Posted on 09/20/2003 12:16:01 PM PDT by Pikamax
Shia militia arrest top Ba'athist
Rory McCarthy in Najaf Saturday September 20, 2003 The Guardian
They came after midnight for Karim Ghaith. Outside his two-storey sandstone house in the holy city of Najaf, they shouted out his name, then opened fire. After a gun battle lasting most of the night, Mr Ghaith, a high-ranking member of the former Ba'ath party, was held and taken for questioning on his suspected involvement in attacks on US troops.
It looked like another of dozens of raids since the war to capture senior Ba'athists. But the men who detained him early this month were not American soldiers or Iraqi police. Witnesses say they were the Badr Brigade, armed wing of Iraq's biggest Shia Muslim party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri).
The operation, denied by Sciri, is evidence of the frustration of Shia groups and the growing willingness to tackle the perceived security threat themselves.
Since Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, the head of Sciri, was killed last month, Shias have become increasingly angry at the pervading lawlessness. They insist that their militias must fill the security vacuum. They risk a confrontation withUS forces, whose commanders insist there is no role for militias and have ordered the militias to disarm or face arrest.
So far groups like the Badr Brigade and the Security Committee, set up by another Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, have avoided a confrontation with US troops, but resentment is simmering. "The Ba'athists must be punished because they are criminals who oppressed the Iraqi people," said Syed Abid Zaid al-Jabari, a Sciri official in Najaf.
"I think if the Iraqis are given a clearer role to participate in maintaining security and courts are set up, then people will start coming to us with the names of these people who are still in our city."
He said so far Badr had not arrested any Ba'athists in Najaf. But Abdul Amir Hassan Hussein, the head of Najaf's human rights association, said: "It was Badr gunmen who arrested [Mr Ghaith]. They held him and they questioned him, and then they handed him over to be held in prison. We think it is a good step by the Badr, because since they started these kinds of operations there has been much more security in Najaf. Many of the Ba'athists have now left the city."
Abu Mohammad and his son Mustafa, 13, living next door to Mr Ghaith, said the Badr men had ordered him to surrender. Mustafa said: "The Badr Brigade came to the door and kept asking if Ghaith was hiding here. We told them he wasn't. The gunmen said they were from the Badr Brigade."
During the gun battle Mr Ghaith hid inside a pile of tyres in their yard. At least two Badr gunmen were killed. Eventually, just after dawn, they captured him. His family fled and a mob ransacked their house, smashing windows and stripping it bare, removing even the floor tiles.
At the nearby police station officers insisted they had no part in the raid, but appeared ready to grant the militia a free hand. "The Badr Brigade doesn't interfere in our job and they asked us not to interfere in their job," Captain Ishar al-Ardawi said. Badr officials in Najaf insist their men are no longer armed, though several, dressed all in black and sometimes wearing Badr armbands, are frequently seen in the city.
"We were not involved in this arrest, we have no weapons now. But Karim Ghaith is a criminal and everybody knows that," said Abdul Karim Rimimi, a brigade leader.
Mr Rimimi, who has met US marine officers in Najaf several times, said the Americans wanted his man to give up their guns and hand back their Kalashnikov permits. "The security is still so weak," he said. "If they left it up to us it would be much better."
US officials say they are considering plans to withdraw from some cities and leave security in the hands of trained Iraqi troops. But they mean the newly retrained Iraqi police or the newly formed paramilitary Civil Defence Battalions.
"We believe that there is not a role in the new Iraq for organised militias," the US civilian administrator, Paul Bremer, said this month.
American and British officials are particularly wary of Badr, which they say is still armed and funded by the Iranian government. For 20 years Sciri and the Badr Brigade were exiled in Iran, where Badr fought on the side of Tehran in the war of the 1980s.
Political leaders of the Shia movement are worried that security problems are likely to make people even more disillusioned with the US military occupation. Many want the Iraqis to have more responsibility now for their political future. "We feel very frustrated," said Adil Abdul Mehdi, 61, head of Sciri's political bureau. "We understand the Americans, but they have to understand us. They cannot dictate things to us."
He said few expected a clash between the Shia majority and the Sunni minority, but there was a danger of Shias turning against the Americans, as many Sunni communities north and west of Baghdad had done.
"It will start with very small groups: actions and reactions. But if this starts, how it will finish nobody knows," he said. "If people cannot find a security solution even in the southern regions we will see an escalation of the situation."
In this, he is absolutely wrong. Such militias are simply people acting in their unalienable role of protectors of themselves, their families, and their communities.
As our Founders said, a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. They will not be well-regulated if they are disarmed.
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