THE SALVADOR OPTION U.S. Counterinsurgency Tactics in the Cold War and the War on Terror Phil Neff 14 December 2005
Author s note, March 2011: This article was written in late 2005 as part of my undergraduate studies in human rights at the University of Washington, for a class titled ‘Human Rights in Latin America,’ taught by Professor Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, shortly after my first experience travelling in Guatemala and my first encounters with Guatemalan human rights and social movement activists. Though the article does not go beyond analysis of news and other secondary sources, I believe that the questions it raises continue to have relevance as the U.S. continues to implement military counterinsurgency policies and training throughout the globe. Investigation by the mainstream press of the existence of government death squads in Iraq was overshadowed in early 2006 by the intensification of sectarian conflict following the bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra.
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The Salvador Option On January 8, 2005, a Newsweek “web exclusive” by Michael Hirsh and John Barry reported that the Pentagon was “intensively debating” an Iraq counterinsurgency strategy called “the Salvador option”.1 The article’s description of this strategy was deeply disturbing to many people familiar with the 12-year long civil war in El Salvador, in which at least 75,000 civilians were killed.2 According to Newsweek, the Salvador option “dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported ‘nationalist’ forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.” In Iraq, the article continues, the Salvador option “would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called ‘snatch’ operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation.”3 With reports of disappearance, torture, and extrajudicial killings tied to Iraqi government and government-supported forces now surfacing daily, it is clear that several urgent questions must be investigated: What was the United States’ counterinsurgency strategy in El Salvador, was it successful, and what were its implications for human rights? Are aspects of this strategy being replicated in Iraq today, and if so, what are the implications for the future of Iraq? Although many aspects of these questions remain shrouded in official secrecy and the fog of war, a very frightening picture emerges from the shadows. In El Salvador, the death squads were integrated seamlessly with and directed by the military, which received U.S. funding and support despite widely publicized, egregious abuses of human rights. Civilian populations were identified as legitimate, even necessary, targets of the counterinsurgency. Throughout the civil war, successive U.S. administrations had the resources to be fully aware of these abuses and of the military-death squad linkages, yet actively obscured the truth through cover-ups and smear campaigns. In the ideologically charged atmosphere of the Cold War, the “Salvador option” was a ruthless expression of U.S. determination to defeat Communism no matter the cost.
1 Michael Hirsh and John Barry, “The Salvador Option,” Newsweek, 8 January 2005, updated 14 January 2005, <http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/> (10 December 2005). 2 PBS, “Enemies of War,” 2001, <http://www.pbs.org/itvs/enemiesofwar/index.html> (10 December 2005). 3 Hirsch and Barry, “The Salvador Option.”
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EL SALVADOR The Birth of the Death Squads U.S. involvement in counterinsurgency efforts in El Salvador actually began long before the civil war began in earnest in the early 1980s. In the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy Administration created the Alliance for Progress to promote reform and counter-insurgency throughout Latin America. In El Salvador, however, reform was deemphasized because of strong elite resistance.4 Instead, the U.S. concentrated on the development of an internal security apparatus designed to suppress dissent and quell any attempts to promote social change. This took place under the ideological guidance of the national security doctrine, which identified internal enemies as the greatest threat to regimes allied with the U.S. in the Cold War struggle against Communism. In 1967, Byron Engle, a former CIA official and director of the Agency for International Development (AID) Public Safety Program, wrote that the U.S. was “developing within the civil security forces…an investigative capability for detecting criminal and/or subversive individuals and organizations and neutralizing their activities”.5 In the early 1960s a new organization formed in El Salvador which was central to this strategy of counterinsurgency. The Democratic Nationalist Organization, ORDEN— Spanish for “order”—was created by General José Medrano, a senior officer of the National Guard with close connections to the CIA. He was reportedly on the CIA payroll and received extensive training from the U.S. In a 1984 interview with reporter Allan Nairn, Medrano said that “the Green Berets helped him plan the structure and ideology of ORDEN”.6 ORDEN was a rural paramilitary and intelligence organization numbering 80,000 strong that was characterized by the military government as a “civic organization” designed to raise peasant support for its National Conciliation party (PCN). In reality, ORDEN’s mission is more accurately described by Medrano himself: “In this revolutionary war, the enemy comes from our people. …They don’t have the rights of Geneva. They are traitors to the country. What can the troops do? When they find them, they kill them.”7 ORDEN forces indiscriminately and brutally tortured and murdered suspected Communist sympathizers and indigenous leaders organizing for self-help8, intimidated voters9, and instituted a generalized reign of terror in the countryside.
Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 4. Quoted in Allan Nairn, “Behind the Death Squads,” The Progressive, May 1984, 21. 6 Nairn, 23. 7 Quoted in Nairn, 23. 8 Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (New York: Times Books, 1984), 84. 9 Bonner, 59. 4 5
-4Though U.S. officials attempted to portray ORDEN as independent of the military and government, U.S. State Department officers investigating the human rights situation in El Salvador were told by the country’s vice-president that “[ORDEN] was headquartered in an office of the presidency,” and “that its head was a senior military officer and that in each province a military officer was commander of the ORDEN forces.”10 ORDEN was intricately connected with the Salvadoran National Security Agency (ANSESAL), which was formed at the same time as ORDEN, also with CIA assistance.11 Allan Nairn described ANSESAL as “the elite presidential intelligence service that gathered files on Salvadoran dissidents and, in the words of one U.S. official, relied on Death Squads as ‘the operative arm of intelligence gathering’”.12 According to Raul Castro, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador from 1964 to 1968, the notorious death squad Mano Blanco “was an offshoot of ORDEN, and the same people in ORDEN were to some extent the same people in the Mano Blanco. Even today, some of the same people are in the Death Squads. That was the origin.”13 ORDEN and ANSESAL were officially disbanded after the coup in 1979, condemned by the junta for their human rights abuses. Yet while officially disavowed, ORDEN continued to operate with impunity. In Febrary 1980 ORDEN founder General Medrano and Roberto d’Aubuisson, a former ANSESAL officer,14 formed the Nationalist Democratic Front, a far-right organization which was “ORDEN under a new name.” The 80,000 ORDEN members were “incorporated into the government’s civil defense forces.” 15 ANSESAL documents, reportedly containing material prepared by the CIA, fell directly into d’Aubuisson’s hands, and he used them in a series of televised speeches in which he denounced supposed “terrorists” by name, many of whom were subsequently assassinated.16 The security forces intelligence systems continued to operate as the “nerve center of Death Squad operations.”17 In 1984, Amnesty International concluded that the death squads “were made up of regular police and military personnel…under the orders of superior officers.”18 This was illustrated in 1983, when Vice-President George Bush Sr. visited El Salvador and denounced “death squad terrorists.” According to Americas Watch, death squad murders decreased notably following this statement, “[illustrating] that military officers directed and controlled death squad killings, a charge that the administration had long denied, and that U.S. pressure could be effective when applied.” Yet the Reagan administration squandered this opportunity, with Regan himself later Bonner, 60 Nairn, 21. 12 Nairn, 20. 13 Quoted in Nairn, 23. 14 Nairn, 28. D’Aubuisson was also a founder of the influential right-wing political party ARENA. 15 Bonner, 61. 16 Nairn, 28. 17 Nairn, 24. 18 Amnesty International, El Salvador: ‘Death Squads’—A Government Strategy, AI Index: AMR 29/21/88 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1988), 1. 10 11
-5claiming that death squad murders were committed by the guerrillas in order to discredit the Salvadoran right.19
Military Counterinsurgency Tactics and State Terror The death squads were by no means the only, or even the most ruthless, abusers of human rights in the El Salvador counterinsurgency campaign. Army counterinsurgency battalions created by the United States deliberately targeted civilians as part of a strategy designed to destroy popular support for the guerrillas, and also targeted non-violent advocates for peace and social change. During the 1980s the size of the El Salvador Armed Forces increased dramatically, as described by a 1995 National Defense Research Institute study: “As the primary supplier of equipment and training, the United States coordinated a nearly fourfold expansion in personnel and a fivefold increase in maneuver battalions”.20 The U.S. devoted massive resources to this endeavor. In the first year of the Reagan administration, U.S. military aid to El Salvador was increased