Low-level Ba'ath members targeted in reprisal killings

By David Filipov, Globe Staff, 9/28/2003

BAGHDAD -- Mohamed al Saadi, a humble bank clerk on his way home for lunch, was standing at a crowded Baghdad bus stop when a black sedan pulled up. A young man got out and walked toward Saadi, calling out his name. As Saadi turned, the stranger calmly pulled a pistol and shot him in the head.

"Make sure he's dead," someone in the car said, as the assailant coolly stared back at dozens of shocked onlookers. "He's dead," the gunman answered. He got back in and the car sped off, leaving Saadi, 56, lying in the street, his shirt pocket still full of money for groceries.

Even in volatile postwar Baghdad, the brazen midday shooting last month of a family man of modest means with no personal enemies seemed to be a particularly senseless act of violence. The same could be said for the killings of Abdurrakhman al Jabouri, an elementary school teacher gunned down at a bazaar, and Razzaq Abdul Khaleq, a newspaper salesman shot as he served customers in his kiosk.

But the men had one thing in common. They had been low-level members of the Ba'ath Party, whose ruthless three-decade rule tormented millions of Iraqis. And that, the victims' families, friends, and neighbors believe, is why they are dead. They say the killings are part of a shadowy reprisal campaign to hunt down former rank-and-file Ba'ath officials.

The killings suggest a frightening trend in a country where tens of thousands of state employees were forced to join the party as a condition for employment and where Ba'athists were expected to inform on everyone else.

Nobody knows how many former Ba'athists have been killed in Iraq since the war ended -- most estimates suggest several hundred. Iraqis familiar with the recent slayings say the killers seem to be working methodically from lists of party members, looted from party headquarters after the April ouster of Saddam Hussein, rather than settling personal scores.

With Iraq's reformed police force and US military patrols struggling to rein in street violence, the killings of former Ba'athists have gained little attention amid the daily reports of shootings and stabbings that, according to emergency room doctors in Baghdad's hospitals, average in the dozens per day in the Iraqi capital alone.

Iraqi officers say that with few weapons or patrol cars and with precincts at less than half strength, police are unable to investigate each killing thoroughly.

"We have so many murder cases, it's hard to tell the reason," said Hazim Salih, a police major at a precinct not far from Saadi's home. These "could very well have been reprisal killings. God knows many people are angry enough to do that."

It would be understandable for Iraqis who suffered under Hussein's regime to view the killings as payback. But the slayings could further complicate American-led efforts to reconstruct the Iraq government.

The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in May banned former party members from top posts, but allowed the estimated 1.5 million former Ba'athists in this country of 24 million to be posted in less important jobs. The entire Iraqi police force, which the coalition is counting on to stabilize the country, is made up almost entirely of former Ba'athists. Doctors, schoolteachers, and museum curators were all by definition party members.

"Under Saddam, if you were looking for a job, if you wanted to study, you had to be a Ba'ath Party member," said Saadi's son Isam, a policeman who had to join the party to enter Baghdad's police academy.

After the war, Isam said, Saadi suspected there would be trouble but assumed the reprisals would be limited to former high-level officials, or such symbols of Ba'athist rule as Daoud Qais, a singer whose songs praised Hussein. Qais was shot dead outside his house in May in what many Iraqis assume was a reprisal killing.

None of Iraq's new religious leaders has publicly called for the assassination of all Ba'athists, although a religious edict issued in April by Kadhim al Husseini al Haeri, an Iraqi-born Shi'ite cleric based in Iran, urged Muslims to "kill all Saddamists who try to take charge." Haeri's words were followed by a wave of slayings in Sadr City, a slum in eastern Baghdad where Hussein brutally repressed the area's 2 million Shi'ite residents. Apparent revenge killings also have been reported in Najaf, Karbala, and Basra, cities in Shi'ite-dominated central and southern Iraq, where the Sunni-dominated Ba'ath regime put down a bloody rebellion in 1991.

Earlier this month, Abdul Aziz al Hakim, a member of Iraq's US-appointed Governing Council and the leader of the Badr Brigade, a paramilitary militia that continues to bear weapons despite a US order to disarm, called on Iraqis to "root out all Ba'ath Party gangsters and Saddam followers by force." Hakim stopped far short of calling for reprisals, and his aides have denied involvement in any killings.

But graffiti seen recently on the walls of Najaf reads, "It is your duty as Muslims to kill all Ba'ath Party members" and "It is your duty as humans to kill all Ba'ath Party members." The slogans are signed "Badr Brigade."

"I asked my father many times if he felt unsafe," Isam al Saadi said in an interview about his father's killing. "He would reply: `My son, you know I've always been nice to people." One night in July, a group of unidentified men approached Mohamed al Saadi's modest home, opened fire with automatic weapons, and then disappeared. The police refused to investigate, Isam al Saadi said. The elder Saadi went to his local mosque to ask whether he and his family should worry. He was told he should not. When Saadi's bank reopened and the coalition told everyone to go back to work, he went. But a month later, Saadi was dead. One recent night, gunmen fired on Saad Abdul Riva's house, a few doors down the narrow alley from where Khaleq, the slain news kiosk owner, had lived. Khaleq's neighbor, Mahmud Chalabi, a former Ba'ath Party member who once worked as a guard at an elementary school, went into hiding three weeks ago after gunmen shot up his living room."We got rid of Saddam, and now we have 100 Saddams," said Fathiya Abdul Riva, Saad's cousin.