New Evidence Confirms US Used Death Squads to Manufacture Civil War in Iraq

An Iraqi prisoner of war comforts his son at a center for
prisoners of war captured by the US army near Najaf
in March 2003. Photograph: Jean-Marc Bouju/AP

Today, almost 2 million Iraqi civilians have been killed, and at least 5 million displaced from their homes as a direct result of the most Orwellian mission ever created: "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Remember, there are indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, as well.

Now, there is clear evidence that, in the aftermath of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US government, military and CIA organized death squads of up to 12,000 men for the purpose of torturing and slaughtering Iraqi civilians, night after night, in order to defeat the Iraqi resistance. Believe it or not, Iraq had no history of sectarian clashes.

“Iraq is not a sectarian society. People are intermarried. Shi’is and Sunnis marry each other…Some from the militias and death squads want a civil war (but) there has never been a civil war in Iraq. The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke a civil war? The Americans will say that it’s al Qaida or the Sunni insurgents; it is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do; the occupation authorities.” --Robert Fisk, “Somebody is trying to provoke a Civil War in Iraq”

In Baghdad, up to a hundred bodies a day were dumped on the streets. Often they’ve been tortured with electric drills. Yet those doing the killing have little to do with al Qaeda or Sunni insurgents. The majority of the killings are carried out by US controlled Shia death squads, who have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and even entire government ministeries. The killers act with impunity and there’s little investigation into their activities.

“A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services

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The Myth of the Surge

“One of the enduring myths of the Iraq War is that George W. Bush’s “surge” of 30,000 US troops into Iraq in 2007, reduced the number of attacks on US troops and effectively defeated the Sunni-led insurgency in Baghdad. This is entirely false. The surge was largely a public relations campaign that was designed to conceal the activities of US-funded and trained Shia death squads that were killing or expelling millions of Sunnis from Baghdad in what turned out to be one the greatest incidents of ethnic cleansing in the modern era. While the MSM still refuses to acknowledge what was actually taking place on the ground even before Bush deployed his meager 22,000 US troops to Baghdad, a disturbing article in last week’s Guardian helps to connect the dots.