to $82 million—five times the amount the country had received in the entire period from 1936 to 1979,21 with military aid totaling more than $1 billion by the end of the 1980s. 22 The goals of this massive military aid campaign were, ostensibly, twofold: “Developing effective counterinsurgent military forces” which could effectively combat the guerrillas while also winning the support of the population; and “Developing professional military establishments” which respect human rights and civilian authority.23 However, U.S. training was continually associated with massive abuses of human rights and the laws of war. In 1981 the U.S. sent 55 Special Forces advisers to El Salvador to create a counterinsurgency force, “permeating the ESAF [El Salvador Armed Forces] with soldiers and units indoctrinated with U.S. COIN [counterinsurgency] strategy” by “[creating] whole units from scratch. The United States created five of these rapid-reaction units; the first was the infamous Atlacatl Battalion.” 24 The Atlacatl Battalion was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa Barrios, who had been extensively trained by the U.S.25 In the book Massacre at El Mozote, which details the battalion’s most notorious massacre, Mark Danner describes the Atlacatl Battalion under Monterrosa: From the beginning, Monterrosa worked to give his new force a mística—a mystique. “They shot animals ands smeared the blood all over their faces, they slit open the Americas Watch, 124. Michael Childress, “The Effectiveness of U.S. Training Efforts in Internal Defense and Development: The Cases of El Salvador and Honduras,” National Defense Research Institute (Santa Monica: RAND, 1995), 24. 21 Bonner, 11-12. 22 Childress, 21. 23 Childress, 18-19. 24 Childress, 25. 25 Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 50. 19 20
-6animals’ bellies and drank the blood,” a lieutenant in another unit told me. “They were a hell of a raunchy unit. They had no discipline of fire, none at all.”26 This behavior is consistent with forms of “atrocity training” described by a team of Berkeley psychologists in their study of “violence workers” in authoritarian Brazil and Greece, in which shared experiences of brutality increase the allegiance of soldiers to their unit and commanders and inure them to the commission of torture, murder, and other atrocities.27 While the Atlacatl Battalion was clearly trained in brutality, the success of its U.S. training is less evident. Clearly, the human rights training emphasized in official descriptions of U.S. training was not absorbed, and the goal of winning popular support for the government is not reflected in Atlacatl’s long history of massacres and other atrocities. Rather, its conduct represented the continuation of the military’s plan to “cut off supplies to the revolutionary armed forces, subject them to constant attrition, and attack the civilian population that made up the FMLN’s [Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the unified guerrilla forces] social base of support” (emphasis added).28 Mark Danner relates, “all civilians in certain zones were reduced to the status of masas, guerrilla supporters, and thus became legitimate targets” in the eyes of the military. 29 This mindset was vividly illustrated in December 1981, when almost 1000 peasants in the area of the town of El Mozote were slaughtered by the Atlacatl Battalion.30 Highlighting the excesses of the military strategy, Mark Danner reveals that the town of El Mozote was known to resist supporting the guerrillas, as its population was made up largely of evangelical Protestants, who were staunchly anti-Communist.31 Clearly, the massacre at El Mozote served no tactical purpose beyond instilling terror in the rural population. The massacre was first reported in the U.S. on January 26, 1982, by Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post, and soon after by Raymond Bonner of the New York Times. Both reporters had been taken to El Mozote by members of the FMLN, and had witnessed evidence of the destruction. 32 The U.S. embassy conducted a cursory investigation of the allegations, but its representatives did not enter the ruined town because the Salvadoran army refused to accompany them. 33 Nevertheless, the Quoted in Danner, 50. Martha Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo, Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 2002). 28 Mario Lungo Uclés, El Salvador in the Eighties: Counterinsurgency and Revolution, trans. Amelia F. Shogan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 69. 29 Danner, 42. 30 Bonner, 112-113. 31 Danner, 19. 32 Danner, 102. 33 Danner, 109. 26 27
