Sunday, May 29, 2016

Shia militancy in Iraq


Immediately after the ouster of Saddam in 2003, different Shia militant groups in Shia-majority South Iraq were involved in the killing and harassment of Baathist officers, Christians, Mandaeans and unveiled women; taking over Sunni mosques, destruction of hair saloons, and shops selling alcohol, music and videos. However, they remained largely discreet in the wake of Sunni insurgents' anti-Shia violence in "Sunni triangle" until January 2005 elections when they started retaliating against Sunnis. Initially, anti-Sunni violence of Shia militants was of retaliatory nature but, as it happens in these situations, soon it turned into a reign of terror that went beyond being defensive and many innocent Sunnis became victims of assassination, abduction, and forced displacement at the hands of Shia militants. Shia death squads became a source of terror and violence against Sunnis in their own right.

To be fair, Sistani condemned vigilante violence of Shia militias, but like Pope, he did not have any divisions. Most Shia militants listen to Khamenei or Muqtada al-Sadr, not to Sistani.

In addition to anti-Sunni violence, Shia militias were involved in urban warfare against coalition troops, and there was also infighting among Shia militias.  
 
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Companies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa%27ib_Ahl_al-Haq
http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/asaib-ahl-al-haq-from-breakaway-sadr.html
http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/badr-organization-view-into-iraqs.html
http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/view/57
http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/view/143
http://www.counterextremism.com/threat/asaib-ahl-al-haq 
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/08/new_special_groups_s.php 




http://www.migri.fi/download/61225_Security_Situation_in_Baghdad_-_The_Shia_Militias_29.4.2015.pdf
2015: A report on abuses of Shia militias



https://talisman-gate.com/2016/07/01/the-origins-of-the-pmus/
Hash al-Shabi formed before, not after, Sistani's fatwa


July 28, 2016: [Iraqi authorities] have subjected family members to threats and physical abuse, including severe beatings, burns with cigarettes, and electric shocks, to coerce confessions implicating husbands, brothers, or other male family members...have also raped and sexually assaulted girls along with women in detention.

======
 General Mahdi Gharawi

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=u7I_BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80#v=onepage&q&f=false 
http://thebea.st/1uKVzXF 
http://reut.rs/1ESQ0x2
Despite the fact he was a Shi'ite, he had been a member of Saddam's Republican Guard. In 2004, after Saddam's fall, Washington had backed Gharawi to lead one of Iraq's new National Police Divisions. 
In 2006, he was found to torture 1400 Sunni prisoners. Maliki appointed him to Mosul.


=====

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/26/world/aftereffects-iran-s-influence-cleric-in-iran-says-shiites-must-act.html?pagewanted=all
April 23, 2003:The edict, or fatwa, issued on April 8 by Kadhem al-Husseini al-Haeri, an Iraqi-born cleric based in the Iranian holy city of Qum,... says that Shiite leaders have to ''seize as many positions as possible to impose a fait accompli for any coming government.''
....
In the fatwa, Mr. Haeri urged his followers in Iraq to ''kill all Saddamists who try to take charge'' and ''to cut short any chance of the return to power of second-line Baathists.'' That clause in the fatwa may explain the killing two days later of a prominent pro-Western Shiite cleric.


http://www.dawn.com/news/108559
27 June 2003:  A senior Iraqi Shia leader has issued a fatwa ordering the killing of any Jew who buys real estate in Iraq, an aide said on Friday. The Iran-based scholar, Ayatollah Kazem al Husseini al Haieri, also said in the fatwa that selling real estate to Jews was forbidden for Muslims.


http://www.unhcr.org/459ba6462.pdf
August 2006: A report on atrocities of Shia militias in Basra region.


http://bostonreview.net/rosen-anatomy-civil-war 
Nov 8, 2006: Among Muqtada’s followers it is common to hear that the American army has come to kill the Mahdi. In a September 2006 sermon in Kufa, Muqtada told his followers that the Pentagon had a large file on the Mahdi and would greet his return with their military.
....
[In 2003] For the next nine months Muqtada continued to test the limits of American tolerance, sometimes virtually declaring war on them, then retreating and welcoming them as friends. In a sermon he praised the September 11 attacks and condemned the Interim Governing Council and all its actions. In March 2004 the Americans closed his newspaper, al Hawza, which they accused of calling for violence, arrested an influential associate of his, and issued an arrest warrant for him as well.
 ...
 In fact, the Mustafa Husseiniya’s Sheikh Safaa was at the center of an organized campaign against Sunnis in Shaab, which was one of the first parts of Baghdad where Sunnis were the victims of assassinations and cleansing by Shia militias. Here, in the Baghdad neighborhood with the second-largest Mahdi Army presence, the civil war began in earnest in early 2005.
But it all started in the last months of 2004. Shias had fought alongside Sunnis in April in the first battle of Fallujah, but by November, when a second battle between Americans and insurgents destroyed the Sunni city of Fallujah, some Shias were beginning to think that the Fallujans got what they deserved for harboring Zarqawi and his killing force. The near-daily insurgent attacks against Iraqi policemen and soldiers had taken on a sectarian tone, because these forces were mostly composed of poor Shia men; Sunnis avoided joining. And as Shias grew indifferent to Fallujans’ suffering, Sunnis became resentful, and some turned murderous. Sunni militias started targeting Shias as Shias, not as forces of the occupation. 
....
Shia attacks on Sunnis would become better organized after January 2005, when Sheikh Haitham al Ansari was assassinated.
...
Sectarian violence even extended to the American prisons in Iraq, and prisoners segregated themselves.
....
 On February 22, 2006, a bomb destroyed the Shia Askari shrine in Samarra. In the days that followed, over 1,300 bodies were found in Baghdad, most of them Sunni. Once these figures were revealed, the ministry of the interior—whose forces were likely responsible for most of these deaths—asked the Shia-controlled ministry of health to cover up the numbers. Shias took over dozens of Sunni mosques and renamed them after the Samarra shrine.  
Sunni television stations such as Baghdad TV, controlled by the Iraqi Islamic Party, showed only Sunni victims of the retaliatory attacks. Shia television stations, such as al Furat and al Iraqiya, focused on the damaged shrine and on the Shia victims. Al Furat was even more aggressive, encouraging Shias to “stand up for their rights.” On a Shia radio station’s talk show, one caller announced that those responsible for the attack were Abu Bakr, Omar, and Othman, the three first caliphs.


http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-changing-face-of-moqtada-al-sadr.html
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2006/03/more-fingers-pointing-at-al-sadr-for-iraqi-violence/
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Dt4NlW3tV0gC&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70#v=onepage&q&f=false
Shiite militias targeted the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Adhamiya with numerous mortars. Muqtada was said to have announced that “we have the legitimate cover to kill al-Nawasib,” a pejorative term for Sunnis.


http://www.insideiraqipolitics.com/Files/Inside%20Iraq%20No111.pdf
June 2015: Several of the militant groups have proclaimed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali  Khamenei as their religious leader...Several of the militant factions, including the Khorasani Companies and AAH, have become infamous for gangsterism and bully tactics, picking fights with pro-government Sunni tribal fighters, Kurdish Peshmerga, and even Shia civilians. 


http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2010/07/iranianbacked_shia_t_1.php
Since late 2006, US and Iraqi forces have captured or killed several high-level Qods Force officers inside Iraq. Among those captured were Mahmud Farhadi, one of the three Iranian regional commanders in the Ramazan Corps; Ali Mussa Daqduq, a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative; and Qais Qazali, the leader of the Qazali Network, which is better known as the Asaib al Haq or the League of the Righteous. Azhar al Dulaimi, one of Qazali’s senior tactical commanders, was killed in Iraq in early 2007.
.... Immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iran established the Ramazan Corps to direct operations inside Iraq. The US military says that Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah have helped establish, fund, train, arm, and provide operational support for Shia terror groups such as the Hezbollah Brigades and the League of the Righteous. The US military refers to these groups along with the Iranian-backed elements of the Mahdi Army as the “Special Groups.”
 

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-22/iran-s-forces-and-u-s-share-a-base-in-iraq
July 22, 2015:
The Washington Institute in 2013 identified three militias -- the League of the Righteous, Iraqi Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada -- as sending elite fighters to Syria to fight for Assad.  ..
These militias also stand accused of gross human rights abuses and battlefield atrocities in Sunni areas where they have fought. The State Department heavily criticized Iran’s support for the Iraqi militias and those militias’ behavior in its annual report on worldwide terrorism


https://www.academia.edu/5802463/Iraqi_women_journalists_challenges_and_predicaments
"Santa Mikhael Al-Hariri, a Christian Iraqi journalist, worked for the Iraqi Ministers’ Cabinet and Parliament. First, she received e-mail threats,...  she later received a  warning from the Shiite militia group, Al-Zahraa Brigades, in which her name and some of her colleagues were listed as legitimate targets. She was described as an ‘agent who desecrated Iraq’s honour’. In addition, Kawthar Abdul Amir  Al-Zubaidi who worked for the Aswat al-Iraq news agency received a threat letter from the same Shiite militia group, Al-Zahraa Brigades, and from the Iraqi Armed Group. Both sent Al-Zubaidi threatening messages to stop her from working. As a result, she and Al-Hariri felt imprisoned in their own houses and cultures and their psychological situation deteriorated, so they moved with their families to Iraqi Kurdistan."


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/1429709/Murder-of-Catholics-selling-alcohol-raises-fundamentalist-fears.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/1429616/Christians-murdered-for-selling-alcohol.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/may/09/news/war-christians9
May 8, 2003:  BAGHDAD — When the head of Iraq's largest Christian community tries to lead his congregation in prayer these days, it is often impossible to be heard, even in the front pew of his church.  There used to be a Baath Party office across the street -- an intimidating presence, but a quiet one. Now a group of Shiite Muslims has taken over the building. They have converted it into a mosque and have mounted half a dozen massive speakers on the structure, which they use to broadcast their religious messages into the streets.
.....
"It is difficult for us to pray now," said Monsignor Emanuel Dally, consultor of the patriarch. "They pray loudly with microphones. Our people are hesitating to come to church."
....
In recent weeks, Christians say, militant Shiites have threatened to kill people who produced and sold alcohol, which is considered illegal under Islamic law but was allowed under Hussein. Churchgoing women say they have been taunted for not covering their heads. Shopkeepers report being harassed for selling magazines with advertisements featuring women.



https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde14/007/2004/en/ 
Violence targeting those involved in the alcohol trade started soon after the occupation began. Shops selling music and videos have also been attacked. On 8 May 2003 two merchants, ‘Abd al-Ahad Sleiwa and Sabah Kamel, were shot dead in separate incidents. As a result of these killings, the licensed stores closed. Attacks, however, continued. Sarkun Nanu Muradu and Bashir Toma Elias, who both used to run liquor stores, were killed in November and December 2003 respectively. Bashir Toma Elias, 53, who shut down his liquor store in Bashar Street, Old Basra, after the two killings on 8 May, was shot dead on 24 December. A retired English teacher who drove a taxi to support his wife and six children, he had gone to the market in Old Basra at about 9am to do some shopping for the Christmas celebrations. According to his family, a man with a beard approached him and fired a bullet into the back of his neck.
The violence peaked on 15 February 2004, when at least nine people were killed by armed men who fired randomly into the crowded main street in Old Basra near the footbridge, a well-known spot for illegal selling of alcohol by street vendors.
...
According to Archbishop Gibril Kassab, about 150 Christian families, many of whom were involved in the alcohol trade, have relocated to their original homes in and around Mosul in northern Iraq. He estimated that 20 or 30 families had left Basra permanently and the others plan to return if the security situation in Basra stabilizes. .. A senior Iraqi police official confirmed in February 2004 to Amnesty International that no prosecutions had been initiated for killings of alcohol vendors.


May 13, 2003: "Like most of their countrymen, Christians greeted the fall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with celebration and hope. But in little more than a month, their desire for greater religious freedom has been replaced by fear of the fundamentalism rippling through Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, which has moved quickly to exert its influence after decades of violent repression.
Christian women say they've been harassed by Shiite men for walking on the street without head scarves, and priests complain that Shiite clerics inflame religious hatred by calling for the expulsion from Iraq of "nonbelievers."
......
In the chaotic days after Baghdad's fall, Shiite clerics sent armed followers to patrol neighborhoods and to safeguard schools and hospitals from looting.
Still under Shiite control, some of those hospitals now bear signs ordering any woman seeking treatment to wear a head scarf.
......
In almost every Baghdad neighborhood, vacant buildings and former government offices have been converted into Shiite houses of worship.
One such mosque, Jama Al-Wehda Al-Islamiya, or Unity of Islam, sits directly across the street from Warduni's church, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. Before the war, the building served as the neighborhood headquarters for the ruling Ba'ath Party. Later, it was looted and partially burned.
The Shiite moved in three weeks ago, mounting a half-dozen loudspeakers that blare the call to prayer five times a day, sometimes interfering with church services across the street.
The mosque's imam, Sheik Ali Al-Bahadili, said he is supportive of an Islamic state, but he said it should be one that respects the rights of Christians and other Iraqi minority groups. He flatly rejected claims that Muslims have been targeting or intimidating Christians."


http://www.dawn.com/news/102091/alcohol-sellers-warned
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=5582
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/imam-urges-iraqis-to-burn-down-cinemas-1.359280
http://www.aina.org/reports/mrgi0702.pdf
16 May 2003: "In May 2003, Sheikh Mohammed al Fartousi, a member of al-Sadr, issued a fatwa banning alcohol, commanding women to wear the veil and ordering cinemas to close. In a sermon at Muslim weekly prayers at Al Mohsen mosque in Baghdad’s Shia suburbs of Sadr City, he told ‘several thousand’ Muslims:
‘The cinemas in Al-Saadun Street show indecent films. I warn them: if in a week they do not change, we will act differently with them. We warn women and the go-betweens who take them to the Americans: If in a week from now they do not change their attitude, the murder of these women is sanctioned [by Islam]. This warning also goes out to sellers of alcohol, radios and televisions.’

According to another report, al Fartousi also said: ‘Our fatwa is for all the people. Alcohol is banned under every religion’. He claimed to have up to 1,000 armed former soldiers under his control. Several alcohol factories were attacked just hours after the fatwa was issued."


