- General Charles de Gaulle gave the French resistance
48 hours to rgler les comptes - settle accounts - after the liberation
of France. But after the "liberation" of Iraq, the Baath party's
enemies have declared it open season to hunt down and murder hundreds of
the former regime's officials - with not the slightest attempt by the Anglo-American
armies or their newly installed police force to end the bloodshed.
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- In the Shia city of Najaf, 42 ex-members of the Baath
have been murdered and not a single arrest has followed. In Basra, controlled
by British troops, almost 50 Baathists have been found with their hands
bound behind their backs and a single bullet hole in the neck. Again, there
have been no arrests. Hussam Thafer, a doctor at the Baghdad city mortuary,
says that every day he receives "five or six" bodies of people
who worked for the old regime.
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- Some of the killings may be personal revenge. The Independent
on Sunday has learned of one young Shia who hunted down his former torturer
in Baghdad, calmly told the man's family that he intended to execute him,
refused financial retribution for his suffering and went on to murder the
man. But many of the killings are being carried out systematically - and
with the same cruelty Saddam's own henchmen once used against the regime's
opponents.
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- Major-General Khalaf al-Alousi, a former director of
the secret police in Baghdad, was assassinated on a Sunday afternoon this
month when he visited a home he was renovating in Yarmouk. His wife, Um
Ali, described how two men in black hoods were waiting for them in the
yard and another in the house, and how she knew they were going to kill
her husband . "I shouted and begged them not to do it, for the sake
of his daughters," she said. The ex-general tried to talk to his killers.
"I never saw such calm before," Um Ali said later. The gunmen
fired 17 bullets into their victim.
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- The guard on the house, Wisam Eidan, had earlier found
the men in the yard. "One of them showed me an ID written in English
with his picture, and he told me, 'don't argue with the CIA and keep your
mouth shut'." In fact, al-Alousi's family suspect Iranian agents were
responsible. He was, they said, in contact with the American-created Governing
Council. Was he just a marked man? Or did he know too much - about Saddam's
enemies, about the Iranian secret police, or about the American intelligence
services which, after all, co-operated with al-Alousi and his comrades
between 1978 and 1990?
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- In Najaf and other southern cities, Baathists have been
shot down by men on motorcycles or in taxis. Sunni Muslims suspect the
Badr Brigades are responsible, the militia of the Supreme Council for the
Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) whose representatives also sit on the Governing
Council. A building believed to be controlled by the Sciri was blown up
in Baghdad last week, killing a Shia man who lived there with his family.
Neighbours immediately blamed ex-Baathists for the attack.
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- Among the most savage of the recent killings came when
Dhamia Abbas, a teacher walking to school with her two sons in Najaf, was
sprayed with bullets from an AK-47 rifle. "I left the Baath party
five years ago," she said from her hospital bed. "But they have
been threatening me and following me. I was wearing a full veil when they
shot me. I want to take my sons and leave Iraq." What Mrs Abbas did
not know when she said this was that one of her two boys, aged four, had
already died of his wounds.
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- Save for appeals for "solidarity" in the aftermath
of Saddam's capture, the Western authorities in Baghdad have shown no concern
about the murders. It is, of course, hard to show pity for satraps of the
former regime whose own victims are still being dug up in their thousands
from the mass graves of southern Iraq. Mrs Abbas, for example, has been
accused of choosing prisoners for execution after the 1991 Shia revolt
in Najaf.
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- The local police admit that they have not solved a single
crime against ex-Baathists, acknowledging that they will themselves become
targets if they attempt to do so. The killers are supposedly receiving
$250 for every Baathist they eliminate. Another of their victims was a
former governor's bodyguard who was tortured by his fellow Baathists in
1991; it did not save him.
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- Only yesterday, in the northern city of Mosul, gunmen
in a fast-moving car shot and killed Sheikh Talal al-Khalidi and his 23-year-old
son, Saad. Although a member of the new local council that works with US
soldiers, al-Khalidi had been a member of the Baathist National Assembly
in Baghdad under Saddam. The long arm of revenge - if that is what it truly
is - therefore now stretches the length of Iraq.
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