-7investigation concluded that “no evidence could be found to confirm that Government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone”.34 The reports of the massacre came just as Reagan administration was required, by a Congressionallymandated condition for military aid, to certify that the government of El Salvador was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.” 35 Worried that the reports would jeopardize continued aid, the administration went on the attack, disputing the facts of the case and characterizing it as guerrilla propaganda.36 In the end, the Democrats in Congress were afraid that they would be blamed if a reduction in aid led to an FMLN victory, and military aid was increased. Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa of the Atlacatl Battalion was subsequently promoted.37 While there was never again a massacre as brutal as El Mozote, the army and security forces of El Salvador continued to engage in abuses of human rights throughout the conflict. After 1984, Americas Watch reported, there were no known cases “in which the military killed more than a score of civilians in a ground sweep” of the kind which characterized the counterinsurgency from 1980 to 1983.38 There were, however, dozens of instances of smaller-scale killings of civilians in the later half of the decade,39 while indiscriminate aerial attacks became the primary method of attacking civilians, with the same goal of “[driving] masas [guerrilla sympathizers], or those designated that way, from large sections of the country”.40 And while numbers of death squad killings fell during the mid-80s, Amnesty International reported that they were again on the rise by 1987. 41 As if to drive the point home, the Atlacatl Battalion carried out the death squad-style killings of six Jesuit priests, a cook, and a fifteen year old girl at the University of Central America in 1989. This blatant display of continued repression “said to the world, and especially to the Americans in Congress, that after the billions and billions of dollars and all the fine words about ‘training’ and ‘reform,’ at bottom the Salvadoran Army remained what it had been at El Mozote.”42
Quoted in Danner, 111. Quoted in Danner, 102. 36 Danner, 127. 37 Danner, 142. 38 Americas Watch, 47-50. 39 Americas Watch, 59-62 40 Americas Watch, 54. 41 Amnesty International, 44. 42 Danner, 156. 34 35
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Impelled by polarizing Cold War ideology, the U.S. was determined to defeat the insurgency in El Salvador at all costs. In pursuit of this counterinsurgency goal, U.S. advisers and military aid contributed to the formation of the death squads operated by the El Salvador security forces, and created military counterinsurgency battalions which made civilians the target of state violence. The U.S. covered up military control of the death squads and systematically obscured attempts to reveal the human rights abuses committed by the El Salvador Armed Forces. As Americas Watch concluded, “the United States has treated human rights and the rule of law as secondary objectives, in service of its own strategic goals”.43 After describing the tactics used by the U.S. in El Salvador, the Newsweek article about the “Salvador option” states, “Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success”.44 In fact, the civil war in El Salvador ended in 1992 not with the defeat of the insurgency, but with a negotiated peace settlement. By 1989 the war had “entered into a state of ‘dynamic equilibrium’ in which the two adversaries constantly tried out new initiatives but in which neither could triumph.”45 A negotiated settlement had first been suggested in 1981 by the FMLN, but was “adamantly opposed”46 by the U.S. The U.S.’s unconditional support for El Salvador’s repressive military government does not deserve credit for the country’s transition to democracy. If anything, U.S. aid was successful only in prolonging and intensifying the civil war in El Salvador.
