Iraq: the killer in the Iraqi government

The Minister of Civil War
Bayan Jabr, Paul Bremer, and the rise of the Iraqi death squads
An excerpt of an article from Harper's Magazine, August 2006.
By Ken Silverstein

In May 2005, Shiite militia groups in Iraq began depositing corpses into the streets and garbage dumps of Baghdad. The victims, overwhelmingly Sunni, were typically found blindfolded and handcuffed, their corpses showing signs of torture—broken skulls, burn marks, gouged-out eyeballs, electric drill holes; by that October, the death toll attributed to such groups had grown to more than 500. In November, American troops discovered more than 160 beaten, whipped, and starved prisoners—again, mostly Sunni—at a secret detention center run by the country's Interior Ministry. Since then, Shiite militias have become so integrated into the Iraqi government's security apparatus and their work so organized, systematic, and targeted that they are commonly referred to in Iraq (and in the American media) by their proper name: death squads. The death squads, which have expanded their area of operations from the capital across much of the country, are now believed to be responsible for more civilian deaths than the Sunni and foreign insurgents who are the United States' ostensible enemies there. By any reasonable measure, Iraq is in a state of civil war, and some of its most ruthless and lawless combatants are members of the government's own security units.

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. The Interior Ministry, which is something like a combined FBI and Department of Homeland Security, controls billions of dollars and more than 100,000 men in police and paramilitary units. Jabr was a former high-ranking member of the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade, the military arm of the fundamentalist Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) that is now the dominant political force in the country. After taking over the Interior Ministry, he quickly purged it of Sunnis, and members of the Badr Brigade were widely incorporated into the ministry's police and paramilitary units.

Jabr—who in May of this year was named finance minister in a new government headed by Nuri al-Maliki—has disavowed any personal or institutional responsibility for violence committed by the death squads. He has now acknowledged that some groups operated within the Interior Ministry while he headed it, but he insists that they were few in number; he blames much of the sectarian killing on terrorists “using the clothes of the police or the military.” At a press conference last November that followed the discovery of the torture chamber in an Interior Ministry building, Jabr said, “You can be proud of our forces. [They] respect human rights.” (For this article, Jabr did not respond to requests for comment sent to his press office in Iraq.)

Jabr wears glasses and a neatly trimmed beard that has rapidly turned white over the past few years. He is always immaculately groomed and dressed, and although a devout Shiite—an American who worked with Jabr recalled that he would halt meetings for prayer—he favors expensive Western-style suits rather than the robes worn by many of his colleagues. Jabr's tribe was persecuted harshly by Saddam Hussein's regime, and so he (along with thousands of other Shiites) fled to Iran, where he became a member of SCIRI, founded in Tehran in 1982 with the goal of toppling Hussein's government. The council was heavily supported by the Iranian government, but it also had mostly cordial ties with the the U.S. government and ultimately became part of the Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella opposition alliance created by Washington after the Gulf War and headed by Ahmed Chalabi. During the 1990s, Jabr ran SCIRI's local office in Syria, where he coordinated relations with other anti-Saddam exile groups. In May 2000, when SCIRI fighters launched a rocket attack on Hussein's presidential palace in Baghdad, it was Jabr who served as spokesman. Along with Chalabi, Jabr was among a group of sixty-five exiles named to the Iraqi Opposition Coordinating Committee that was founded in London in December of 2002, just three months before the American invasion.

Iraqi Sunnis accuse Jabr of sponsoring abuses committed by Shiite militias linked to his Interior Ministry. General Muntazar al-Samarrai, a former commander of special forces at the Interior Ministry, publicly stated that Jabr had condoned the torture of detainees. In late 2005, Falah al-Naqib, who preceded Jabr as head of Interior, told the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, that sixteen Sunni men whom Jabr ordered to be arrested were later executed, according to an account in The New Yorker. American officials began pushing for Jabr's ouster from the Interior Ministry in 2006, suggesting that he was too close to Shiite militias and had turned a blind eye to death-squad activities—or, in the most generous interpretation, had taken insufficient steps to control them. Either way, Jabr is thought to have greatly contributed to the political violence in Iraq. “He allowed his ministry to become a preserve of the Shia militias,” said Ken Katzman, a senior analyst on Iraq at the Congressional Research Service. “It all flows from there.”

