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Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy:
Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq

«Part Two | Index | Part Four»

Part III. The Rise of US-backed Death Squads

From Cakewalk40 to Quagmire

Perhaps the best–armed and most powerful perpetrators of gender–based violence in Iraq are those militias that have been trained, funded, and armed by the United States. The US began using Iraqi militias to enforce its occupation during the first weeks of the invasion.⁴¹ On April 8, 2003, under the headline "US–backed Militia Terrorizes Town," The Financial Times reported that the Iraqi Coalition of National Unity, led by Shiite cleric Hassan Mussawi, was looting homes, beating residents, and stealing cars in the city of Najaf, where they were carrying out arrests on behalf of US forces.⁴² Within months, Islamist militias had mushroomed across Iraq. Women's organizations publicized the growing number of gender–based attacks committed by these forces.

At home, Bush Administration officials reminded US audiences of the "mission" of liberating Iraqis, especially women. But on the ground in Iraq, the Islamist militias were wholly tolerated. According to US Major General Martin Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division in Iraq, " [The militias] have recognized that they can operate freely so long as they do not challenge us."⁴³ In fact, the US military enabled the militias and their growing attacks on women. As the "cakewalk" envisioned by US war planners quickly devolved into the quagmire that has become the Iraq War, the US began to actively cultivate Shiite militias to help battle the Sunni–led insurgency and enforce the US occupation.

"The best-armed and most powerful perpetrators
of gender-based violence in Iraq are those militias that have
been trained, funded, and armed by the United States."

In January 2005, Newsweek reported on a Pentagon plan to dispatch US "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."⁴⁴ The next month, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised that these groups were "going to have the greatest leverage on suppressing and eliminating the insurgency."⁴⁵ In June 2005—at a moment when Shiite militias' systematic torture of women was an established fact of life in Iraq—former Marine officer and counterinsurgency expert Thomas X. Hammes described "a marriage of convenience" between the US and the militias, stating that, "Our policy is to equip those who are the most effective fighters."⁴⁶

The two largest militias that the US has supported are the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army. Like SCIRI's Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army belongs to a political formation that won 30 parliamentary seats and control over several government ministries after the December 2005 elections. It is the armed force of Moqtada al–Sadr, commonly described as an "anti–American cleric," whose men twice battled US troops in 2004. But in 2005, the US struck a deal with al–Sadr in order to mobilize the Mahdi Army against a common enemy—the Sunni–led insurgency.⁴⁷ By 2007, the US was once again confronting the Mahdi Army (through Bush's so–called troop "surge"), but the policy change does not negate the Pentagon's earlier support for the militia. As al–Sadr said, "Yesterday's friends are today's enemies. "⁴⁸

For the US, the devil's bargain of backing Shiite against Sunni militias was risky. In fact, within a year of the Pentagon plan to train the Badr Brigade, the militia—with its obvious ties to the US–backed government—caused a public relations crisis for the White House when the group was implicated in widespread sectarian killings. As for the Mahdi Army, Pentagon planners surely considered the possibility of a future confrontation with the militia. Those risks were assumed because the official Iraqi army—on which Bush had staked his exit strategy from Iraq—was unable and unwilling to fight the insurgency. Moreover, the militias offered an enticing advantage over government troops. For a time, their quasi–official status allowed the US to out–source the violence of its counterinsurgency operations without having to answer for the militias' gross human rights violations, including their campaign of terror against the women of Iraq.

Refusing to Connect the Dots

By early 2005, two facts were clearly established. First, the US was arming and training Islamist militias in Iraq. Second, these same militias were using gender–based violence to impose a theocracy. Yet, almost nowhere in the media were these facts examined in relation to each other. Indeed, after initially reporting on the "Salvador Option," most mainstream media sources failed to cover the consequences of US military support for the militias, even as The New York Times and other outlets cited Badr fighters armed with US–issued weapons, driving US–issued trucks, and operating freely during US–imposed curfews.⁵¹ Meanwhile, articles such as "Iran Gaining Influence, Power in Iraq Through Militias"⁵² emphasized the Badr Brigade's extensive ties to Iran, while ignoring the fact that Iraq's largest militia—the Mahdi Army—is vehemently anti–Iranian.

