Iraqi Driller Killers

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‘Driller Killers’ Spread A New Horror

Iraq - There was no sign of danger as Mohammed Sammarai arrived at his brother Mustafa’s home for lunch last week, no hint that this would be their last meal together.

First two police vehicles pulled up outside their house in the Hay al-Jihad district of Baghdad’s sprawling southern suburbs. Then came a convoy of up to 10 black BMWs and Opels — the favoured cars of the Shi’ite militias. Suddenly masked men brandishing Kalashnikov automatic rifles were storming inside.

Ahmad was arrested. Mustafa protested. Mohammed fled upstairs. There was no escape, however, as Ahmad recalled.

“One of the men grabbed Mustafa’s one-year-old son and put him between his legs and threatened to kill him unless Mohammed came downstairs,” he said.

“Another man grabbed the boy’s mother and placed a machinegun on her chest and threatened to shoot her.” Then he banged her head against a chair, loudly cursing her.

Realising that trying to run away was futile, Mohammed, 30, came downstairs. He begged the intruders to leave 32-year-old Mustafa and his family alone but was arrested for his pains.

“Who are you?” the family demanded to know.

“We are from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,” one of the men is said to have shouted.

They beat the brothers, dragged them and Ahmad, 40, outside and thrust each man into the boot of a different car, firing their Kalashnikovs into the air to deter anyone tempted to intervene.

The convoy stopped and started and it seemed to Ahmad that several others had been detained by the time the cars finally halted and the boots were opened.

To their horror, the captives found themselves in Sadr City, a Shi’ite stronghold in Baghdad. “A crowd gathered to watch what was going on,” Ahmad said.

“The armed men told them we were terrorists and the crowd began to curse us.”

The Sunni brothers and their friend were bundled back into the car boots and driven off again. The next person they saw was an imam, but he was not there to save them.

“I saw an imam peer into the boot with a policeman,” Ahmad said. According to his account, the imam condemned Mustafa and Mohammed with the chilling words: “Kill any identified suspect immediately.”

Ahmad was freed on the imam’s orders, apparently because he had merely been a guest of the brothers and had not been suitably identified.

“I walked home barefoot in a terrible state,” he said. “I could not call any official to report this. How could I when they were involved?” Two days later he found his friends’ bodies in the city’s Teb al-Adli mortuary. Mustafa’s right eye had been gouged out and his right leg broken. Other parts of his body appeared to have been penetrated by an electric drill, an increasingly common tool of torture in Iraq.

Mohammed’s body bore similar injuries. Both men had been shot in the head.

Their widows have now moved in with relatives and Mustafa’s empty home has already been vandalised.

John Pace, the outgoing head of the UN human rights office in Baghdad, said the vast majority of the bodies arriving at the mortuary showed signs of summary execution and many had their hands tied behind their backs. “Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills,” said Pace, a Maltese official.

He claimed that militias were integrated with the police and were wearing police uniforms. One in particular was singled out: the Badr organisation that used to be the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the political party mentioned by one of the men in the Sammarais’ home.

“The Badr brigade are in the police and are mainly the ones doing the killing,” Pace was quoted as saying. “They’re the most notorious.”

Thousands of Shi’ites have been killed by Sunni insurgents in the past two years, including 19 labourers murdered last Friday when gunmen ran amok in the small town of Nahrawan, near Baghdad.

According to Pace, the cases of torture and extrajudicial executions now exceed those under Saddam’s rule.

“Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less okay,” he said. “Now you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone.”