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Some Iraqis are Sunni or Shia Muslim of varying degrees of practice and some Iraqis are Christians who fled way back when Saddam Hussein first took power. Some families are mixed, like the Jarrars: where one person is Sunni, one is Shia, one is devout, one is not. They might be business owners, usually very well educated, and speak two or three languages. The Jarrar family reminds me of some of the families that I might have talked to in the Detroit area.
Today, I was saddened to hear about the trials and tribulations of the Jarrar family that occurred back in July. Basically, it seems Khalid was on his way to pay his school tuition, when through a series of unfortunate events, he was snatched up by the interior ministry for reading his own brother's and mother's blogs while killing time at the university internet cafe.
Here are a few excerpts from Khalid's blog entry describing that day:
The whole thing started when I went to the university to pay my tuition fees, the thing is that the engineering campus is separated from the rest of the university with few kilometers, but for such administrative issues, students should go to the headquarter, and this is what I did. I entered the main campus and went to the financial department to pay money. I started the paperwork process, and then reached to a point where we needed the director’s signature to finish the paperwork, but she was in a meeting. So, the employee asked me to go and waste an hour inside the campus till the meeting is over, and I did. ... Of course, what is better than the internet to kill time?After doing some surfing and reading the blogs of his mother and his brother, Khalid attempted to return to the tuition office, but instead was quickly detained by security. Shortly thereafter, Khalid describes how he was searched, interrogated, humiliated, handcuffed, had a bag thrown over his head, and then tossed into a van.
Given the well-known history of the Iraqi government's atrocious record of human rights abuses under Saddam Hussein, Khalid was definitely justified to be frightened for his life. It seems little has changed in that regard.
I was so lucky that I was taken to the Mokhabarat directly. Usually you have to go through a police station or a center of the national guards to get there, where the standard procedure of torturing is hanging people upside down and beating them with cables for hours, pinching their bodies with electrical drills, burning them with hot water, ripping out their finger nails, breaking bones, using acids on the wounds after whipping them, the dead bodies that are found in the dumpsters in Baghdad even had their eyes taken out of them, and a lot of these things happened with people that I know, or with people that were detained with the people that were with me in this jail, before they were brought here, and the list of torturing techniques is long, and you don’t want to hear them or know about them if you want to sleep at night.Khalid describes his days in the prison in detail. He tells some of the stories of other prisoners in his cell. Since I first had the opportunity to read Khalid's blog a year ago, I have noticed several things. Khalid's fluency in English has improved a great deal. The tone of his blog has changed from a typical teenager's style of writing in text message slang with fairly light topics to a more articulate, but darker disdain for the U.S. occupation of his homeland. It's sad, but not entirely unexpected to me, to see the devolution of his spirit.
There are several things contributing to the mess in Iraq. Despite the Bush Administration's constant "stay the course" and "we're making progress" chants, things are not getting better for the people of Iraq in real, everyday ways. In fact, in many ways, the situation is deteriorating. You may have noticed that no one from Bushworld has uttered the familiar phrase "we are winning hearts and minds" in the last year. Even Dubya's evangelical ability to deny reality doesn't allow him to try and put that one slogan past the U.S. public any longer.
It's difficult to win hearts and minds when the lack of public security and contractor fraud has left Baghdad without basic services, like reliable electricity. It's hard to win hearts and minds when the U.S. military often goes on blind insurgent hunts and ends up killing thousands of innocent bystanders. Much of the blindness in intelligence in Iraq is due to historic political animosity between Sunni and Shia.
There is increasing evidence that the Iraqi police forces, now under Shi’ite control, are carrying out systematic revenge killings against Sunnis in Baghdad. The bodies now showing up at the morgue have obvious signs of handcuffing and blindfolding and evidence of being tortured before death. U.S. sources indicate that the suspicious killings have reached the rate of almost 700 per month. The police are supervised by the Shi’ite-run Ministry of Interior, which claims that the killings are being carried out by insurgents wearing stolen police uniforms. But American intelligence sources disagree, noting that many of the killers appear to be actual policemen carrying the expensive standard-issue Glock automatics and driving official Toyota Land Cruisers.Unfortunately for Khalid, who happens to be a Sunni Muslim, the new ruling Shia officials can be quite revengeful. Despite the fact that his mother is Shia and his best friend is Kurdish, there is a high level of ethnic killing in Iraq. I fear that ten years from now -- when the body count is finally tallied in Iraq -- it will likely eclipse the racially-motivated lynchings of the 20th century in the Southern United States perpetrated against the blacks by the whites.
-- Philip Giraldi (ex-CIA) in American Conservative Magazine
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