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/1430367/Radical-Shiite-cleric-warns-women-not-to-consort-with-Americans.html
May 16, 2003: A radical cleric in Iraq warned women who consort with American soldiers to conform to Islamic precepts within a week or face retribution from vigilante groups.
Sheikh Mohammed Fartousi, the leading authority in the Shi'ite Muslim slums of east Baghdad, said the murder of "sinful women" and those who control them would be sanctioned by Islam. He also had warnings for cinema owners and alcohol sellers.
The burning of cinemas would be permitted, he said at Friday prayers, if their owners continued to show "indecent films". He added that sellers of radios and televisions should stop their trade, though this would be hard to enforce as there is a boom in sales of satellite dishes, banned under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Cinema owners have already received warnings from armed gangs to remove the sultry posters outside their premises. Shi'ite Muslim vigilantes have burned nine alcohol factories, and the sellers of strong drink - an exclusively Christian trade - are braced for trouble.
Sheikh Fartousi is the only authority in the slum area of Baghdad which used to be known as Saddam City but has since been renamed by the residents Sadr City after a well-known Shi'ite Muslim religious dynasty.



http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/914166/posts
https://www.barnabasfund.org/news/TwoChristiansMurderedLongFearedAnti-ChristianViolenceBegins
http://cathnews.acu.edu.au/305/107.php
May 19, 2003: Sabah Gazala and Abdul Ahed who were shot and killed by two Islamic gunmen within ten minutes in separate incidents in Basra.
Like a number of Christians in the city and in other parts of Iraq they were involved in the sale of alcohol, jobs forbidden to Muslims but permitted to Christians under Saddam Hussein's rule.
In recent weeks such vendors have faced severe threats from Shia Muslim conservatives seeking to impose defacto Islamic law (which bans alcohol completely) in Iraq in the chaotic wake of the victory of coalition forces in the country.
Many Christian shop owners have been forced to close, others to defend their premises with metal bars across the windows.
In Basra, Baghdad and across Iraq some Christians are beginning to suffer harassment, threats, intimidation and even violence at the hands of conservative Shia Muslims who want to impose Shari'ah law on both Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
On Friday 2 May Moqtada Sadr, one of the main Shia leaders in the country openly declared in a sermon in Kufa that "The banning of alcohol; and the wearing of the veil should be spread to all and not only to Muslims."
The Los Angeles Times reported that last week in Basra Shereen Musa, a Christian woman, was pelted with vegetables to chants of "Shame! Shame!" as she walked with her mother through a market, simply because her head was not covered in accordance with the Shari'ah. "Everyone was laughing at me, and I was crying," Shereen said.
"When I had to walk back through the same place someone saw a cross on my neck and said: 'Oh, you're a Christian. You'll suffer a terrible fate.'"
Some Christian families like Shereen's have now begun to leave Basra to return to the traditional Christian heartland around Mosul.
In Baghdad Christians are "terrified"and "hesitating to come to church" as services at one Chaldean church in the city are drowned out by Islamic prayers and teaching broadcast by loudspeaker from a new mosque across the street.
Elsewhere, shopkeepers selling western-style magazines with advertisements containing pictures of women considered unacceptable by many Shia Muslims have also been threatened and intimidated.



http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-05-20/news/0305200203_1_key-cleric-liquor-store-shiites
May 20, 2003: BAGHDAD — A pile of charred empty liquor bottles tells of the purge being waged these days by militant Muslims against secularism.
Hundreds of invaders descended upon the Al-Tharthor distillery one morning last week bearing machine guns, firebombs and rocket launchers, witnesses said. Decrying drink, they set the plant ablaze after pouring out pints of gin, whiskey and local spirits.
It was the eighth distillery torched in the last two weeks, industry insiders say. And if hard-line clerics' warnings are an indication, the violent crackdown may escalate to liquor stores, cinemas and beauty parlors.
"I warn them: If in a week they do not change, we will act differently with them," Shiite leader Mohammed Fartousi told a huge mosque audience Friday during prayers, according to media accounts.
If they do not comply, "the torching of cinemas would be permitted," Fartousi said, adding that the murder of "sinful women" also would be condoned.
Liquor store owners say they have been threatened and harassed in recent days by men in turbans and beards. Cinemas have been plastered with posters warning of bombings from the "Believers' Muslims Committed to Punishment" who find love scenes and action movies such as "Rambo" to be offensive.
Long persecuted by deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, Shiites make up more than 60 percent of Iraq's population and many of them are boldly pushing for religious rule in Iraq.


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/24/world/after-the-war-vigilantes-iraq-s-liquor-trade-becomes-a-casualty-of-postwar-chaos.html
May 22, 2003: One store owner recently had a firebomb thrown into his shop. At least two others have been shot dead and several have received warnings from armed men that the new Iraq does not allow alcohol.
''They told me, 'If you don't close the shop in an hour, we'll destroy it,' '' said one liquor-store owner, speaking in a whisper and insisting on anonymity. ''I closed.''
The store owner still manages to unload some of his supply, which is stored at his home now. Loyal customers place their orders by telephone and he heads out after dark with the alcohol in the trunk of his sedan.
Transactions are done in alleyways, he said, and both he and the buyer are always anxious.  ''I was freer before the war,'' he said. ''We're all afraid now.''  Attacks on alcohol sellers have become common in the free-for-all that has followed the war. But it is in the south, where Shiite Muslims are in the majority, that the phenomenon seems to be worse.


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/international/worldspecial/25WOME.html
25 May 2003:After Saddam Hussein's government fell, the three main theaters here were taken over by the three rival Shiite Muslim factions.....
The cleric appointed to run the educational system in Basra, Ahmad al-Malek, declared that female teachers would not be allowed to receive their emergency salary payment if they appeared without a head scarf.
Female students at the university said they were being harassed by followers of these Shiite clerics for not wearing head scarves, and many shops in the market have put up signs that read, "My sister, cover your hair."
... 
In more conservative cities, like Najaf, the burial place of Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law and the founder of the Shiite branch of Islam, no woman is seen in public without an abaya, a head-to-toe black garment. Religious men are vocal in criticizing women, even foreign women, who do not wear an abaya there.

29 May 2003: The clergy have set up four committees at Hikma Mosque, each with four or five people. They have sought to rid the neighborhood of alcohol and pornography, and to urge women -- often by stopping them in the streets -- to don the veil and not wear cosmetics.
Sayyid Ali Dinainawi, who has authority over the committees and said he cooperates with Rubai, boasted that the men have already succeeded in shutting down liquor stores in Sadr City. The capital's nine movie theaters have all had visits, usually after evening prayers, and have been warned against showing foreign films and others the Islamic committeemen deem indecent. At one theater, a leaflet posted at the entrance said, "This is the last warning."
.....
Sitting in the Islamic Youth Center, under portraits of Shiite Muslim saints and Koranic verses inscribed on newly painted white walls, he said the same went for the U.S. occupation authorities and the kind of secularism he believed they were trying to instill in Iraq.
"We have warned them against these things. We will not stand by and watch," he said. "Our goal is to maintain the morality of society. The biggest disaster will be a lack of morality and immoral behavior in the name of freedom and democracy."
June 1, 2003:  Already, the Shiites have taken over hospitals and libraries, opened Islamic courts, provided administrative documents to the public and posted codes of behavior at schools. In some cases they are accused of abducting people linked to the Hussein regime, confiscating property and demanding money from businessmen.

http://members4.boardhost.com/acnaus/msg/1682.html
July 1, 2003:  Christian women have to go about covered from head to foot in veils in the street for their own safety, otherwise they would be attacked or abused. This is true especially in Basra.

http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/403226b74.pdf 
http://www.ict.org.il/Article/901/Muqtada%20al-Sadr%20A%20Threat%20to%20coalition%20forces%20and%20moderate%20Iraqi%20Shiite  
in July 2003, hundreds of al-Sadr’s followers took over the Sunni religious affairs offices in Basra, kicked out all the employees and appointed Hammed al-Sadi to replace the ousted director. Sadr’s men also seized the thousands of files and lists found in the offices. Subsequent Sunni requests for intervention, directed to the Iraqi police, British forces stationed in Basra and even to the provisional governing council were ignored .[19] Sadr’s followers even took over the city hall building in Sader City, kicked out all the employees on charges of accepting bribery, and appointed new representatives.[20]  Meanwhile, one of the Sunni leaders in Iraq, Dr. Abd al-Salam al-Kubisi, accused Muqtada Sader of taking over 18 Sunni mosques in the country, including 12 in Baghdad.[21] This charge came after of Sadr’s takeover of the only Sunni mosques in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala. 


https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Dt4NlW3tV0gC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40#v=onepage&q&f=false 
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1066214.html 
When questioned about such seizures in September 2003, al-Sadr said: "They [the mosques] were ours. Saddam Hussein stole them from us and we have taken them back. If the Sunnis want to come and pray here, they can do so on [the] condition that they will follow a Shi'ite imam in prayers. We are the majority and the majority must be respected." According to media reports, at least some, but likely not all, of the mosques have been returned to Sunnis since that time.

http://www.wnd.com/2003/12/22313/
Dec 16, 2003: The Barnabas Fund said Christians all over Iraq have received a notice from Al-Badr, the militia of the main Shia group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has a representative on the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council established by the U.N.-led coalition.
The notice reads:
In the name of God: the Merciful, the Compassionate. Do not adorn yourselves as ignorant women did before the time of Islam (Sura 33.33).
The leadership of the Islamic Badr Brigade hopes that the head of this noble family will stand with the Muslim brethren and follow basic Muslim rules. The veil should be worn and the honorable teachings of Islam that have come to us from ages past must be adhered to. We are Iraqis and Muslims; we will not tolerate sin. If this announcement is not complied with, we shall either inflict some unbearable punishment, kill offenders, kidnap them or destroy them in their homes with fire or by bombing.
This order applies to the daughters of this family, their mother and the little girls.
The Islamic Badr Brigade, Najaf
CBN said Shiite Muslims are becoming more aggressive and vocal in the Caldean Christian community led by Bishop Ishlemon Warduni.

Not long after the war began, followers of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini converted a Baath Party building next to his church into a mosque and mounted several loudspeakers in its direction.
“This is very unsettling,” Warduni told CBN. “During our church services, we can hear the Muslim call to prayer and it is very loud. It is frightening a lot of the Christians. Many are afraid to even come to the church. Attendance is very low.”
.....
Sheik Hadi Hussein Al-Ghazragi, leader of a prominent Shiite group gathering nationwide support, has insisted Islamic law “must be the foundation of this country and constitution.”
“All the citizens, including Christians, Jews and others who belong to different religions, must follow the strict rules of Islam,” he stated.


http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/iraqi-christians-fear-for-their-lives-120336
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1048495/posts
29 Dec 2003: Bashir Toma Elias was killed by a single shot to the head in the middle of Basra's bazaar on Christmas Eve as he prepared to head home to celebrate with his wife and five children.
....Since the war that toppled Saddam, armed groups have looted and set ablaze several liquor stores in the once freewheeling city, where Shi'ite religious parties now wield power and seek to impose strict moral regulations, similar to Iran.
More than 400 liquor stores run by Christians, the only community allowed to sell alcohol under the former Baathist government, were forced to close in the immediate aftermath of the US led occupation of Iraq.
......
Iraqi Christians are terrified of armed Shi'ite groups, which have names like God's Vengeance, God's Party and the Islamic Bases Organisation. Their members roam the streets to chase mobsters, drug addicts and prostitutes, exacting their brand of what they call God's law.....
Abdullah Faisal, head of the Islamic Bases Organisation, says Islam venerates his young "martyrdom seekers", who have a mandate from God to stamp out vice. But Faisal says the killings of liquor traders were carried out by undisciplined militant Islamic groups and that Islam opposed the summary executions witnessed in Basra.
"Some Islamic movements have challenged liquor merchants. There was burning and killings," he said. "Religion doesn't allow this even though we confront vice and crime."
Families cite growing intolerance in Basra's society at large, with schoolgirls and female university students under intimidation from teachers to wear the veil. "Our daughters are being fought. They are telling them you have to wear a veil and become a Muslim," said Abdulahad Wissam, a Christian who runs a chain of household goods stores.
Fears of worse to come have prompted more than 2 000 families from the community of at least 100 000 Christians in the city to pack up and leave. Most headed to northern Iraqi cities such as Mosul where their ancient communities trace their ancestry, their leaders say.


http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/iraq/article1994639.ece 
http://www.juancole.com/2003/12/basra-massive-drug-petroleum-smuggling.html 
Dec 30, 2003:  Steven Farrell reports in the London Times (12/30) of Basra: "Many of the theatres and music halls where [musicians] used to play have been shut, or converted for use by the many new Islamic parties that claim to represent Iraq's Shia Muslims, the overwhelming majority in Basra. While ice-cream and electronics stores thrive, the fundamentalists have shut down all alcohol shops, aided by rocket-propelled grenades and the summary killing of liquorsellers. Video and CD stores have been closed or had their wares heavily censored. In one CD shop in central Basra, posters of Britney Spears have been taken down. In their place are speeches of ayatollahs, to appease the self-appointed moral guardians." He says that Shiite Islamist gangs have beaten up musicians returning from weddings, e.g.
 

http://aina.org/releases/20040613151448.htm 
January 22, 2004: Sarmad Bazou defended an Iraqi mulsem translator in an argument between the translator and local Basra shiites. The local group responded that this is argument is not for him, a Christian, to be involved and shot him on site.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/magazine/the-shiite-surge.html
Feb 1, 2004: In Basra, a city now virtually alcohol-free, shadowy Shiite extremist groups like the 15th of Shabaan movement, which originated during the Shiite uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991, have mounted a concerted campaign of terror against Christian liquor-store owners, driving many out of business. Fifteenth of Shabaan and other militant groups have also been accused by Sunni tribal leaders in southern Iraq of trying to drive Sunni property owners from their land. A protest sent to Paul Bremer speaks of ''ethnic cleansing'' and lists the names of some 40 people whom the militants have supposedly expelled or kidnapped.
Feb 19, 2004:  Basra is becoming as dry as the endless desert around it. Nowhere in Iraq are attacks on vendors of alcoholic beverages as common as in the country's second-largest city, 60 miles from the Persian Gulf.  
The attack on bustling Old Basra Street, which killed at least five people, was the latest and deadliest in a string of assaults on alcohol salesmen in a city where conservative Shiite movements and political parties are struggling for dominance, possibly with the aid of members of the police force.  Over the summer, stores were firebombed and destroyed with rocket-propelled grenades. A Christian salesman was shot dead on Christmas Eve. In a murky incident on Feb. 1, plainclothes policemen engaged vendors in a gun battle that ended with British soldiers accidentally killing two of the policemen.  
The earlier attacks drove owners of liquor stores, both Muslim and Christian, to shut their shops and take their businesses underground, to places like the strip under an overpass on Old Basra Street.
...
Basra is a caldron of conservative Shiite groups vying for influence. Many people refer to some of them as vigilante organizations.  Names that come up often in such conversations include the Badr Brigade and the 15th of Shaban Party. The local leader of that group, named for the birth date of a mythical imam, denied any involvement in the attacks but had little sympathy for the victims.  
''If a man is selling or buying alcohol, we must tell him it's a bad thing,'' said Muhammad Sharif al-Hachami, the local director. ''If he doesn't leave his job, then we must punish him with 80 lashings. Then he will forget about doing bad things.'' 
13 March 2004: A Sunni Muslim cleric was wounded on Thursday in what he claimed was an assassination attempt against him that killed his son and son-in-law. Nazem Khalaf, a cleric at the Rahman mosque in Abu Dsheer, a suburb in southwestern Baghdad, said that assailants drove up next to his car and opened fire.
...The alleged attempt is the second known attack on a Sunni Muslim cleric following the bombings at Shiite Muslim shrines in Karbala and Baghdad on March 2 which killed at least 181 people and left 573 wounded. It was the bloodiest day since the ouster of Saddam Hussein last April.
On Wednesday, the US military said that the imam of the al-Qubaisi mosque, in west Baghdad, was shot and killed by unknown assailants on Sunday. The imam, Sheik Ali al-Dhabi, was killed in a drive-by shooting.


http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0324/p07s01-woiq.html
March 24, 2004: As the car turned onto the bumpy rutted track leading into their run-down Shiite neighborhood, four masked gunmen forced them to stop. Likaa was told to get out of the car and lie on the ground. She was shot in the head point-blank. Shamia was shot where she sat in the rear seat.
...Iraqi police believe the girls were killed because of their employment with the coalition.
...The CPA in Basra estimates about 150 militias and political parties operate in this mainly Shiite city of 1.3 million. 


Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article24440125.html#storylink=cpy

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article24440125.html
March 25, 2004:  As al Asadi spoke to a reporter in a courtyard, a scruffy-looking man handed out fliers that likened uncovered women to prostitutes and murderers.
...While there are no known cases of women being attacked for not covering up, three alcohol vendors and two bystanders were gunned down in February, the latest in a string of such assaults. A few weeks ago, gunmen pumped six bullets into a woman who ran a shop that sold romantic videos.


http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4923763/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/al-sadr-aide-reward-killing-british-troops/#.V2JwKY5uU1g
May 7, 2004: A senior aide of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr told worshippers today that anyone who captures a female British soldier can keep her as a slave.  The aide, Sheik Abdul-Sattar al-Bahadli, also called on supporters to launch jihad, or holy war, against British troops in this southern city.  He also offered money for anyone who captures or kills a member of the Governing Council, a widely unpopular interim administration appointed by the U.S.-led occupation 10 months ago.  Al-Bahadli, al-Sadr's chief representative in southern Iraq, was speaking in a Friday sermon at al-Hawi mosque in central Basra.
 
==================

Attack on Iraq's antiquities



Sep 9, 2006: The Nasiriyah Museum was burned and looted in 2004 by militants affiliated with Mr. Sadr. The museum’s guards reported that the militants promised to do to the antiquities there exactly “what the Taliban did.”
The center for Iraq’s illicit antiquities trade, Fajr, in the heart of the Sumerian plain, is also a stronghold for militants loyal to Mr. Sadr. And anti-Western graffiti has appeared at looted archaeological sites.

Sep 20, 2004:"At the time it was like a pleasant dream sequence in a long nightmare," says Hamadani, "The looters did not join the Al-Mahdi army because they believe in fighting the Occupation, it's more about personal vendetta. Now they were able to intensify their activities. There were no Italian forces at the Nasiriya Museum when the library was set ablaze. The smugglers are now controlling life in this district and nothing is stopping them from looting."
"These people have no respect for anything, not even their own religion," claims Georges. "Last May, they stole the treasures of the Imam Ali in Najaf. No one really knows what was there but it is widely believed that those were the treasures of the Islamic Sultans. People have been donating their most precious objects to the Mausoleum since the birth of Islam. All that is vanished today."


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/middleeast/28antiquities.html
28 August 2006:
The director of the Baghdad Museum has resigned and moved to Syria because he felt under threat from fundamentalists with ties to the Shiite-led government
Nov 9, 2006: Dr Lamia Al-Gailani Werr, a former cultural adviser to the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council, believed that Dr George had been forced to leave Iraq because of his faith.
“They [the authorities] deny it like anything, but that was one of the reasons why he left,” she said. The other reason was his family’s safety. “His son was definitely threatened, and that was the end of it. He decided he had had enough.”
Dr Eleanor Robson, an expert in Iraqi antiquities, said Sadarists (followers of the extreme Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr) now ran the Ministry of Culture, and had no interest in pre-Islamic heritage. Instead of preserving all of Iraq’s heritage, the Ministry of Culture was prioritising the restoration of Shia shrines.


http://www.andrewlawler.com/discover-interview-director-of-iraqs-national-museum/
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/aug/discover-interview-director-iraqi-national-museum
August 3, 2007:  
The last straw was when I was told by the minister’s adviser that I should look after myself. He said the al-Sadr party had given an order that since I was Christian, I should not be allowed to keep my job, that it was very important a Shiite Muslim have the position. I was shocked.
.......
Last year, al-Sadr’s followers attacked and burned the museum of Nasiriyah and its library. They said to the guards—and I know this is true because I spoke with them—“tell [local inspector] Abdul Amir Hamadan we will do to your antiquities exactly what the Taliban did!” In Najaf, al-Sadr’s party was heard to tell worshippers that looting artifacts is ethical so long as the money goes for guns or building mosques. And we have started to have problems in an area in Basra called Zobeir—the original Basra—which was founded by the caliph Omar in A.D. 638. Our inspector says people are building houses on the site, in practice destroying the first Islamic city that was built outside the Arab peninsula. Historically, Omar is considered the enemy of all Shiites. So is it being destroyed intentionally or just neglected? I don’t know.

=================

 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3529364.stm
August 2, 2004: Several Christian merchants have had their shops burnt down because they sold alcohol. Such vigilante violence is believed to be the work of local Iraqi Islamists, including the followers of radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr.


http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/1227.htm 
Sep 2004: [Najaf] police found a mass grave with 200 bodies of men, women, and even children, who were tortured and killed at the order of the Shari'a court established by Muqtada Al-Sadr during his control of Najaf for allegedly cooperating with the occupation forces or for refusing to obey the orders of the Mahdi Army. [13] Similar Shari'a courts established by Muqtada Al-Sadr operate in the Al-Sadr City neighborhood in Baghdad.
...One unveiled student at the University of Basra, who is not Muslim, had her clothes torn off in public. [14] Any contact between male and female students is now taboo. Today, even young girls must go to school veiled. In Al-Sadr City religious vigilantes have not hesitated from hitting women with sticks if they appeared in public in immodest dress. [15]


http://www.bpnews.net/19302
http://www.christianheadlines.com/news/iraqi-christians-fleeing-to-jordan-syria-1289972.html
Oct 7, 2004: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has condemned the assaults on churches as "hideous crimes," Muslim leaders have largely refused to criticize the killings of Christians who work for the U.S. military or sell liquor. Beauty salons and shops selling music cassettes run by Christians have also been targeted because they are deemed offensive to strict Islamic practices. Christian businessman Sawa Eissa said it was more than threats that forced him and his family out of Baghdad and over the border to Jordan. He said militants linked to renegade Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr recently kidnapped and tortured him until his family paid ransom money."


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/world/middleeast/22security.html?pagewanted=print 
"In December 2004, senior officers in the Basra Police Department were implicated in the killings of 10 members of the Baath Party, according to a State Department report.
...

In the early morning of Aug. 24, 2005, about 50 men wearing police uniforms swept into the Huriya neighborhood in northern Baghdad and dragged 36 Sunni Arab men from their homes, according to a State Department report. Their bodies were found near the Iranian border with bullet holes in their heads, their faces disfigured by acid.... Although a judge ordered the unit's commander, Brig. Gen. Bassem al-Gharrawi, arrested for murder, the arrest warrant was never executed.


http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/how-iraqs-civil-war-broke-out-in-diyala.html 
[2005]: Wolf Brigade (an all Shia unit) of their Special Police. It raided into Diyala twice in 2005---and again this before formal elections had happened taking each time in excess of 500 Sunni prisoners---not a single Shia was ever touched.
... 
we recovered over 80 prisoners being held by the new Iraqi Army in a hidden prison who had been badly tortured-all Sunni and located another prison being run by the Iraqi 6th Army Division that held even 13 year old Sunni prisoners who were being abused and underfed—all with the statements “Hey they are criminals so we can treat them as dogs”. None had been charged or convicted and some had been held as long as a year. Again all of this before the 2005 elections.
.....
by mid 2005, a subtle and sometimes not so subtle tit for tat ethnic cleansing was starting long before the actual wave was triggered allegedly by Zarqawi.
20 Feb 2005: [Basra] Women afraid to go outdoors without headscarves for fear of Shia militias.

http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Iraq%20Syria%20Lebanon/Iraq/52_the_next_iraqi_war_sectarianism_and_civil_conflict
For a year and a half, from August 2003 until February 2005, such attacks met with barely a response from most Shiites, except deepening anger and calls for revenge. The only ones accused of meting out revenge from the outset were members of the Badr Organisation, allegedly responsible for the assassination of former regime officials and suspected Baath party members, in addition to  suspected insurgents, but for a long time these actions did not reach critical mass.
.......
Muqtada  Sadr  has  had  broad  appeal  among  Sunni  Arabs   because  of  his  strong  nationalist,  anti-occupation  stand,  his  apparent  opposition  to  federalism,  and  his open solidarity with Sunnis during times of crisis, for example,  the  November  2004  U.S.  assault  on  Falluja. [ The Sadrists also celebrated the feast marking the end of Ramadan in 2005, the Eid al-Fitr, on the date set by Saudi  Arabia rather than Iran in a show of solidarity with the Sunnis.]  Sadr’s office also pointedly reminded Iraqis that residents of the  predominantly Adhamiya neighbourhood of Baghdad had gone out of their way, during the Kadhemiya bridge disaster in August  2005,  to rescue  (Shiite)  victims from the river, showing that “Sunnis and Shiites are  brothers”.  Yet  altercations  between  Sadrists  and  Sunni  Arabs  have  occurred,  probably  because  many  Sadrists   see  Sunni  Arabs  as  Baathists  and  terrorists.  The  fact  that   Sadr’s  movement  is  so  inchoate  may  have  led  to  armed   attacks  on  Sunni  Arabs  regardless  of  Muqtada’s  official   stance.  
.....
[After January 2005 elections] Iraqis witnessed a steep rise in killings of Sunnis that could not be explained by the fight against insurgents alone. Carried out during curfew hours in the dead of night and reportedly involving armed men dressed in police or military uniforms arriving in cars bearing state emblems, raids in predominantly Sunni towns or neighbourhoods appeared to cast a wide net. Those seized later turned up in detention centres or, with a disturbing frequency, in the morgue after having been found – hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded, teeth broken, shot – in a ditch or river. These raids prompted suspicions that they were carried out by Badr members operating under government identity and targeted the Sunni community rather than any particular insurgent group or criminal gang.
....
According to Tareq al-Hashemi, secretary general of the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party, some 55 pilots were killed in the six months before September 2005: “There is a sense of revenge. They have a list of former pilots in Saddam’s regime, and they are looking for them. It is part of a strategic Iranian plan to push the Sunnis out”. Crisis Group interview, Baghdad, 5 September 2005. The assassinations are attributed specifically to SCIRI, a group that was established in and financed and armed by Iran, and that fought on the Iranian side during the Iran-Iraq war in an effort to put an end to the Baathist regime. Some reports suggest that the victims also include Shiite pilots not sympathetic to Iran. If true, the killings may be part of an Iranian effort to create a pro-Iranian Iraqi air force, one unlikely to attack Iran, as happened in September 1980.


 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/world/middleeast/20university.html
[Mustansiriya University] is under the sway of an armed group of violent Shiite students in engineering, literature, law and other disciplines; faculty members; and campus security guards.
.....  professors and administrators at the school solemnly give the names of colleagues and students who were threatened by the group before being found dead: Jasim al-Fahaidawi, a professor of Arabic literature, shot dead at the university’s entrance in 2005; Najeb al-Salihi, a psychology professor, kidnapped in 2006 near the campus and found in the morgue three weeks later, shot to death; and Jasim Fiadh al-Shammari, a psychology professor fatally shot near the university, also in 2006.



http://www.aina.org/news/20050324155721.htm
March 15, 2005 (Basra, Iraq) — About 30 members of the gang of Mugtada al-Sadr (the al-Mahdi Army) attacked a group of Engineering College students of Basra University. The students were having a picnic at al-Andalus Park, downtown Basra, when a hooded gang in the name of Islam attacked and began to beat them with batons and sticks. One Christian student Zahra Ashor was killed and fifteen others students were badly injured. When a fellow student attempted to help Zahra, he was shot in the head. At least 20 students were kidnapped and taken to Sadr's office in al-Tuwaisa for 'interrogation' and were released late at night. The gang stole the student's belongings, including telephones, jewelry, and destroyed the tape recorder they were using to listen to music and many tapes. The attacks are because the female students were not wearing the Islamic hijab (veil) and because the students were listening to music.
March 23, 2005: The students had begun to lay out their picnic in the spring sunshine when
the men attacked. "There were dozens of them, armed with guns, and they poured into the park," said Ali al-Azawi, 21, the engineering student who had organised the gathering in Basra.

"They started shouting at us that we were immoral, that we were meeting boys and girls together and playing music, and that this was against Islam.

"They began shooting in the air and people screamed. Then, with one order, they began beating us with their sticks and rifle butts."

Two students are said to have been killed.

Standing over them as the blows rained down was the man who gave the order, dressed in dark clerical garb and wearing a black turban. Mr Azawi recognised him immediately as a follower of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric.
...
Students say there was nothing spontaneous about the attack on the picnickers. Police were guarding the picnic in the park, as is customary at any large public gathering, but allowed the armed men in without any resistance.