Americas Watch, 137. Hirsch and Barry, “The Salvador Option.” 45 Arthur Schmidt, Introduction to Mario Lungo Uclés, El Salvador in the Eighties, 21. 46 Americas Watch, 10. 43 44
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IRAQ Days after Newsweek’s first report, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld brought up the subject of the “so-called Salvador option” at a Department of Defense press appearance. Saying that he could not find, and had not read, the Newsweek article itself, he went on to characterize it as “nonsense,” stating, “First of all, the Pentagon doesn't do things like are described in the reporting on the story—since I've not seen the story. Second, the task of training the Iraqis is to train them to do the things they need to do to provide security for their country, and it does not involve the kinds of things that are characterized in that story at all. It just doesn't”47. In light of the history of official secrecy and deception which accompanied the original “Salvador option,” it is clear that these vague denials cannot be taken at face value. First, it is important to note that the occupation of Iraq today takes place in a context of a polarizing, Manichean ideological conflict—the “War on Terror.” President Bush declared on September 20, 2001: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”48 Bush has also cast the War on Terror as the direct continuation of the Cold War.49 Therefore, it is hardly surprising to read of Pentagon plans to target both “Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers” or to hear a military source flatly declare, “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. …From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation” (emphasis added).50 Insurgent sympathizers—masas, in El Salvador—are no better than terrorists themselves. In fact, the entire Sunni population in Iraq must become the target of counterinsurgency—they must pay. This is the calculus that leads to imposition of state terror. On May 1, 2005, the New York Times published a story by writer Peter Maass titled “The Way of the Commandos,” which reported on the formation of “Iraq’s most fearsome counterinsurgency force”—the 5,000-strong Special Police Commandos. 51 Under the leadership of General Adnan Thabit, a Sunni Muslim and former Baathist who was U.S. Department of Defense News Transcript, “Secretary Rumsfeld Joint Media Availability with Russian Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov,” 11 January 48 George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” Sept. 20 2001. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html> (14 December 2005). 49 George W. Bush, “President Addresses Military Families, Discusses War on Terror,” August 24 2005 <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050824.html> (14 December 2005). 50 Hirsch and Barry, “The Salvador Option.” 51 Peter Maass, “The Way of the Commandos,” The New York Times, 1 May 2005. Full text available at: <http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/TheWay_of_the_Commandos.html> (14 December 2005). 47
- 10 imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, the commandos are run by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The article does not mention the “Salvador option,” simply stating, “The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, to which it has often been compared, but El Salvador”. In fact, the lead U.S. adviser of the Special Police Commandos is James Steele, who was also the leader of the 55 Special Forces advisers who trained counterinsurgency battalions in El Salvador in the 1980s. His assessment of the new force’s leader is chilling: “When I asked him to describe Adnan's leadership qualities,” Maass writes, “Steele drew on the vocabulary he learned in Latin America. Adnan, he said approvingly, was a caudillo—a military strongman.” Perhaps Steele is reminiscing about Atlacatl Battalion’s Monterrosa? It is impossible to know for certain. Steele insists that he opposes human rights violations. Yet Maass reports several disturbing commando tactics. The Special Police Commandos have their own television show, called “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice,” which features supposed insurgents confessing “to everything from contract murders to sodomy.” The show is a psychological warfare operation designed to portray insurgents as weak and defeated. However effective it might be, Maas writes: The real problem with the program, according to its most vocal critics— representatives of human rights groups—is that it violates the Geneva Conventions. The detainees shown on ''Terrorism in the Grip of Justice'' have not been charged before judicial authorities, and they appear to be confessing under duress. Some detainees are cut and bruised. In one show, a former policeman with two black eyes confessed to killing two police officers in Samarra; a few days after the broadcast, the former policeman's family told reporters, his corpse was delivered to them. (Emphasis added) Indeed, it is hard read about “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” without being reminded of Roberto d’Aubuisson’s televised death squad communiqués in El Salvador. Maass reports seeing detainees beaten by commandos as U.S. soldiers stood by, and also saw a commando threaten a detainee with death. In the latter case, a U.S. officer stepped in to remind the commando of his “professional” obligation to respect the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit such threats. Maass also offers grisly descriptions of a commando detention center, where he saw bleeding detainees who had evidently been beaten, and heard screaming—“That evening, as I was eating dinner in the mess hall at Olsen base,” he reports, “I overheard a G.I. saying that he had seen [a Syrian detainee] at the detention center, hanging from the ceiling by his arms and legs like an animal being hauled back from a hunt. When I struck up a conversation with the soldier, he refused to say anything more.” The next day Maass heard gunshots coming from “within or behind” the detention center.