Mainstream media often report that the Badr and Mahdi militias have "infiltrated" Iraq's Ministry of Interior,⁵³ which controls the country's police, intelligence, and paramilitary units. More accurately, Iraq's Islamist government, boosted to power by the US, placed the ministry in the hands of its militias. In April 2005, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaffari appointed Bayan Jabr, a high–ranking Badr Brigade officer as Interior Minister.⁵⁴ Since then, the Badr Brigade has been headquartered in the ministry. The Mahdi Army, meanwhile, controls the police forces of Baghdad and Basra, Iraq's two largest cities.⁵⁵ Press reports frequently cite killings by "men in police uniforms," resisting the foregone conclusion that gunmen are wearing uniforms because they are indeed police officers—trained, armed, and funded by the United States. As one senior Iraqi minister told the British newspaper, The Independent, "of course they wear police uniforms. They are real policemen."⁵⁶

In November 2005, the Badr Brigade was widely labeled a death squad when its operatives were discovered imprisoning and torturing Sunni men in a secret prison. Although this same group had been torturing and killing Iraqi women for more than a year, these gender–based attacks were generally not identified as part of the pattern of politically–motivated violence that was then coming to light. To cite just one example, in October 2005, journalist Robert Dreyfuss, known for his authoritative and critical analysis of Iraqi politics, reported that in addition to targeting Sunnis, the Shiite Badr Brigade was "terrorizing Iraq's secular, urban Shiite population."⁵⁷ Although gender–based violence was a central tactic of this terror campaign, Dreyfuss does not mention it. Nor does he explore why a supposedly sectarian militia was terrorizing members of its own sect. Like most media accounts, Dreyfuss' report fails to consider the Badr militia from the perspective of Shiite women. From women's vantage point, the militia is typical of theocratic fundamentalists everywhere. For such groups, asserting control over members of their own religion—especially women, who are seen as the carriers of group identity—is a prerequisite to extending control over society at large, including, ultimately, the institutions of the state.

From Violence to Feminicide

Like the press, much of the anti–war movement has failed to assess the gendered dimension of the violence gripping Iraq. For example, Iraqi artists, musicians, academics, and teachers have all been targeted by Islamists in a manner reminiscent of Pol Pot's Cambodia and for the same reason: they represent a potential challenge to the killers' vision of society. In response to these attacks, a series of international campaigns have been launched to protect people in these sectors. With the exception of the advocacy work of gay men, who are also attacked on the basis of gender, these campaigns have not recognized that women are specifically targeted in attacks against artists and intellectuals. Yet, as Yanar Mohammed said, "We have been studying these killings since they began. It is not that the Islamists also kill women journalists, performers, or intellectuals—women are especially hunted. That's because they commit a double offense—by advocating a secular society and by being accomplished, working women."⁵⁸

Here, the issue of disaggregated data is critical. For without comprehensive knowledge of who is being targeted, it is difficult to analyze the crisis or protect people. But rather than facilitate the collection of data, US authorities have repeatedly ordered the Iraqi Health Ministry to stop publishing statistics about whom or even how many Iraqis are being killed.⁵⁹ When figures have been released, Iraqi women's organizations have cautioned that the actual number of women who are harassed, assaulted, abducted, raped, and killed by Islamist militias is much higher than statistics show, since most crimes against women are not reported because of stigma, fear of retaliation, or lack of confidence in the police.

These concerns, together with the failure to collect data, place violence against Iraqi women squarely within the paradigm of "feminicide," a term usually reserved for the wide–spread killing of women in Guatemala and Mexico since the early 1990s. Feminicide is the sum total of various forms of gender–based violence against women, characterized by impunity for perpetrators and a lack of justice processes for victims. Feminicide occurs in conditions of social upheaval, armed conflict, violence between powerful rival criminal gangs and militias, rapid economic transformation, and the demise of traditional forms of state power.⁶⁰ All of these conditions apply to Iraq.

The framework of feminicide also emphasizes the complicity of local or state authorities in violence against women. Iraqi women's organizations report clear links between the Islamist militias who control and work in the police force and criminal gangs involved in forced prostitution and trafficking of women. For example, Maha (who chose to withhold her last name) was abducted from her home in Najaf and trafficked from brothel to brothel in Baghdad for nearly two years. She managed to escape twice and flee to the police station in Baghdad's Amiriyah neighborhood. Both times the police forcibly returned her to the brothel.⁶¹

US authorities bear responsibility for the crimes of the Iraqi police force they have created and for failing to provide police recruits with even rudimentary training regarding women's human rights. In fact, the company that the Bush Administration contracted to train Iraq's new police force, DynCorp, has its own record of perpetrating violence against women. DynCorp was hired by the federal government in the 1990s to train police in the Balkans. Company employees were found to have systematically committed sex crimes against women, including "owning" young women as slaves. One DynCorp site supervisor videotaped himself raping two women. Despite evidence, the contractors never faced criminal charges.⁶²

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40Ken Adelman, "Cakewalk in Iraq," The Washington Post, Feb. 13, 2002, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp–dyn/A1996–2002Feb12?language=printer (accessed Jan. 29, 2007).