One brought a video camera to record the sinful spectacle of the picnic, footage of which was later released to the public as a warning to others.

It showed images of one girl struggling as a gunman ripped her blouse off, leaving her half-naked. "We will send these pictures to your parents so they can see how you were dancing naked with men," a gunman told her.

Two students who went to her aid were shot -- one in the leg, the other twice in the stomach. The latter was said to have died of his injuries. Fellow students say the girl later committed suicide. Another girl was severely beaten around the head and lost her sight.

Far from disavowing the attack, senior Sadr loyalists said they had a duty to stop the students' "dancing, sexy dress and corruption".

"We beat them because we are authorised by Allah to do so and that is our duty," Sheik Ahmed al-Basri said after the attack. "It is we who should deal with such disobedience and not the police."
April 24, 2005: BASRA, Iraq -- Sheikh Assad al-Basri says there's no need to worry that he and his Islamist militiamen might recreate a repressive Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq.  That's because the Islamic Republic of Iran is far too liberal, according to Basri, the leading local representative of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
...
During celebrations commemorating the martyrdom of Shiite saint Imam Hussein, some 6,000 armed members of Sadr's Mahdi Army marched through the streets in a show of strength. Their influence and intimidation have arrived in all parts of this city of 1.5 million.
"They are everywhere," said Muhamad Nassir, a physician who heads Basra Maternity and Pediatric Hospital. "Some of them recently visited our hospital to try to convince us to forbid male doctors from curing female patients."
His colleagues from a nearby hospital -- renamed Sadr Hospital after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime-- complained that Sadr's followers have hung posters of the young cleric inside the wards.
"They watch us," said one doctor, who requested anonymity to protect his safety. "I have received a few death threats. I am afraid to talk. To protect myself, I bought a pistol, which I hide under my shirt."
....
Fear is palpable on the streets. One day three months ago, a female student from Basra University's college of sciences was ordered to cover her hair. She refused to comply. Three days later she was found dead on the road to her house, said her classmates and professors.
Even picnics along the Shatt al-Arab waterway where the Tigris meets the Euphrates -- a treasured rite in steamy Basra -- have become an illicit act. In a high-profile incident first publicized by Iraqi television stations in Baghdad, Sadr's militiamen violently broke up a picnic last month attended by hundreds of engineering students beneath the palm trees of al-Andalus Park. As boys played volleyball and girls listened to music, men armed with knives, metal bars and assault rifles rushed them, firing shots into the air
The Sunni Arab community often cited police raids of its mosques and religious sites as an example of targeting by the Shi'a-dominated government. 
On May 19, 2005, for example, security forces raided Baghdad's prominent Sunni Abu Hanifa Mosque as Friday prayers were ending, reportedly to detain alleged terrorists. Local leaders complained that security forces used tear gas and abused women. The prime minister subsequently provided compensation for damages to the Sunni religious endowment office and promised a full investigation of the incident. 
On June 9, 2005, police broke into Amarra's Sunni Hetteen Mosque in the south charging that it harbored terrorists. Subsequently, the police turned the mosque over to the Shi'a Endowment Office, which changed its name to Fatima Al Zahraa Mosque.
May 28, 2005: Not just the Christians, but many of the city's minorities -- from obscure sects like the ancient Sabeans to the sizable Sunni Muslim community - - live in fear of the hard-line Shiite religious parties and their militias that now rule Iraq's second-largest city.
Freedom has been curtailed for women, regardless of their religion. Several decades ago, almost no woman in Basra covered her head. Now, they all do, under fear of harassment or worse.
.... 
Women working for foreign companies or governments, and those considered to have loose morals, have been marked for death by the militants -- two Iraqi sisters who worked in the laundry at the U.S. compound in Basra were assassinated last year. 
..... 
In April 2004, one of the Shiite militias revolted against the British army. Christians who had been licensed to sell alcohol under Hussein were attacked and sometimes killed by the militants. The church started to receive threatening letters intended to extort money, Fathallah said.

June 8, 2005: On May 12, Ayad al-Samarrae, a Sunni cleric, was kidnapped in Baghdad. Two days later he was found dead. Family members said that, judging from holes in the corpse, he appeared to have been tortured with an electric drill. On May 15, Sunni clerics Hassan al-Naimi and Tala Nayef were kidnapped from separate Baghdad mosques by men wearing Iraqi police commando uniforms. They were later found dead. Pictures of al-Naimi show what appear to be drill holes in his shoulder, head and neck.
Similar crimes have continued. On June 5, a Sunni cleric in Basra was taken by men wearing police uniforms. His corpse was found two days later under a bridge. A spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, said that the cleric's eye had been gouged out and that he had drill holes in his chest.
....Firas al-Nakib, a Sunni and a senior legal adviser in the interior ministry, said that since the new government was installed, more than 160 senior members of the ministry have been dismissed and many police commanders have been replaced by Shiites loyal to the Shiite bloc that won the elections. Many of the new commanders, he said, are members of Badr or are connected to the Supreme Council.
"They are putting in battalion commanders who are loyal to one idea and not the whole country," Nakib said.
When men in police uniforms stormed a mosque in his neighborhood and detained 30 people last month, Nakib said his neighbors asked him the reason for the raid. He said he asked at work the next day and was told by other interior officials to stay out of the matter.
Five of the 30 people were later found in the morgue, their bodies mutilated and tortured, Nakib said. The rest are still unaccounted for.
An interior spokesman said the ministry's troops weren't involved and that police uniforms had been stolen. Asked who he thought was behind the abductions and killings, Nakib paused and then said: "Badr, of course."
Al-Ameri, the Badr leader, said that while his militiamen aren't targeting Sunnis, they "still exist and they are ready. ... The sons of Badr are ready to defend Iraq from terrorism," which he said was the work of Sunni Baathists and Sunni jihadists.
Mohammed Jassim Mohammed, a 29-year-old engineering graduate student at Baghdad University, said he's proof that Badr is targeting Sunnis.
When men wearing army uniforms kidnapped him from his home south of Baghdad in April, beating and torturing him for more than 12 days, Mohammed said they made it clear they were from Badr.
"When we were tortured, they said how dare you fight against the Badr Brigade," Mohammed said, sobbing during a telephone interview.

June 27, 2005: BASRA, Iraq — Physicians have been beaten for treating female patients. Liquor salesmen have been killed. Even barbers have faced threats for giving haircuts judged too short or too fashionable. Religion rules the streets of this once cosmopolitan city, where women no longer dare go out uncovered.
"We can't sing in public anymore," said Hussin Nimma, a popular singer from the south. "It's ironic. We thought that with the change of the regime, people would be more open to singing, art and poetry."
Unmarked cars cruise the streets, carrying armed, plain-clothed enforcers of Islamic law. Who they are or answer to is unclear, but residents believe they are part of a battle for Basra's soul. In the spring, Shiite and Sunni Muslim officials were killed in a series of assassinations here, and residents feared their city would fall prey to the kind of sectarian violence ailing the rest of the country.
Instead, conservative Shiite Islamic parties have solidified their grip, fully institutionalizing their power in a city where the Shiite majority had long been persecuted by the Sunni-dominated rule of Saddam Hussein.


http://articles.philly.com/2005-06-28/news/25437653_1_iraqi-police-killings-interior-minister-bayan-jabr 
June 28, 2005:  director of Baghdad's central morgue began noticing that the bodies of Sunni Muslim men were turning up after the men had been detained by people wearing Iraqi police uniforms. Faik Baqr, who is also the chief forensic investigator at the morgue, said the corpses first caught his attention because the men appeared to have been killed in methodical fashion. They were blindfolded and their hands had been tied or handcuffed behind their backs, Baqr said. In most cases, the morgue director said, the dead men looked as if they had been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and shot to death, often with a single bullet to the head.
July 7, 2005: In the music bazaar, a tattered warning sign appears on a shuttered instrument shop owned by a famous musician known as Kareem Trumpet. The sign denounces as "soldiers of Satan" the city's "whorehouses and dealers in porn DVD's and gambling shops and music stores."
The bazaar is just blocks away from a strip where sidewalk alcohol vendors once thrived, before armed vigilantes and policemen drove them away.  At least three former officials of the Sunni-dominated Baath Party were gunned down in separate incidents, and a Sunni Arab cleric was kidnapped near his mosque and shot dead. Days later a Shiite cleric was fatally shot while going home.
Few women walk around without a head scarf and full-length black robe. A young woman who gave her name as Layla said she could wear jeans without a robe a year ago. But seven months before, as she strode from her house, a group of men came up to her and warned her that she was improperly dressed.  She says she no longer goes out in public without a robe.
Religious Shiites do not have to legally enshrine Shariah, or Koranic law, to exercise their will. Enforcement of Islamic practices is done on the streets, in the shadows. "We're trying to do it culturally rather than impose it by law," said Furat al-Shara, the local representative for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite political party, known by the acronym Sciri, that holds powerful positions in the national government.  "In the mosques and universities where people learn, we tell them it's a negative thing to do," Mr. Shara said of drinking alcohol or of women appearing in public without scarves.
Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Bahadli, a senior official in the Sadr movement, which is prominent in the National Assembly, summed up the conservative viewpoint:
"If Shariah exists everywhere in the world, in China, Korea or Japan, for example, and not just in Iraq, everyone will be happy."
Clerics like Sheik Bahadli and Mr. Shara do not operate on the margins of society here. Increasingly, people are going to them to sort out day-to-day problems. As this reporter sat in Sheik Bahadli's office one evening, three men walked in to ask him to settle a dispute between a renter and his landlord.
Politicians loyal to Sciri and to Ayatollah Muhammad Yacoubi, a radical cleric close to the Sadr movement, dominate the 41-seat Basra provincial council as a result of the January elections. The two religious groups are rivals. The governor, Muhammad al-Waeli, belongs to the ayatollah's party.  A faded poster of the white-bearded Ayatollah Yacoubi appears on a gate outside Mr. Waeli's fortified office, ordering Iraqis not to buy or sell American, British or French cigarettes. Beside it hangs a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini with even harsher words: "All the problems of Islam stem from colonialism and the Great Powers."


http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/iraqi-professor-found-dead-in-basra-247659
July 8, 2005: Gunmen kidnapped and killed a university professor in southern Iraq and a physician in a central city in separate incidents, police said on Friday.
Jumhour Karim Khammas, a professor at Basra University, was kidnapped and his body was found on Friday with three bullet wounds, Lieutenant Colonel Karim al-Zubaidi said.
Khammas, a Sunni Muslim and a former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, was kidnapped on Thursday, said Shaker al-Basri, a spokesperson for the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni group.
Khammas headed the Arabic language department at Basra University before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but was demoted to professor shortly after.
Meanwhile, gunmen abducted Dr Hussein Al-Shamari from his clinic in the central city of Samarra on Friday, police Captain Laith Mohammed said. His body was later found with several bullet wounds, he said.
Attacks against university professors were common after Saddam's overthrow because many of them had close ties to his regime. But it was not clear if Khammas' killing was linked to tensions between Iraq's Shi'a and Sunni communities. Basra is mostly Shi'a.
July 13, 2005:  Last March, Mr. Sadr's followers disrupted a picnic held by Basra University students, during which men and women - many with their hair uncovered - played secular music and mingled freely. In the ensuing melee, Sadrists beat and robbed students, and one woman temporarily lost her eyesight. And though Sadr's office later apologized for the incident, some members remain unrepentant. "We believe we have a religious task to separate good behavior from bad," says Abu Zahara al-Mayahi, a director of Sadr's Basra office.
The militias have also harassed Basra's media. At the scene of the picnic attack, for example, Sadr's men physically assaulted and broke the equipment of cameramen trying to film the event. Recently, the author of a newspaper article about the Sadrist movement received death threats because the newspaper accompanied the article with a photograph that showed many women with uncovered hair.
But even this type of thuggery is not the only manifestation of religious extremism in Basra today. "This is a city where if you have a birthday party for your child, you could end up dead," says one Iraqi journalist.
As drama professor Thawra Yousif Yaakub relates, her sister-in-law Salina belonged to an all-female band that performed at baby showers, birthday parties, and other festive occasions, playing before all-women audiences only. Last May, the band were unloading their equipment on the street after a gig, when a man leaped out of a car and opened fire, killing Salina and another band member. "They died because they were women and they made music," Yaakub says.
According to Iraqi officials, nearly 1,000 people - most of them Sunni Muslims - have been killed in the city over the past three months, with 100 murdered in one week in May alone. In June, unknown assailants killed three Sunni clerics: the bullet-ridden body of one was found beside his untouched car, a clear sign that the murder was politically motivated, rather than a criminal act.


August 4, 2005: The assassins have targeted mostly men who are thought to have been connected to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which was dominated by Sunni Muslims. About 950 people have been killed since Hussein's regime was toppled in April 2003, according to Majid al-Sari, the Defense Ministry adviser for the southern region. About half of the dead, Sari said, are Sunnis, who make up about 30 percent of the city's population.   As a result, many Sunni families are selling their homes and migrating to other provinces and countries. They are not the only victims. "Even among those Baathists who have been killed, there were Shiites," Sari said. "Daily we find bodies, and 90 percent of them are political crimes."  Many of the killings are attributed to men in police patrol cars who kidnap and kill or commit drive-by shootings... Professor Hamed al-Azzawi retreats behind the concrete walls of his home after work at Basra University. He has not gone to the city center in months. Before he leaves home, he peeks out from behind a steel gate and checks the street for gunmen and kidnappers.  Eight of his friends at the university have been killed, five Sunnis and three Shiites. Shiites, too, had to join the Baath Party to get ahead in Hussein's Iraq.  Azzawi says he will sell the home where he raised three sons and move to another country.  "Saddam killed the Shiite; now we bear the consequences," he said. "I want to save my life. If I were a Shiite, I would have more chances to survive."