- 11 Reports have only gotten worse since Maass’ report in the New York Times. On October 9, 2005, a Sunday Times story headlined, “Iraqi police ‘linked to ethnic cleansing’” reported on the extrajudicial execution of 22 Sunni men who were detained by police accompanied by “masked members of the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of Iraq’s main Shi’ite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq”.52 This is only one instance of what human rights groups in Iraq call an “epidemic,” citing “hundreds of cases” of disappearances.53 The Iraqi Interior Ministry and its security forces have been implicated in torture and abuse at detention facilities. As reported in the New York Times on December 13, 2005, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad has stated that “‘over 100’” of the 169 detainees whom American troops found on Nov. 15 in an Interior Ministry bunker in the Jadriya neighborhood had been abused,” and in a “second raid last week, on another makeshift detention center run by a notorious police commando unit, the Wolf Brigade, as many as 26 of the 625 detainees jammed into the overcrowded center had been abused.”54 Nearly all of these accounts tie abuse to the Iraqi Interior Ministry and its security forces, but the details remain murky, with most sources variously attributing disappearances and executions to the Special Police Commandos, the Wolf Brigade, or members of the Badr Brigade who have infiltrated the security forces. For example, a June 9 2005 “Q&A” on Iraq’s militia groups by the Council on Foreign Relations portrays the Wolf Brigade as an “offshoot” of the Badr Brigades, separate from the Special Police Commandos,55 while a May 21 Knight-Ridder article by Hannah Allam56 describes the Wolf Brigade using many of the details Peter Maass uses to describe the Special Police Commandos, attributing the creation of the television show “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice” to the Wolf Brigade. Other reports, such as a November 18 United Press International article by Pamela Hess, claim that “targeted and unsanctioned violence against Sunnis from cities across Iraq suggests Badr or other rogue elements have a presence throughout the ministry.”57
Hala Jaber, “Iraqi police ‘linked to ethnic cleansing’,” The Sunday Times, 9 October 2005 <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1817412,00.html> (14 December 2005). 53 Peter Beaumont, “Frontline police of new Iraq are waging secret war of vengeance,” The Observer, 20 November 2005, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1646800,00.html> (14 December 2005). 54 John F. Burns, “To Halt Abuses, U.S. Will Inspect Jails Run by Iraq,” The New York Times, 13 December 2005, <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/international/middleeast/14abuse.html?pagewanted=1> (14 Dec. 2005). 55 Lionel Beehner, “IRAQ: Militia Groups,” Council on Foreign Relations, June 9 2005 <http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=8175#6> (14 December 2005). 56 Hannah Allam, “Wolf Brigade the most loved and feared of Iraqi security forces,” Knight-Ridder, 21 May 2005, <http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11706326.htm> (14 December 2005). 57 Pamela Hess, “Wolf Brigade raid angers Iraq's Sunnis,” United Press International, 18 November 2005, <http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20051118-041721-6816r> (14 December 2005). 52
- 12 This confusion of responsibility is an important element of the death squad strategy, with unclear links between government agencies and the entities which carry out kidnappings and executions allowing the denial of official responsibility. However, in Iraq, a composite picture of responsibility for the abuses can be assembled. With nearly all reports implicating the Interior Ministry, it is likely that this is the seat of death squad activity. The Wolf Brigade is a unit of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos, as the December 13 New York Times article cited above makes clear, reporting that the brigade was formed by General Adnad Thabit of the Special Police Commandos. The Brigade itself is commanded by a Shiite named Abul Waleed.58 The Special Police Commandos and the Wolf Brigade seem to be made up of Shiite militiamen drawn from the Badr Brigades, which have been incorporated into the Interior Ministry through its connections with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, as well as Sunnis—former Baathists and Republican Guards. Yet the primary targets of the Interior Ministry Security Forces seem to be Sunnis. This seems contradictory—if the security forces are composed of both Shiites and Sunnis, why are they targeting civilians along sectarian lines? Indeed, the current situation in Iraq makes little sense outside of the framework of the “Salvador option” as organized by U.S. advisors. The Iraqi security forces have incorporated some former Baathist elements because, as Peter Maass writes, they are “the country's most experienced fighters. They are particularly well suited to fight in the Sunni Triangle—they have deep ties there and can extract more intelligence than outsiders.” In addition, “Their presence is useful politically…it makes it hard for the insurgency to claim that the government ignores Sunni interests.” 59 Sunnis are necessary because the government’s target is the Sunni insurgency and its sympathizers. However, the predominately Shiite makeup of the Interior Ministry and the security forces makes it all the more likely that this targeting of the Sunni population could flare up into a sectarian civil war.
