February 2006,

Iraq 'death squad caught in act'

The probe comes after a US general revealed the arrest of 22 policemen allegedly on a mission to kill a Sunni.

"We have found one of the death squads. They are part of the police force," US Maj Gen Joseph Peterson said.

April 25, 2006

U.S. Military Warily Eyes Iraqi Forces

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. troops aren't just training Iraqi forces, they're also keeping an eye on them, watching for signs they could be moonlighting in the Shiite death squads that target Sunnis.

Bound and tortured bodies - both Sunni and Shiite - turn up every day in the capital, dumped in the streets. Sunni Arabs say their people are the victims of Shiite militiamen who have infiltrated government forces, especially paramilitary commando units of the Shiite-led Interior Ministry.

In Dora, one of the Baghdad's most violent neighborhoods with a mix of Sunnis and Shiites, U.S. troops working with Interior Ministry units say they can feel the Sunni mistrust.

"There's a fear that when (the Interior Ministry) comes in, it may not be on a legitimate mission, unless they're with us," said Lt. Col. Greg Butts, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Regimental Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division that oversees Dora.

and on and on.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military plans to speed up the training of Iraq's army by tripling its number of embedded trainers to about 9,000, while keeping a close eye on units' sectarian loyalties, a U.S. general said on Sunday.

Brigadier General Dana Pittard, whose Iraqi Assistance Group oversees training of Iraq's security forces, also said each of the nine police brigades would be taken off the streets over the next nine months for one month-long training.

A number of police units have been accused of colluding with, or being infiltrated by Shi'ite militia death squads targeting minority Sunnis. An explosion of sectarian violence since February has pushed the country toward all-out civil war.

"Over the next couple of months we will augment the transition teams to double or triple their size," Pittard said, noting that the teams training the Iraqi army were now 3,000-strong.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has recommended to President George W. Bush that he accelerate the training of Iraqi forces to allow the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by early 2008.

Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki agreed to this at a summit in Jordan last month. Maliki said then that Iraqi forces would be able to assume security control by next June. Pittard said he thought that was an achievable goal.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061217/ts_nm/iraq_military_training_dc

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.