August 3, 2005:  Steven Vincent, An American journalist from New York who was writing about the rise of conservative Shiite Islam and the corruption of the Iraqi police was abducted and shot dead in Basra.
 
http://www.mickware.info/2002-2009/2005/files/1ed99bba67b6c013794d8844a97615ab-11.php 
August 15, 2005:  The U.S. Military's new nemesis in Iraq is named Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, and he is not a Baathist or a member of al-Qaeda. He is working for Iran. According to a U.S. military-intelligence document obtained by TIME, al-Sheibani heads a network of insurgents created by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps with the express purpose of committing violence against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. Over the past eight months, his group has introduced a new breed of roadside bomb more lethal than any seen before; based on a design from the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hizballah, the weapon employs "shaped" explosive charges that can punch through a battle tank's armor like a fist through the wall. According to the document, the U.S. believes al-Sheibani's team consists of 280 members, divided into 17 bombmaking teams and death squads. The U.S. believes they train in Lebanon, in Baghdad's predominantly Shi'ite Sadr City district and "in another country" and have detonated at least 37 bombs against U.S. forces this year in Baghdad alone.
.....
In southern cities, Thar-Allah (Vengeance of God) is one of a number of militant groups suspected of assassinations. U.S. commanders in Baghdad and in eastern provinces say similar cells operate in their sectors. The chief of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, General Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, has publicly accused Iranian-backed cells of hunting down and killing his officers. In October he blamed agents in Iran's Baghdad embassy of coordinating assassinations of up to 18 of his people, claiming that raids on three safe houses uncovered a trove of documents linking the agents to funds funneled to the Badr Corps for the purposes of "physical liquidation."
August 20, 2005: Mohammed Musabah, the governor of Basra, acknowledged that the police were infiltrated by religious parties... Since May, political leaders estimate that as many as 65 assassinations have occurred in Basra. Among the victims were a lieutenant colonel in the Defense Ministry, a Baath Party-era police officer, a merchant with ties to Hussein's government, two university professors and a municipal official who had tried to combat corruption.
....
Ammar Muther, a 30-year-old member of Iraq's Border Police, had brought his father 110 miles south from the city of Amarah to Basra in December. A senior Baathist and a missile engineer in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, his father, Muther Abadi, had already escaped what he believed was an assassination attempt by Basra police who traveled to Amarah in two pickup trucks. Muther thought his father would be more secure with him in his home in Basra.
On a cold day that month, Muther recalled, he was downtown when his cell phone rang. It was his brother-in-law, his words urgent and clipped. "Come immediately to the house," Muther recalled him saying.
When Muther arrived, his father was gone. Six uniformed policemen in black masks had entered his house, his family told him. They put a gun to his wife's head and locked her, his mother and the children in the bedroom. The father tried to run, but police caught him. He clawed at the door as they dragged him away.
"The neighbors just watched," Muther said. "What could they do? It was the police."
Muther searched for five hours for his abducted father in Basra's streets. As the sun began to set, he gave up and returned home. Minutes later, a friend rushed into his house, crying. He had heard that Muther's father had been killed.
That evening, the father's corpse was found in The Lot, amid rusted cans and water bottles. He had been shot five times -- twice in the chest, twice in the face and once in the temple.

August 26, 2005: The day before, the body of Jumhour el-Zergany, his university mentor, had been found dumped alongside the road. Zergany had been tortured, his arms broken, before his tormentors finally put three bullets in his head. His crime, the professor said, was that he had converted years before from Shia to Sunni Islam and had dared to hire religious Sunni professors in the history department that he chaired.   
A police van was seen by witnesses to have stopped Zergany's car at the time of his disappearance, and police vehicles and sometimes men in police uniforms have been involved in others of the hundreds - perhaps as many as 1,000 - assassinations in Basra in the past 18 months.   It is not just Sunnis who are being targeted in this majority Shia city, the professor said, but other Shia as well. All professors - particularly those interested in politics, like himself - are in danger. And not just professors, but judges, and doctors and journalists. And politicians who are seen as secular alternatives to the clergy now in power. And those, especially women, who work for foreigners. And Christians.   
U.S. and Iraqi sources say it is often police intelligence officers who commit the killings. British forces, which patrol this region, made a deal to integrate the religious militias here into the police in return for the militias' disbanding. But they never stopped serving their former masters, the Shia clerics who lead the political parties now in power.  
Sep 3, 2005: Gunmen opened fire on worshipers at two Sunni mosques in southern Iraq on Friday morning, killing one and wounding four, as imams across the country devoted their weekly sermons to the nearly 1,000 victims of Wednesday's deadly stampede in Baghdad.  
The attacks took place in Zubayr, a Sunni town south of Basra in Iraq's largely Shiite south. Men in a white sedan drove up to the Mizel Pasha Mosque as worshipers were finishing their dawn prayers and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, killing one man and wounding three, witnesses said. The gunmen then drove to another Sunni mosque a few hundred yards away, opening fire and wounding one worshiper before driving away.
....
It was not clear whether the attacks in Zubayr were linked to the stampede in Baghdad, which happened while tens of thousands of Shiite pilgrims were crossing a bridge on their way to a Shiite shrine.  The stampede began shortly after insurgents had fired rockets and mortars at the shrine, killing seven pilgrims and wounding two dozen. Some Shiite leaders have publicly blamed Sunni Arab insurgents and hinted at reprisals, and Zubayr is known as a stronghold for militant Sunnis.  
A number of Sunni Arabs have been killed in southern and central Iraq in recent weeks, and some Sunnis have accused militias controlled by Shiite religious parties of carrying out the killings.
Sep 20, 2005: An Iraqi journalist working for the New York Times has been killed after men claiming to be police officers abducted him from his home in Basra.  Fakher Haider, who had also worked for the Guardian and National Geographic, was found dead in a deserted area of the Iraqi city yesterday.
Oct 8, 2005: British forces launched a fresh crackdown in Basra yesterday when troops seized 12 Iraqis, including police officers, who were suspected of involvement in attacks against coalition forces.
A house filled with members of a Shia militia was raided just hours after Tony Blair accused Iran of exporting technology and explosives to guerrilla allies in Basra and other parts of southern Iraq.
The operation underlined a new policy of confronting militias, who are blamed for increasingly lethal roadside bombs that have killed eight soldiers, three of them British, in recent months.
......
Sheik Khalil al-Maliki, a member of the Mahdi army militia loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said the detainees were his comrades. "I think the reason is the recent British claim about Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs."
British officials would not confirm reports that the raid used armoured vehicles and focused on members of the internal affairs unit at the Jameat station, one of several Basra police units said to owe loyalty to Shia militias rather than the government in Baghdad.
Oct 9, 2005:  It's not just Shia who are displacing themselves to be among their own kind, though they are the main victims of the Sunni-led insurgents. Many Sunnis, terrified of death squads and Shia-dominated police who look the other way, are fleeing Shia areas even if they don't support the insurgency. Dozens of Sunni families left Basra in the past year, fearing attacks from Shiite militias that dominate that southern city. "For a Sunni family like mine that was swimming in a lagoon of Shiites, it was almost impossible to continue living in Basra," said one refugee, Abu Mishal.
Oct 16, 2005:  Local people say three female students at Basra University have been killed for failing to cover themselves in the black abaya and hijab.  This follows a notorious incident in March when gunmen attacked students in a park.  As the police stood by, the gunmen ripped the blouse from one woman, leaving her half-naked. Two male students who went to help her were shot.  The militia filmed all this, concentrating on the woman's humiliation; she was later said to have committed suicide.  The gunmen, loyal to a radical Shia cleric, distributed a CD of the footage in Basra.  It was a warning to others not to allow men and women to mix in public. 
"The militia were hitting us again and again with iron bars and rifle butts," said one of the students.  "I have left Basra with my family now because the militias control all aspects of our lives, because of the killing and the kidnapping."
Oct 29, 2005: Iran is backing a Shia insurgent campaign of systematically assassinating former elite Iraqi air force pilots as part of a covert sectarian war against Sunnis, according to senior politicians in Baghdad.  The spate of murders of pilots has prompted an intervention from Jalal Talabani, Iraq's president, who has offered them safe haven in his native Kurdistan even though some of them were involved in dropping chemical weapons there.
....
One of the pilots assassinated was Ismael Saeed Fares, 48, known as "the Hawk of Baghdad" because of his legendary exploits. A series of daring raids at the end of the eight-year war with Iran earned him a string of medals and the admiration of millions.
They also earned him 24 bullets in his chest, fired at point-blank range by a gunman who struck as he sat with a neighbour in the garden of his home in north Baghdad earlier this year. Scores of others are believed to have been murdered, although precise figures are not available. There is no suggestion that Mr Fares was involved in the anti-Kurdish atrocities of the Anfal campaign.
The organised manner in which the murders have been carried out, each with multiple shots fired from an AK47, has fuelled suspicions that elements within Iraq's Iranian-linked government are behind them.
"Many of my father's friends have already left Iraq for Jordan because they received written death threats warning them to leave," said Mr Fares' son, Wisam, 21.
Victim's families suspect their names and addresses have been taken from old records at Iraq's ministry of defence. They claim that the killings are the work of the Badr Brigade.
Nov 17, 2005: About 2 a.m. on Aug. 23, men in Volcano Brigade uniforms and trucks rolled into the streets of Dolay, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood of western Baghdad, residents say. “I got a call from my cousins” around the corner, said Ahmed Abu Yusuf, 33, an unemployed Sunni. “They told me to stay hidden because the Volcano were in the streets, arresting Sunnis.”  For three hours, the raiders burst into Sunni homes, handcuffed dozens of men and loaded them into vans. They ended the assault and drove out of the neighborhood just before the dawn call to prayer, which would bring men into the streets, walking to the local mosques, Abu Yusuf said.  Two days later and 90 miles away, residents of the desert town of Badrah, near the Iranian border, found the bodies of 36 of the men in a gully, their hands still bound and their skulls shattered by bullets. Two were the cousins who had phoned him the warning, Abu Yusuf said.  The Volcano Brigade’s commander, Bassem Gharawi, has denied his force committed the massacre. But Shiite and Sunni Iraqis close to the unit, some of them high-ranking security officials, said it took part — whether on its own or with the Badr militia. “No one can talk openly about the Volcanoes because we could easily be killed,” said a government official who discussed the matter in hushed tones this month in a corridor away from his office.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/17/iraq.topstories3
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/17/world/middleeast/iraqi-rift-grows-afterdiscovery-of-prison.html
17 Nov 2005: This hidden struggle surfaced last week when US forces and Iraqi police raided an Interior Ministry bunker only a couple of hundred yards from where we were standing. They found 169 tortured and starving captives, who looked like Holocaust victims. The "disappeared" prisoners were being held, it is claimed, by the Shia Muslim Badr militia, which controls part of the ministry. Bayan Jabr, the Minister of the Interior, is himself a former Badr commander, but the ministry's involvement does not end there: General Adnan's commandos come under its control. So does the Wolf Brigade, which vies with the commandos for the title of most feared.
...
Nothing was done by the British authorities when police in plain clothes, along with their militia colleagues, killed Christians, claiming they sold alcohol, or Sunnis for being supposedly Baathists.  Action was only belatedly taken when a particularly menacing faction, a "force within a force" based at the Jamiat police station on the outskirts of Basra, captured two SAS soldiers who were gathering information on their mistreatment of prisoners.  British troops smashed into a police station to rescue the two soldiers and later arrested more than a dozen others.
....
 Ammar Muthar, a member of the border police, knew his father, Muthar Abadi, was on the Shia militia hit list, because he had acted as a missile engineer in the war against Shia Iran. Ammar brought his father from Al-Amarah to Basra for safety. But while he was out one day, six policemen, in uniform but wearing black masks, dragged Abadi away. His body was later found, shot five times, three in the face. 
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/world/middleeast/sectarian-hatred-pulls-apart-iraqs-mixed-towns.html 
19 Nov 2005:  Migration patterns are different for Sunni Arabs. Threats to them have come less often from anonymous letters than from large-scale arrests by the police and the Iraqi Army, largely Shiite, criticized by Sunnis as arbitrary and unfairly focused on Sunni neighborhoods. Sheik Hussein Ali Mansour al-Kharaouli, who is associated with the Iraqi Islamic Party, said Sunni families have been moving from Jibelah, Muhawail, Iskandariya and Haswa, all south of Baghdad, to escape arrests.  The net is wide, and the treatment can be rough. Thiab Ahmed, a Sunni Arab from Madaen, a town of severe sectarian strife south of Baghdad, said his brother, Khalid, died in custody in an Interior Ministry prison on Oct. 20, seven days after Iraqi police commandos arrested him.  
Mr. Ahmed, speaking at a Sunni Arab rights organization, Freedom Voice, showed photographs of a man whose body was mutilated and riddled with drill holes, a method often used by Shiite interrogators.  "I found him in the morgue," Mr. Ahmed said, his face hard. "He was labeled 'unknown body.' "  
Arrest warrants were the reason Abu Noor's Sunni friend wanted to leave Baghdad. Two of his brothers were wanted by the police, Abu Noor said, and the family thought it would be best to leave the area, a largely Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad called Huriya.
20 Nov 2005: Militia-dominated police, who were recruited by Britain, are believed to have tortured at least two men to death in the station. Their bodies were later found with drill holes to their arms, legs and skulls....Iraqi authorities in Basra are failing to even investigate incidents of torture and murder by police, ministers admit.

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/11/22/tuesday/ 
23 Nov 2005:  A Sunni leader and 4 family members killed.
27 Nov 2005: Mr. Sadr has made no move to disband his militia, the thousands-strong Mahdi Army. In recent weeks, factions of the militia have brazenly assaulted and abducted Sunni Arabs, rival Shiite groups, journalists and British-led forces in the south.
....
On Nov. 17, the American Embassy demanded that the Iraqi government prohibit private armies from controlling the Iraqi security forces, after American soldiers had found 169 malnourished prisoners, some of them tortured, in a Baghdad police prison reportedly under the command of a Shiite militia.
... A recent article in Al Hawza, a weekly Sadr publication that the Americans tried unsuccessfully to close last year, carried the headline: ''Bush Family: Your Nights Will Be Finished.'' Another article explained that Mr. Sadr was supporting the December elections to rid Iraq of American-backed politicians who ''rip off the heads of the underprivileged and scatter the pieces of their children and elderly.''

http://articles.latimes.com/print/2005/nov/29/world/fg-death29  
Nov 29, 2005: The Baghdad morgue reports that dozens of bodies arrive at the same time on a weekly basis, including scores of corpses with wrists bound by police handcuffs.
Over several months, the Muslim Scholars Assn., a Sunni organization, has compiled a library of grisly autopsy photos, lists of hundreds of missing and dead Sunnis and electronic recordings of testimonies by people who say they witnessed abuses by police officers affiliated with Shiite militias.
U.S. officials have long been concerned about extrajudicial killings in Iraq, but until recently they have refrained from calling violent elements within the police force "death squads" -- a loaded term that conjures up the U.S.-backed paramilitaries that killed thousands of civilians during the Latin American civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s.
But U.S. military advisors in Iraq say the term is apt, and the Interior Ministry's inspector general concurs that extrajudicial killings are being carried out by ministry forces.
"There are such groups operating -- yes, this is correct," said Interior Ministry Inspector General Nori Nori.  

