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Iraqi police wage a war of vengeance

Peter Beaumont

Baghdad: Baghdad's Medical Forensic Institute — the mortuary — is a low, modern building reached via a narrow street. Most days it is filled with families of the dead. They come here for two reasons. One group, animated and noisy in grief, comes to collect its dead.

The other, however, returns day after day to poke through the new cargoes of corpses ferried in by ambulance, looking for a face or clothes they might recognise. They are the relatives and friends of the "disappeared", searching for their men. And when the disappeared are finally found — on the streets or in the city's massive rubbish dumps, or in the river — their bodies bear the all too telling signs of a savage beating, and then the inevitable bullet to the head.

In a new twist in the ongoing brutality of this country, Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is escalating dramatically.

Global outrage

Last June an investigation by the London-based Observer newspaper reported that Iraqi police commandos were running secret torture units, and last week there was international outrage when an Iraqi government bunker was found being used as a makeshift prison.

American forces found 173 half-starved prisoners being held in dreadful conditions in an Iraqi government bunker.

According to human rights organisations in Baghdad, "disappearances" in recent months have reached epidemic proportions. As the disappearances have escalated, whatever faith Sunnis had in Iraq's judicial process has collapsed, falling back instead on the tribal code permitting revenge killings in retaliation. And so the violence in Iraq continues. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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