41In fact, armed militias such as the Kurdish Pesh Merga and the Shia Badr Brigade were founded decades ago. Yet, the US military had no known plans for integrating militia members into a new and rehabilitated Iraqi security force. Instead, the US disbanded the Iraqi military (Coalition Provisional Authority Order 2, issued on May 23, 2003) without providing employment for its 400,000 officers and troops. By doing so, the US swelled the ranks of both militias and criminal gangs and deprived Iraq of a basic precondition for a functioning state: a monopoly on the use of force.

42 Charles Clover, "US–backed Militia Terrorizes Town," The Financial Times, April 8, 2003.

43Hilzoy, "Iraq: Women's Rights," Obsidian Wings, Aug. 21, 2005, http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/08/iraq_womens_rig.html (accessed Jan. 30, 2007).

44Michael Hirsch and John Barry, "The Salvador Option: Death Squads in Iraq?" Newsweek, Jan. 13, 2005.

45Kim Sengupta, "Iraq's Dirty War of Wolves in Police Clothing," The New Zealand Herald, Nov. 21, 2005.

46Lionel Beehner, "Backgrounder: Iraq: Militia Groups," Council on Foreign Relations, June 9, 2005, http://www.cfr.org/publication/8175/ (accessed Jan. 29, 2007).

47A.K. Gupta, "Unravelling Iraq's Secret Militias," Z Magazine Online, May 2005, http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Images/gupta0505.html (accessed Dec. 13, 2006).

48A.K. Gupta, "Understanding Bush's 'Surge' Strategy for 2007: A Second Civil War or Genocide," Indybay, Jan. 15, 2007, http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/01/15/18347261.php (accessed Feb. 5, 2007).

49United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, "From Madness to Hope: The 12–Year War in El Salvador," Aug. 1, 1993, http://www.usip.org/library/tc/doc/reports/el_salvador/tc_es_03151993_toc.html (accessed Feb. 5, 2007).

50Ali Al–Fadhily and Dahr Jamail, "Government Death Squads Ravaging Baghdad," Inter Press Service News Agency, Oct. 19, 2006, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35167 (accessed Dec. 13, 2006).

51See, for example: "In Shadows, Armed Groups Propel Iraq Toward Chaos," The New York Times, May 24, 2006, and: "How Iraq Police Reform Became Casualty of War," The New York Times, May 22, 2006.

52Tom Lasseter, "Iran Gaining Influence, Power in Iraq Through Militias," The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2005.

53Solomon Moore, "The Conflict in Iraq: Killings by Shiite Muslims Detailed," The Los Angeles Times, Sep. 28, 2006.

54Jabr was named finance minister in May 2006 under Nuri al–Maliki.

55Edward Wong, "Shiite Cleric Wields Violence and Popularity to Increase Power in Iraq," The New York Times, Nov. 27, 2005.

56Patrick Cockburn, "New Terror that Stalks Iraq's Republic of Fear," The Independent, Sep. 22, 2006.

57Robert Dreyfuss, "Death Squads and Diplomacy," TomPaine.com, Oct. 5, 2005, http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2005/10/05/death_squads_and_diplomacy.php (accessed Dec. 14, 2006).

58Interview with Yanar Mohammed, April 25, 2006.

59Associated Press, "Official: 150,000 Iraqis Killed by Insurgents. Basis of Iraqi Health Minister's Estimate Since March 2003 is Unclear," Nov. 10, 2006.

60Kent Paterson, "Feminicide On the Rise in Latin America," Global Politician, March 10, 2006, http://globalpolitician.com/articles.asp?ID=1654 (accessed Dec. 5, 2006).

61Interview with Yanar Mohammed, April 25, 2006.

62Susan J. Brinson, "Torture or 'Good Old American Pornography'?," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 50(39), June 4, 2004: B10–B11.

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