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4528012.stm 14 Dec 2005:"Most Iraqis are Muslims, so we think the new government will maintain the country's Islamic identity," said Amir Hussein Fayl, of the Islamic Daawa Party.
"Christians will be free to follow their own religion. But Islam must be the main source of the constitution. We won't accept anything less."
But the Shia are divided among themselves.
An amateur video is circulating in Basra of a recent clash in the holy city of Najaf.
As night falls, and hundreds of people start to pray in the streets, gunmen loyal to one Shia group open fire on supporters of another.
The worshippers flee in terror while muzzles flash from the end of the darkened street.
The crucial point about this video - now part of the propaganda battle in Basra - is that both of these factions are present in the United Iraqi Alliance.
3 Feb 2016: Mona Damluji on "Baghdad's Deep Dilemma,"  


 http://www.juancole.com/2014/08/mistakes-maliki-country.html
When Gen. David Petraeus came to him in late 2006 with a plan to disarm the Sunni and Shiite militias in Baghdad, al-Maliki insisted that he begin with the Sunni armed groups. The US acquiesced, but as a result, the Shiite militias came into disarmed Sunni neighborhoods at night when the Americans weren’t looking, and ethnically cleansed them. Baghdad went from some 45% Sunni in 2003 to only 25% Sunni by the end of 2007.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/world/middleeast/as-iraqi-shiites-police-sunnis-rough-justice-feeds.html
Feb 6, 2006: Heavy handedness of Shia-dominiated Iraqi police against Sunnis in Salman Pak.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4719252.stm
Feb 16, 2006: The probe comes after a US general revealed the arrest of 22 policemen allegedly on a mission to kill a Sunni. "We have found one of the death squads. They are part of the police force," US Maj Gen Joseph Peterson said.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=15783 
Feb 16, 2006: "Between November 2005 to January 2006, 141 people have been either murdered or assassinated in Basra which is double that between May 2005 to November 2005," Wilson said.
Feb 23, 2006:  At least 47 other bodies were found scattered across Iraq, many of them shot execution-style and dumped in Shiite-dominated parts of Baghdad.  The hardline Sunni Clerical Association of Muslim Scholars said 168 Sunni mosques had been attacked, 10 imams killed and 15 abducted since the shrine attack. The Interior Ministry said it could only confirm figures for Baghdad, where 90 mosques were attacked in Baghdad, one cleric was killed, and one abducted.  Officials said at least 110 people had been killed across the country in violence believed triggered by the mosque attack.  Three journalists working for Al-Arabiya television were found dead in Samarra, the site of Wednesday's Askariya mosque attack. Al-Arabiya is viewed in Iraq as favoring the United States.

Feb 24, 2006: The insurgent bombing of a major Shiite shrine on Wednesday, followed by the wave of killings of Sunni Arabs, has left political parties on all sides clinging to their private armies harder than ever, complicating American efforts to persuade Iraqis to disband them.
The attacks, mostly by Shiite militiamen, were troubling not only because they resulted in at least 170 deaths across Iraq, but also because they showed how deeply the militias have spread inside government forces. The Iraqi police, commanded by a Shiite political party, stood by as the rampage spread.
....
Though many Shiite leaders denounced the anti-Sunni reprisals this week, none of them chastised the Mahdi Army or called for disbanding it. That itself was a clear indication of how the politicians were looking to the militia as a protector of Shiite interests in the wake of the shrine attack.
  
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/international/middleeast/03militia.html 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/25/AR2006022501252_pf.html 
Feb 25, 2006:  Mahdi militia relcaim a mosque in Baghdad from Sunnis. Saddam Hussein mosque renamed to Imam Ali mosque.


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/02/iraq.jonathansteele
March 2, 2006: Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, has fled Iraq in fear of his life after reporting that more than 7,000 people have been killed by death squads in recent months.


March 11, 2006: On Thursday, authorities said they found the body of Saud Muzahim al-Hadithi, a reporter with the pro-Sunni Arab satellite channel al-Baghdadiya. It was dumped in Dora, a Baghdad neighborhood where corpses routinely surface......
The bodies of reporter Laith al-Dulaimi and Muazaz Ahmed Barood, a telephone receptionist with the pro-Sunni Al-Nahrain TV channel, were discovered Monday along a road near their hometown of Madain, 12 miles southeast of Baghdad. The men, both Sunnis, had been abducted Sunday by men wearing police uniforms, authorities said, citing witness reports.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/death-squads-on-the-prowl-in-a-nation-paralysed-by-fear-470650.html
March 19, 2006: In the three days after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1,300 people, mostly Sunni, were picked up on the street or dragged from their cars and murdered. The dead bodies of four suspected suicide bombers were left dangling from a pylon in the Sadr City slum.


http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1175055,00.html 
March 20, 2006: The most gruesome discovery was an 18-by-24-foot mass grave in the Shi'ite slum of Kamaliyah in east Baghdad containing the bodies of 29 men, clad only in their underwear with their hands bound and their mouths covered with tape. Local residents only found it because the ground was oozing blood. In all, 87 bodies were found over two days in Baghdad.
 
March 26, 2006: Mr. Azawi was among the few Sunni Arabs on the block, and, according to witnesses, when a Shiite friend tried to intervene, a gunman stuck a pistol to his head and said, "You want us to blow your brains out, too?"
Mr. Azawi's body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.
In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city's homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from March 7 to March 21 was typically brutal: at least 191 corpses, many mutilated, surfaced in garbage bins, drainage ditches, minibuses and pickup trucks.
There were the four Duleimi brothers, Khalid, Tarek, Taleb and Salaam, seized from their home in front of their wives. And Achmed Abdulsalam, last seen at a checkpoint in his freshly painted BMW and found dead under a bridge two days later. And Mushtak al-Nidawi, a law student nicknamed Titanic for his Leonardo DiCaprio good looks, whose body was returned to his family with his skull chopped in half.
What frightens Iraqis most about these gangland-style killings is the impunity. According to reports filed by family members and more than a dozen interviews, many men were taken in daylight, in public, with witnesses all around. Few cases, if any, have been investigated.
Part of the reason may be that most victims are Sunnis, and there is growing suspicion that they were killed by Shiite death squads backed by government forces in a cycle of sectarian revenge. This allegation has been circulating in Baghdad for months, and as more Sunnis turn up dead, more people are inclined to believe it.
"This is sectarian cleansing," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament, who has maintained a degree of neutrality between Shiites and Sunnis.
Mr. Othman said there were atrocities on each side. "But what is different is when Shiites get killed by suicide bombs, everyone comes together to fight the Sunni terrorists," he said. "When Shiites kill Sunnis, there is no response, because much of this killing is done by militias connected to the government."
March 30, 2006: "In November, members of the Mahdi Army—the Shia militia commanded by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr—rounded up Othman’s older brother and several other Sunnis who worked in a shop in a mixed neighborhood. The Sunnis were taken to a local Shia mosque and shot. Othman’s brother was only grazed in the head, but a Shiite soldier noticed that he was still alive and shot him in the eye. Somehow, he survived this, too. Othman found his brother and took him to a hospital for surgery. The hospital—like the entire Iraqi health system—was under the Mahdi Army’s control, and Othman decided that his brother would be safer at their parents’ house. The brother was now blind, deranged, and vengeful, making life unbearable for Othman’s family.
April 2, 2006: BAGHDAD — For police in Baghdad’s Al Adil neighborhood, the 14 corpses looked like the products of just another night’s work in Iraq’s sectarian war. All were young Sunni men, all had been killed with a bullet to the head, and all were found tossed into a garbage dump. Only when they noticed their identity cards — carefully placed on the victims’ chests — did officers realize what else they had in common. All shared the same first name: Omar. The victims’ only crime, it seemed, was to be namesakes of Imam Omar, a prominent historical figure in the Sunni religious tradition.
April 12, 2006: Since March 30, 12 high-profile killings of Sunnis have  taken place in Basrah.  On March 30, a female Sunni lawyer,  Maimouna Abdul Karim Hamdani, was shot and killed as she exited  a taxi.  Maimouna was a well-respected legal advisor to the  electricity directorate.  On April 3, six members of a Sunni  family from the Al Sadoon tribe were shot and killed in the Al  Kaddara market in Basrah in the middle of the day.  One of the  victims was a four-year-old boy.  On April 4, one Sunni police officer was killed and another injured.  Also on April 4, Sheikh  Nawaf Ahmed Al Aqrab, a prominent leader of the Iraqi Islamic  Party (IIP), was killed.  On April 5, a well-known Sunni  professor at Basrah Technical institute, Salah Azeez Hashem, was  kidnapped, shot and killed.  Also on April 5, a Sunni employee  of the health directorate, Jalal Moustafa, was shot and killed.  On April 6, Nowfal Jasem Al Aqrab, a Sunni sheikh was shot,  injured, and reported to have later died of his injuries.  On  April 7, Sheikh Amar Nadir Othman, a local Sunni imam at the Al  Arab mosque, was killed.  Thus far, the perpetrators of all of  these incidents have not been identified.    

3.  (C) In addition to the high-profile killings, other Sunnis  have been killed, shot and injured, and kidnapped.  On the  evening of April 7, the Sunni Al Asharah Al Mubashera mosque was  attacked with mortars and small arms fire.  On April 5 and 6,  all Sunni mosques in Basrah closed on request of the Basrah  Sunni Endowment in protest to the perceived targeting of Sunnis  (reftel B).  Sunni contacts have shown REO staff threat letters  they claim to have received over the past week.  They stated  that the threat letters were slid under doors and posted at  Sunni mosques.  The letters range from threatening death to all  Sunnis in general terms to direct threats against the Deputy  Head of the Basrah IIP, Dr. Jamal, to telling Sunnis to leave  Basrah or be killed.  (Comment:  REO cannot verify the  authenticity of these threat letters.  All threat letters turned  into the REO thus far have been generic computer-generated  documents.  However, the preponderance of letters turned in,  along with the corroboration of threat letters targeting Sunnis  by UN, Danish, and British contacts in Basrah leads us to  believe that it is credible that threat letters against Sunnis  are being distributed in Basrah. ). 



http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1067827.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4905770.stm
April 13, 2006:People have been receiving threatening text messages and gruesome videos filmed on mobile phone cameras. In one, a Sunni Iraqi man who entered a mainly Shia neighbourhood of Baghdad is seen being beaten and killed by men in black clothes. The video was then sent out with the warning that this is what would happen to any other Sunni who came to the area.
 

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/2006/04/iraq-060417-irin01.htm
April 17, 2006: 
....Displaced families complain that sectarian threats are increasing daily. “I have to leave because I received a letter saying that if I don’t leave my district – where I’ve lived for more than 20 years – my family will end up in a cemetery,” said Ahmed Shamari, a Sunni Muslim teacher who resides in a majority-Shi’ite district in the capital.
30 April 2006: BAGHDAD -- Zina Hassan, 22, drops her voice to a whisper when she talks about student politics at Baghdad University. "We are surrounded by spies," said Hassan, who's a Sunni Muslim.  Kadhem al-Muqdadi, a Shiite Muslim professor, scans the campus before getting into his car. A colleague was killed when a student alerted a waiting assassin with a phone call.  Mohammed Jassim, a Sunni, resigned from his job as a lecturer at Mustansariyah University in northeast Baghdad. Members of the Mahdi Army, the militia of militant Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, threatened twice to kill him if he stayed.
....
Al-Sadr sympathizers also run the student governments at Mustansariyah University and Baghdad University in the capital. At Mustansariyah, near the huge Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, pictures of the late Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, Moqtada al-Sadr's father, cover the walls and al-Sadr newsletters are piled on benches and tables across campus. Students stand in line to enter the campus, waiting for guards to search them for weapons and check their ID cards.  It's the only campus in the capital that's known to celebrate the student-fueled 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0508/p06s01-woiq.html
8 May 2006: Abu Omar says the men [from Mahdi Army] told them they were killing all young men named Omar and Bakar - popular Sunni names borrowed from early Islamic caliphs hated by Shiites. They said they would be back for his son. After his release he called the police for protection. "They told me that close to Sadr City there's nothing they could do for a Sunni." The next day, like hundreds of Iraqi families, both Shiite and Sunni Arab, he fled his old neighborhood. In his case, he sought safety in a Sunni area to the west of the Tigris.


http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/05/12/gunmen-kill-sunni-iman-son-in-iraq-after-mosques-ordered-closed.html 
12 May 2006: In Friday's attack, three gunmen killed Sheik Khalil Ibrahim, a Sunni imam of the al-Khudairi mosque in the Ashar area of central Basra, and his son. ... gunmen killed Sunni imam Sheik Khaled Ali Obeid al-Saadoun and two of his associates Wednesday..... Last month, the body of a Sunni lecturer in the Basra Technical Institution, Salah Aziz, was found by police in Basra, a day after he was seized by gunmen.
  