The Future It seems likely that a policy of equating the Sunni population in Iraq with the insurgency, and targeting them for counterinsurgency operations using death squad tactics, is being instituted in by security forces of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. These forces have been trained and supplied by the U.S., as indicated by the presence of U.S. advisors within the security forces and by many eyewitness accounts of raids by men using expensive equipment such as Glock pistols,60 consistent with that supplied to the security forces.61 58Hannah
Allam, “Wolf Brigade the most loved and feared of Iraqi security forces.” Peter Maas, “The Way of the Commandos.” 60 Tom Lasseter and Yasser Salihee, “Sunni men in Baghdad targeted by attackers in police uniforms,” Knight-Ridder, 26 June 2005, 59
- 13 Though the most recent accounts of abuse at Interior Ministry detention centers have led the declaration that the U.S. “inspect hundreds of detention centers and embed with Iraqi police commando units,”62 this may not be enough to stop the abuse. Detainees can be clandestinely transferred to new locations, and U.S. forces have themselves been accused of committing similar abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. In fact, this highlights a very dangerous difference between El Salvador and Iraq, which makes the “Salvador option” even less desirable for Iraq: unlike El Salvador, Iraq is currently occupied by thousands of U.S. troops. The tactics of the “Salvador option” could lead U.S. soldiers to be implicated in more atrocities, and if they result in the escalation of conflict in Iraq, will make the occupation even more dangerous for U.S. personnel in Iraq. As mentioned above, the ethnic and sectarian animosities which exist in Iraq make such counterinsurgency tactics even more dangerous. In a worst-case scenario, indiscriminate identification of the Sunni minority in Iraq with the insurgency could lead to genocide, as occurred in Guatemala’s civil war during the 1980s, when the Maya indigenous population was equated with insurgents and targeted for destruction by government forces. In any case, even if one denies U.S. responsibility, it appears undeniable that death squads have emerged in Iraq. As Amnesty International points out, “Once established, …as the persistence of the ‘death squad’ option in Central America since the late 1960s has shown, the formula is rarely abandoned. Even after an insurgency appears to have been controlled, ‘death squad’ killings may become a permanent feature of a security system.”63 The seeds of state terror have clearly been sown in Iraq. As Peter Maass writes, “History has shown that the best way to end an insurgency is to bring insurgents or potential insurgents into the political system.”64 The U.S. occupying forces and the nascent Iraqi government cannot simultaneously attempt to draw Sunnis into the political system while indiscriminately targeting them as a central strategy of the counterinsurgency. In El Salvador, it may have been possible for the U.S. to help end to the civil war years earlier by directing its resources and influence toward a peaceful settlement, rather than by fanning the flames of conflict by pushing for a military solution. Although in Iraq the presence of the U.S. occupying force and the perception that the Iraqi government is a tool of the U.S. may make it more difficult for the U.S. to advocate for peace, it seems clear that insisting upon a military solution to the insurgency is not the answer.
<http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/iraq/11999387.htm>, (14 December 2005). 61 U.S. Department of Defense, Report to Congress: Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq, July 2005, <http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jul2005/d20050721secstab.pdf> (14 December 2005). 62 John F. Burns, “To Halt Abuses, U.S. Will Inspect Jails Run by Iraq.” 63 Amnesty International, 8. 64 Peter Maass, “The Way of the Commandos.”
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