A country where violations are legal!

 

By Fatih Abdulsalam

 

Azzaman, January 2, 2007

 

Terrorist militias, operating under the nose of U.S. and Iraqi forces, are wreaking mayhem in Baghdad.

 

Their power, weapons and means of murder are growing in intensity; their murderous acts increasing and have turned Baghdad, home to nearly six million people, into a wild city.

 

They have become so emboldened that they mount attacks on government ministries and offices belonging to factions they do not like or administered by officials they see as a threat to their authority.

 

They kill, maim and kidnap with impunity and under official cover of the U.S. occupiers or their lackeys in the government.

 

Many Iraqis call them “black death squads” as they routinely clad in black clothes and instill fear and horror in the hearts of the people spotting them.

 

These black squads operate freely and sometimes they wear the official army or police uniforms during their operations.

 

They are courageous enough not to hide themselves as they mount their own checkpoints and carry out summary arrests and executions.

 

But the tragedy is that there is no force to check them. The government is turning a blind eye and even some senior officials have come out defending the militias.

 

The government is sitting on its safe hill, the U.S.-protected Green Zone, and beaming as Iraqis are being butchered on the streets of Baghdad and other major cities.

 

The inaction on the government part means one thing: it agrees with the murderers and in fact it is part of the killing.

 

The U.S. troops will certainly pay a heavy price for their reluctance to take the militias on. In the absence of measures to have them disbanded, the militias have now become a force that perhaps no army in the world has the capacity to disarm.

 

If the mighty U.S. troops, now numbering about 140,000, cannot placate one of Baghdad’s streets, or declare themselves victorious even in a low-level encounter with resistance groups, no one should imagine they will ever be capable of taming the militias.

 

The U.S. and the Iraqi government it created are to blame because through their inaction have sort of legalized these militias and turned them into a thorn not only their side but the side of the country as a whole.