20 May 2006: So many bodies arrive at the morgue each day - 40 is not unusual on a "quiet" day - that it is impossible to let relatives in to identify them. Hence the slideshow in the yard outside. The bodies are dumped in sewage plants or irrigation canals, or just in the middle of the street. Many show signs of torture. Every morning a procession of pickup trucks, minibuses and cars line up with their coffins outside the concrete blast walls of the ministry of health to pick up their cargo. One death often courts another. Many Sunnis say the mourners are attacked en route. When they go to retrieve the body of a relative, family members often wait in the car clutching their weapons in anticipation.
The ministry is under the control of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and a large mural of his dead ayatollah father decorates the entrance to the compound. Most of the security guards in the morgue and the ministry are affiliated to his militia, the Mahdi army, one of the militias thought to be behind the sectarian killing going on in their neighbourhoods.
"Why do you want to go inside? Those inside are all terrorists, Sunni terrorists," said Captain Abu Ahmad, the officer in charge of security at the morgue, when the Guardian presented a document granting permission from the ministry of health to visit. "If you want to see innocent victims, go to the hospitals and see the victims of Sunni terrorism on Shia civilians."
23 May 2006: Basra “Seventy-five civilians were killed in April, while another 40 have been killed so far in May,” said police Col. Lt. Abdul-Karim al-Zaidi. “All of them were victims of assassinations and sectarian strife.”.....
Violence reached a climax last week when a bomb went off at the home of Basra Chief of Police Maj. Gen. Hussein al-Saad, who later complained that policemen’s religious and ethnic orientations often override their loyalty to the state. 
....
Last week, Basra Governor Mohamed Musbih al-Wali, a member of the Islamic Fadhila party, accused religious authorities of encouraging sectarian strife. ....“Religious leaders are using simple people to create sectarian strife by threatening, kidnapping and killing others, especially from the Sunni community,” al-Wali said. Since then, a local police station was attacked and the local offices of SCIRI were torched.
... 
Meanwhile, the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a Sunni hard-line clerical body, said that some 1,200 Sunni families had been forced to leave Basra as a result of threats by militant groups. “About 25 Sunnis were killed by these armed groups, which are affiliated with religious parties, this month alone,” said Sheikh Abdul-Razaq al-Dosari, a senior AMS cleric.


https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06BASRAH89_a.html 
May 30, 2006:  Since the end of March, violence targeting the  Sunni minority in Basrah has produced sensational headlines in  the local news and a growing stack of bodies in local morgues.  With a new rash of high-profile killings since May 10, the Sunni  Endowment closed its mosques in Basrah from May 26 to 28.  One  of the most moderate Sunni imams in Basrah and an outspoken  advocate for tolerance and nonviolence, Sheikh Khalid al Mullah,  has fled the city temporarily out of concern for his safety.  The number of displaced Sunni from Basrah continues to grow.
June 2, 2006: While death squads have been trolling the city for over a year, the pace of the killing has picked up, and the target lists appear to have expanded, residents say.
"It made more sense when it started out. They were killing Baathists and officers from Saddam's army,'' says Ghazi, a long-haul trucker who makes regular trips to Basra, and asked that his full named not be used. "Now they kill Shiites, Sunnis, tribal leaders, doctors, engineers - just about anyone who opposes them politically." 

 
July 2006: [Paul Bremer's book "My days in Iraq" pp. 190-91.] [In late 2003]“He’d taken to wearing a white burial cloth instead of a dark imam’s robe, a symbol that he welcomed martyrdom. Equally disturbing, Muqtada was collaborating with a radical Sunni cleric, Ahmed al-Kubaisi, and was bussing Sunni extremists from the Sunni triangle to the south to augment his small militia….Mike warned that if Muqtada won another standoff with the Coalition, it would greatly enhance his still small following among the Shia. Then we would be faced with a second insurgency, a rebellion not by Baathists and jihadis, but by fanatical Shiites”.
....
After several months of low-intensity conflict, far more serious incidents occurred in March 2004. A violent Sadrist raid against a gypsy (al-Kawliya) village, anti-American assaults in the south, and, above all, Muqtada’s sermon describing the 11 September attacks as “a miracle and a blessing from God” alarmed the coalition. Occurring at a time when the political process was threatened by both an expanding insurgency and Sistani’s objections to the U.S.- sponsored political process, these events prompted a coalition show of force. On 28 March, a Sadrist newspaper that had reprinted the controversial sermon was forcibly shut down.
..... 
the February 2006 Samarra incident appears to have been a turning point. Since then, violence has reached alarming proportions as Sadrists invoke religious arguments to wage indiscriminate attacks against so-called takfiriyin and Baathists.
“We don’t need orders to do this because we have a very clear fatwa on this matter: ‘it is permissible to kill al-nawasib, those who hate the Twelver Shiite Imams’. Besides, we always interrogate suspects and execute them only upon determining they really are the killers or the kidnappers”. Crisis Group interview, Jaysh al-Mahdi commander, Baghdad, March 2006. Other commanders made the same point: “We don’t need to ask Muqtada because there is a very clear fatwa that authorises the execution of nawasib. All we need to do is read Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr’s chapter on jihad”. Crisis Group interview, Jaysh al-Mahdi commander, Baghdad, March 2006. 
......
"Some  Jaysh al-Mahdi  members claim the right to take possession of goods belonging to takfiriyin,  Salafists and Wahhabis they killed." Crisis Group interview, Muqtada sympathiser,  Baghdad, May 2006. 

  
http://vredessite.nl/andernieuws/2006/week28/07-04_basra.html
4 July 2006: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's first major security initiative, a 30-day state of emergency intended to restore peace to Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, appears to have failed, residents there report.
The state of emergency ended Saturday, but residents said that little had changed: Shiite militias and tribes still control the city's streets, political factions still fight for control of the city, and Shiite Muslim militias still threaten Sunni Muslims with death. Morgue officials report that the number of people killed in sectarian violence remains unchanged.
.......
The few new checkpoints that appeared disappeared within two weeks as sectarian violence spread. On Saturday, when the plan ended, Sunni families reported new leaflets warning them to flee or face death. Some fled. 

"I am wondering how this is an emergency state if militias are still moving freely in the city," Talib Rashid Ali, a Basra teacher, said 11 days after the plan began. 

Other residents gave a steady chronicle of continued violence: on the emergency's fourth day, a car bomb exploded in a busy city market, killing at least 15 people. 

Hours later, security forces attacked the Sunni al Arab mosque, charging that the religious site housed insurgents who were building weapons there. Hakim al-Maiahi, the head of the security committee on Basra's provincial council, told Al-Jazeera television that forces found "many weapons, ammunitions, car bombs and other bombs inside the mosque." 

A major Sunni group, the Sunni Endowment, charged that the mostly Shiite police forces killed guards trying to protect the mosque. Hopes of ending sectarian violence quickly dissipated. 

Soon after, a science professor from Basra University was killed in an Internet cafe. At least two other academics would be killed before the end of the state of emergency. All were Sunni. 

On June 16, Sheik Youssef Yaquoub al-Hassan, a popular Sunni cleric known for hosting meetings between rival Shiite groups, despite being the secretary general of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, was killed. With that, some residents said they no longer believed moderate politics could survive in Basra. 
....

Instead, as the World Cup games began June 9, a Shiite cleric and Fadhila party religious leader, Sheik Mohammed Saeed al-Yaqoubi, posted fliers throughout Basra that said watching the games was sinful. 

"It is not logical that a ball made of leather is the reason for (man's) anger or satisfaction," the flier read. "The world is far from God almighty." 
July 9, 2006:  At least 40 people, apparently all Sunnis, were killed yesterday by Shia militants in a rampage in a Baghdad suburb - one of the capital's most deadly sectarian pogroms - that revived fears of civil war.  Witnesses said gunmen, some masked, set up roadblocks and stopped motorists in the mainly Sunni suburb of Jihad, near Baghdad airport, demanding to see identity cards. Those with Sunni names were shot dead; Shias were released.  The slaughter lasted several hours, according to Alaa Makki, a spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic party, one of the main Sunni parties, who blamed the Mahdi army.


http://articles.latimes.com/print/2006/jul/09/world/fg-corrupt9 
July 9, 2006: 
In the Rusafa section of Baghdad, a predominantly Shiite area known for its strong militia presence, police tortured detainees with electricity, beatings and, in at least one case, rape, according to the internal documents. Relief was reserved for those detainees whose relatives could afford to bribe detention officers to release them.
The Wolf Brigade, a notorious commando unit, illegally detained more than 650 prisoners, according to the documents...Female detainees are often sexually assaulted. According to the documents, the commander of a detention center in the Karkh neighborhood of the capital raped a woman who was an alleged insurgent in August. That same month, two lieutenants tortured and raped two other female detainees.

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1212291,00.html 
10 July 2006:  In a single incident last earlier this year, the bodies of 14 Omars were found in a Baghdad garbage dump. They had all been killed with a single bullet to the head, and their ID cards were placed carefully on their chests. It has, says Saleh Mutlak, a prominent Sunni politician, "become the most dangerous name in Iraq." 
.... Websites like the Iraqi League (www.iraqirabita.org) offer detailed tips on how Sunnis can pass themselves off as Shi'ite.
July 16, 2006: In an escalation of the violence which is claiming hundreds of lives in Baghdad each week, the skies above Highway 60 resound, day and night, to the blast of home-made mortars as militiamen shell each other's communities - safe in the knowledge that they will not be harming their own.
Sitting outside the Al Hussein mosque in the centre of Abu Disheer, now an exclusively Shia district, Abu Raad boasts proudly of his precision with a home-made mortar.
"We have watched for three years while the Sunni killed our brothers and now it is time for revenge," said the 26-year-old fighter, a former soldier in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. "All those people in Dora are terrorists. I shot two missiles at them and I feel proud."
The total separation of the two communities was completed last week with the murder of a Shia family in the Sunni stronghold of Dora City, on the northern side of Highway 60.
The incident prompted the last remaining Shia to flee the enclave with their possessions and lit the fuse for an explosion of violence between the two communities.
.....
More than 40 people lost their lives when Shia gunmen set up checkpoints in a predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of west Baghdad and began executing people, leaving their bullet-ridden corpses strewn across the street.
A month-old security clampdown that has flooded the city streets with 50,000 Iraqi troops and police seems to have done little to curb the bloodletting.
An Iraqi journalist who witnessed first-hand the Jihad City death squads told The Sunday Telegraph that the executions took place only half a mile from a manned Iraqi army checkpoint.
The reporter was driving to see his fiancée when he was stopped by a gunmen brandishing an AK47 rifle and ushered out of his car.
"I did not know what to tell them about my background because I did not know where they were from," he said. But he told them he was a Shia after recognising among the vigilantes the green headscarf worn by fighters loyal to the Mahdi army, the Shia militia led by the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which has been accused of drilling holes in victims' eyes and limbs before executing them.
Still unconvinced, the gunmen led him down a narrow side street where his identity card was scrutinised by one of the militia heads.
"As they were talking to me I saw a young man dragged out of a BMW car and pushed into the side street," he said.
"He was Sunni, you could tell from his accent. He was forced to kneel on the ground and a Kalashnikov was placed against his head.
"The man was pleading for his life but the fighter, who had his face covered, was shouting 'You are a Sunni, you are a terrorist and you should die. Sit down now'. The next moment I heard the gun go off and there was blood everywhere. It was a few metres away."
After being released he drove to the Iraqi army checkpoint to warn them but his pleas were greeted with indifference by the soldiers on duty. 
17 July 2006: The violence erupted July 9 when Shiite Muslim militiamen rampaged through the al-Jihad neighborhood and killed dozens of Sunni Arabs. By Friday, the sixth day, the death toll in Baghdad stood at 628 people, according to Brig. Gen. Mahmoud Nima of the Interior Ministry, citing a figure that far exceeded the numbers previously suggested by news reports.
....
On Thursday night, gunmen scattered fliers in the street addressed to "the scum of Ghazaliyah," giving Sunnis 72 hours to leave the neighborhood.  "Otherwise death will be your destiny and the destiny of all those who underestimate this, and bullets from the rifles of chivalrous men will land in the heads and chests of those who support evil and shook hands with the devil," the flier read.  The next day, Sunni groups distributed their own warnings. One flier, which hung on the wall of al-Abbas mosque in Amiriyah, told children not to buy candy or toys from Shiites and instructed their parents to stockpile weapons, leave mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods or abandon Baghdad altogether.
July 26, 2006:  Six weeks ago, Sunni families began fleeing Basra in large numbers, many headed for Mosul and the promise of jobs and security.
...
After the February bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a Shiite shrine, the wave of ethnic strife that gripped much of Iraq spread to Basra. Shiite fighters told Sunni Arab families to leave Basra or be killed. But Sunnis who left said the flight was also spurred by their own clerics who urged them to leave for their safety. The religious leaders worried that armed groups such as the Al Mahdi militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr were intent on killing Sunnis who did not flee their homes.  The Ministry of Displaced People said Tuesday that sectarian violence had displaced 1,040 families from Basra. Mosul aid organizations put the number of people fleeing Basra even higher.

27 July 2006: Sunni leaders who had previously been figureheads for the insurgency against US-led forces have recently begun calling for the coalition troops to remain to protect them from Shia "death squads", which they suspect are operating under cover of the Shia-controlled interior ministry.
A UN report earlier this month revealed that 100 people were being killed every day in Iraq, amounting to nearly 6,000 people in the past two months.
Some of the worst sectarian violence has hit mixed neighbourhoods of Baghdad such as Karradah. A leaked memo (pdf) from the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, last month revealed that other districts were now under the effective control of local religious militias rather than central government, and that outsiders were unable to travel freely around the capital.
.....
Saddam Hussein's trial has also been hit by accusations of sectarianism. Three of his defence lawyers have been killed, allegedly by Shia death squads, since the hearings began last year, and his remaining defence team are boycotting the trial in protest at the court's refusal to grant them extra security.
August 6, 2006: Every morning in the al-Sada area of northern Baghdad, police undertake what has now become a familiar ritual.
The dusty area that was once used as a rubbish tip for the Iraqi capital's refuse has for two months become the dumping ground for something far more sinister: Sunni victims of Shia death squads.
Just after dawn each day, before the city's temperature soars to August's stifling
50-degree heat, police gather as many as 30 bodies - each identifiably Sunni from a hole bored in the head by an electric drill - for transportation to the city's morgue.
Meanwhile, a similar number of headless bodies are pulled from the Tigris, the daily crop of Shia victims of Sunni militia. 
The corpses are the latest tally in a sectarian war that is raging across the streets of Baghdad. As many as 200 a day are delivered to the Baghdad morgue, where Dr Falih Hassan receives them with a resigned shrug.
The morgue's refrigerators filled up long ago, and now corpses lie rotting in rows on the floor. The stench is overpowering.
"Some of the bodies are impossible to identify," he said. "But we can tell the victim's religion: if they have been beheaded they are Shia, if they have been killed by an electric drill or hammer blows to the face they are Sunni."
For the fighters roaming Baghdad streets, the logic that facilitates this morbid identification process is -simple. Hassan Alami, 25, a Shia terrorist from Sadr City, said the holes drilled in the Sunni heads were to "destroy their stupid minds".
The Sunnis are said to behead their victims because this was Mohammed's method for dealing with apostates.
15 August 2006: EVERY night when he comes home from work, Assem al-Hassani sits down and studies. His wife Sausan teaches him the names of the 12 Shia imams, where they prayed and where they are buried. But this is no religious madrassa — Assem is a Sunni, learning from his Shia wife how to pretend to be a Shia to avoid the sectarian death squads stalking Baghdad.     
August 30, 2006: A few days into his recovery at the facility, armed Shiite Muslim militiamen dragged the 43-year-old Sunni mason down the hallway floor, snapping intravenous needles and a breathing tube out of his body, and later riddled his body with bullets, family members said. Authorities say it was not an isolated incident. In Baghdad these days, not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq's Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients, families of victims, doctors and government officials.


http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1075365.html 
[2006] The Sunni-Shi'ite bloodbath that played out on the streets of Baghdad left scores of civilians dead. According to the Interior Ministry, some 1,089 civilians died in September, compared to 769 in August and 1,065 in July. Much of the violence was attributed to Shi'ite death squads, some of which were linked to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Imam Al-Mahdi Army.
 