Prior to taking over at Interior, Jabr served as the minister of housing and construction under the Coalition Provisional Authority that was installed by the Bush Administration following the March 2003 invasion, a position he held until mid-2004. Interviews and internal documents show that a number of senior CPA officials, as well as the local CIA station, became convinced that Jabr was unusually corrupt and thuggish, even by the dismal standards of postwar Iraq. In April 2004, the CPA officials took their concerns to Paul Bremer, head of the CPA and a man sometimes referred to as Iraq's “proconsul,” so great was his authority over the country, and pushed for Jabr's dismissal before the CPA turned over power to a transitional government two months later.

Two of those pushing hardest for Jabr's removal were Michael Karem, Bremer's special adviser for housing and reconstruction, and Rick Clay, one of Karem's top aides. They accused Jabr and several of his deputies of demanding kickbacks, and of complicity in the theft of huge amounts of equipment belonging to the Housing Ministry. A memo Karem sent to Bremer on April 12, 2004, referred to “increasing allegations of corruption at the Ministry,” complained that Jabr had been “less than forthright about his practices,” and detailed what it called his “more egregious management practices,” including his engineering of “systematic work stoppages of time sensitive projects which you had designated a priority.”

The CPA officials were also alarmed by Jabr's ties to the Badr Brigade and his sectarian tendencies. The Iraqi minister, Karem wrote in the memo, “has shown an increasingly authoritarian style of leadership that is affecting work at all levels of the ministry and created a climate of fear and retribution among employees.” Karem reported a “growing pattern of religious discrimination at the Ministry,” particularly in recruiting Shiites for the “Facilities Protection Service,” a police force created by Bremer that later was suspected of playing a major role in political murders.

A few days after sending the memo, Karem and Clay were called to a meeting with Vice Admiral Scott Redd, the CPA's deputy administrator, and several other U.S. officials. “We were thrilled at the end of the meeting,” Karem recalled. “Everybody was shaking their head about the corruption. They said that they were going to get rid of the minister.” Days later, he and Clay were asked to return to Redd's office. They walked in expecting to hear that Jabr had been fired. Instead they were told that their services with the CPA were as of that moment terminated; the minister would stay on. “We were told that we had lost effectiveness because we couldn't work with the minister,” Karem recalled. “We were in shock.”

Shiites are the biggest single bloc in Iraq and were brutally repressed during Saddam's rule, so their rise to political dominance is in many ways a natural outgrowth of the war. But the story of Jabr's role in postwar Iraq reveals how American blindness, incompetence, and cynicism allowed religious sectarianism to thrive after the downfall of Saddam. Indeed, Jabr appears to be merely the most ruthless of a class of Shiite leaders who have sought to engineer Shiite dominance behind the scenes, at times with direct U.S. sponsorship. Two other cabinet members who served with Jabr—former Health Minister Abdul Mutalib Mohammed Ali and former Transportation Minister Salaam al-Maliki—are both closely linked to Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose own militia group, the Imam Mahdi Army, is also accused of sectarian killings and has periodically fought U.S. troops in Iraq. (The new cabinet has similarly problematic figures: besides Jabr as finance minister, it features as education minister a man named Khudayr al-Khuzai, who has been a major figure within the Dawa Party, founded in the late 1950s to promote an Islamic state in Iraq.) Sectarian tensions have been compounded by American hostility toward the secular political forces, as well as by the Bush Administration's insistence that the government allot political power on the basis of religious and ethnic head counts. This is precisely the formula that proved so disastrous in Lebanon, a country that for nearly two decades was mired in a bloody civil war—a path that Iraq appears headed along today.