Their partners in crime. posted by Richard Seymour

It is known to most pundits, but perhaps not so to the general public, that America's SIIC allies in Iraq are among the worst sectarians, killers and torturers in the country. Their Badr Corps has, aside from fighting alongside US troops in various operations, been an active death squad, terrorising Sunni communities, kidnapping, torturing, leaving drilled bodies in the streets and so on. Some people might even know that the CIA trained the Badr and various Kurdish militias to carry out "abductions, assassinations and other kinds of intimidation". Even less well understood than this, however, is the repressiveness of the Kurdish statelet in northern Iraq. There has been some very limited coverage of ethnic cleansing against Assyrians and Turkomen. There were headlines when a man who had criticised the KDP leader Massoud Barzani in a newspaper was kidnapped by Parastin, tortured until he signed a confession of 'defamation' and imprisoned for thirty years, although I don't know if anyone other than Amnesty picked up on the PUK's men firing on peaceful demonstrators. Now, a new report describes widespread torture carried out by the Kurdish security forces - oh, electrocution, beating with metal rods and cables, the usual. Well, why not? They learned it from the best and are, after all, partners to a much larger crime.

Labels: iraq, kurdish leadership, torture