5 Sep 2006:  But perhaps it was the 34-year-old engineer's refusal to play for a local soccer team run by members of Moqtada al-Sadr's al-Mahdi militia that made him a target. Certainly, the repeated hammer blows to his knees during his ordeal has meant that Mr Abbas - a popular figure on Baghdad's football scene, a former member of Iraq's youth squad, and an avid Manchester United fan - may never play again. Now in hiding in Iraqi Kurdistan, Mr Abbas (not his real name) said: "I must be very careful because I still have family in Baghdad and I just don't know who exactly took me."
Like many other dazed residents caught up in Baghdad's dirty war, Mr Abbas may never know. His story is not exceptional: it is repeated with variations between 30 and 40 times each day in Baghdad.
And he is not the only sportsman to be targeted. Yesterday police said another popular football player had been kidnapped in Baghdad by people dressed in military uniforms.
Ghanim Ghudayer, 22, considered one of the best players in Baghdad's Air Force Club, had recently signed a one-year contract with a club in Syria and had been planning to leave Iraq within a few days.
Iraqi sports officials and athletes have frequently faced threats, kidnappings and killings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/world/middleeast/06identity.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all 
Sep 6, 2006: To stay alive, Iraqis change their names.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/17/iraq 
Sep 17, 2006:  Shakrya Hassan, whose 26-year-old son Falah was taken at the same time as Karima's. Her family, though Sunni, has placed pictures of the venerated figures of the Shia sect of Islam on their walls in the hope no one will ask precisely how they pray.
Zafaraniya is a case study in the crisis facing Iraq. Its largest mosque, a huge green dome and sandy minaret that overlooks the highway, was once Sunni. Now it has been taken over by the militia of the Jaish al-Mahdi, becoming their second biggest base for operations outside Sadr City.
Sep 22, 2006: Lt Col William Brown, an intelligence officer whose job is to monitor the militias in east Baghdad, estimated that Shia groups raised at least $1 million (£530,000) a day through organised crime. The money came "especially from kidnappings, extortion, black marketeering and blackmail".
Thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Payments of $50,000 are routinely demanded and paid. Many people are killed even after the ransom is paid.
Lt Col Brown said that of particular concern was the control of many petrol stations by members of the Mahdi army, the militia of Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-western fundamentalist cleric whose political allies control the ministry of transport. The Mahdi army is the largest and most powerful of the Shia militias in Baghdad, with an estimated 10,000 members.
"You see the guards around the petrol stations," Lt Col Brown said. "It is easy for them to sell 40 litres of gas then give only 35 litres."
The US military is monitoring 20 militias operating in the city. They have recently grown stronger as they provide security to residents at a time of rising religious violence. At the same time they are accused of conducting many tit-for-tat sectarian killings.
...Sadr's control over his militiamen seems to be weakening, with reports of a number of his followers operating independently. American concern has focused on one of his former lieutenants known by the nom de guerre Abu Dereh (Father of the Shield). Abu Dereh is accused of abducting scores of Sunnis and depositing their bodies at al-Sada, a rubbish tip near the Baghdad Shia slum of Sadr City. His preferred method of murder is by crushing skulls with cinder blocks.
29 Sep 2006:  Azzawi said Shiite militiamen abducted his aunt at a checkpoint in July in Baghdad's Shula neighborhood. Three days later, police found her body dumped on a street. Since then, Azzawi has taken measures to protect himself.
From his brown wallet, he pulled out a fake press credential from an Arabic-language newspaper. It cost him $35. On the red and white badge, Omar, a common Sunni name, became Amar, a common Shiite name.
Whenever he enters a Shiite neighborhood, Azzawi slips on a large silver ring worn by many Shiites, especially those considered to be descendants of Muhammad. He also carries a torba , a round piece of clay Shiites use to place their foreheads upon when they bow in prayer.
At work, Azzawi said, he often surfs Web sites to learn more about Shiites and their practices. For instance, he's been learning to recite the 12 imams of the Shiites, in perfect succession. He's heard that Shiite militiamen at checkpoints often use this as a test.
"I don't like to learn something that happened more than a thousand years ago," said Azzawi, who wore black jeans, a black shirt and a thin beard. "But I have to."
One Web site, http://www.iraqirabita.org , offers a 12-point plan for Sunnis to disguise themselves as Shiites. The No. 1 tip: "Get a forged ID card, especially if your name is Omar or Othman."
...
Haki Ismael is a Shiite guard at a government ministry. He lives in Amiriyah, a mostly Sunni neighborhood. Every time he left, he said, he used his fake Sunni identity card. But one recent morning, he was kidnapped by members of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia aligned with firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. They thought he was a Sunni, he recalled.
So Ismael spoke with an accent typical of Shiites from the south. The militiamen began to relax. They released him.
3 Oct 2006: THE followers of Moqtada al-Sadr believe that the US invaded Iraq to prevent the return to Earth of their sect’s messiah-like figure, the Mahdi, or 12th imam.
.....
At a prayer service in the central Iraqi city of Kufa on September 15, the cleric told a crowd of thousands that the Americans were collecting a dossier on the Mahdi to prevent his return. “Did you ever ask yourself about why all of this, the bloodshed and the prisons? Why are the brothers fighting each other for a political game planned by the Americans? This all happened because they (the Americans) are waiting for the Mahdi. This planning started ten years ago. They have a big file for Imam Mahdi and they just need his picture to complete it.”  Hojatoleslam al-Sadr and his advisers are convinced that the Americans want to destroy Islam and stop the Mahdi. “The Americans are trying to hijack Islamic movements. They think that these are serving the Mahdi’s interests. Whatever they did in Afghanistan and Iraq are all attempts to hijack the Mahdi’s return.”
4 Oct 2006: The chilling details are spelled out in an intelligence report seen by CBS News. Among some of the details of the report are:      
  • Hospitals have become command and control centers for the Mahdi Army militia.       
  • Sunni patients are being murdered; some are dragged from their beds.      
  • The militia is keeping hostages inside some hospitals, where they are tortured and executed.      They're using ambulances to transport hostages and illegal weapons, and even to help their fighters escape from U.S. forces.   
...      a hospital worker says Mahdi Army spies are everywhere, and would only talk with both face and voice masked.  "A man was bringing his murdered brother to the morgue. They asked him if he knew who the killers were and he said 'yes.' They shot him right there," she says.  
More than 80 percent of the original doctors and staff where she works are gone, replaced by Shia supporters of the Mahdi Army. ...... In burial, the victims of Iraq's sectarian slaughter still have no names, only a number on an anonymous grave marker. And with neither the Iraqi government nor the U.S. willing to act, the numbers keep climbing.
4 Oct 2006: Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said the Ministry of Interior announced late Tuesday a "recall of the 8th Brigade, 2nd National Police." The incident comes amid longstanding concern over the infiltration of Iraqi police by Shiite death squads.This move was made after a brazen kidnapping of two dozen people on Sunday.

9 Oct 2006: Sunnis in Iraq are studying Shia religious history and customs to enable them to bluff their way through illegal checkpoints set up by Shia death squads... Websites have also been established to help Sunnis learn how to pass themselves off as Shia.
...
 Since Saturday at least 74 bodies have been found around the capital — often, Sunnis claim, killed with the complicity of the predominantly Shia police force in the city.
Last week an entire Iraqi police brigade of 800 men was demobilised and sent for retraining after it was found to be helping Shia death squads in north-west Baghdad.
10 Oct 2006:  Sunnis in Baghdad changing their names to Shia names.
...Sunni families in Shia areas of Baghdad that are strongholds of the Jaish al-Mahdi, the militia loyal to the firebrand cleric Moqtadr al-Sadr, have placed Shia religious images on their walls. Sunni drivers in Baghdad, fearful of police and militia checkpoints that may mean abduction and death, have taken to hanging Shia symbols in their cars or playing Shia religious music.


https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/oct/12/iraq.broadcasting 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6043158.stm 
https://rsf.org/en/news/deadly-day-baghdad-journalists 
Oct 12, 2006: Armed attack on TV station Al Shaabiya killed 11 employees dead (including Director) and several wounded...Witnesses said masked attackers wore police uniforms.
Oct 17, 2006: Basra. Christian women there often wear Muslim head scarves to avoid harassment from religious zealots trying to impose a strict Islamic dress code. After the pope’s statement, an angry crowd burned an effigy of him.


http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Open-sectarian-war-engulfs-river-towns-Shiite-2468157.php
Oct 17, 2006: Shiite elders of Balad said they called in the Baghdad militias of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- whose bloc is the largest in Iraq's Shiite-led government -- to take revenge. Most of the victims since then have been Sunni men in Duluiya and neighboring Sunni towns. Hasanein al-Badawi, a physician at Balad's hospital, said almost all had been shot and some had been tortured with electric drills. The total number of victims received by Balad's hospital morgue held steady at 80 Monday.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15343811/#.V0yMq5MrIyk 
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/pubs/PolicyFocus66.pdf 
"On October 18, 2006, a Badr provincial police chief was killed by a roadside bomb while traveling between Basra and Maysan provinces; indications were strong that this was a sophisticated assassination by Sadrist forces. In retaliation, his family kidnapped the teenage brother of the Jaish al-Mahdi commander in Amara and beheaded the hostage when the Sadrists failed to hand over the police chief ’s killers. Similar violence is coming to Basra; on October 30, Shiite militants pulled seventeen Sunni police recruits off a bus near a British-run police training center and executed them."


http://www.rferl.org/a/1073718.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1537861/Soldiers-destroy-Basras-rogue-police-HQ.html 
Dec 26, 2006: " British forces raided the headquarters of a rogue police unit in Basra on Christmas morning to free prisoners who were about to be executed. Many of the 127 captives were found in a cramped and squalid cell at the headquarters of the serious crimes unit and showed signs of torture, officers said.
...
 Last week, 800 British troops backed with 35 Warrior armoured vehicles and five Challenger tanks arrested a senior officer in the Basra serious crimes unit and six others under the cover of heavy fog.
The officer was accused of ordering the murder of 17 staff at a British-run police academy on Oct 29 when gunmen ambushed a bus carrying employees back to their homes in Basra."



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/interpreters-used-by-british-army-hunted-down-by-iraqi-death-squads-424660.html 
Nov 17, 2006: Iraqi interpreters working with the British Army in Basra are being systematically hunted down and killed. At least 21 have been kidnapped and shot in head over the past three weeks, their bodies dumped in different parts of the city. Another three are still missing. In a single mass killing, 17 interpreters were killed.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but militia groups fighting for control of the province - and opposed to the presence of foreign troops - are widely suspected.
....
Abu Kamael, a member of the Mehdi militia, said translators were legitimate targets and subject to the group's death squads.
"Baathists, those involved in Saddam's government, Takfiris and Wahhabis [extremist Sunni Muslims] are all our enemies," he said.
"So are the occupation armies and those helping them. Interpreters are not working for the good of Iraq, they are working for invading powers, they are traitors and are to be punished like traitors."


https://iwpr.net/global-voices/sunni-patients-fear-baghdad-wards
In November [2006], Britain’s Channel 4 television broadcast a documentary about the death squads. The programme showed photos of 14 Sunnis abducted from a hospital in Baghdad, then forced into a rubbish container and shot dead.
Last [2006] December, a Sunni surgeon was quoted in The Sunday Times as saying that in some hospitals porters and cleaners who support the Mahdi army, a militia loyal to the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, offered doctors 300 US dollars to identify Sunni patients.
"I found that many patients were dying. Most were well and ready to walk out of the hospital. Instead, they left in wooden boxes,” the surgeon told the newspaper.

According to him, most of the support staff in the hospitals comes from the Shia slums of Sadr City, a stronghold of the Mahdi army, a group which has been accused of leading Shia death squads. In one case, he said, two patients from the mainly Sunni Diyala province were placed on trolleys to be taken to the x-ray department. The patients were never seen again.
... One doctor said two died as a result of insulin overdoses.



 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc9Fdoa75Lc
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eUBeBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA189&lpg=PA189#v=onepage&q&f=false
Extract from the page 189 of the book "Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity" by Fanar Haddad. Sadrist cleric Hazem Al-araji inciting Iraqi Shias to kill Baathists and Wahabis.



==============

Abu Deraa - Shiite Zarqawi
Nov 12, 2006:  Less than six months after an American airstrike ended Abu Musab al Zarqawi's campaign of Sunni terror, an equally brutal fanatic has emerged on the other side of the religious divide. Abu Deraa's trademark method of killing is a drill through the skull rather than a sword to the neck, but his work rate is just as prolific as the former al-Qaeda leader's and shows the same diabolical artistry. In the past year, he and his followers are thought to have murdered thousands of Sunnis, their victims' bodies symbolically dumped in road craters left by al-Qaeda car bombs.
.....
So great is the risk of being killed in tit-for-tat violence that Iraqi tattoo parlours are offering "death tags", showing names and next of kin. Such inkings are a safeguard against ending up among the countless -unidentified bodies in Baghdad's morgue.
Yet, while Abu Deraa may have replaced Zarqawi at the top of the American wanted list, Iraq's Shia-dominated government has shown a marked reluctance to sanction the kind of large-scale operation necessary to arrest him in his stronghold of Sadr City, a vast Shia slum in east Baghdad. Taking action against him could cost it valuable support among other Shia militias who, despite official disdain for Abu Deraa's bloodthirstiness, value the fear that such a loose cannon inspires in their enemies.
"We are proud of leaders like Abu Deraa," said Hassan Allami, 25, a fighter with the Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr's Mehdi army, which Abu Deraa quit earlier this year to form his own faction. "His drills destroy the crazy minds of the Sunnis."
Dec 20, 2006: Our interview takes place just hours after gunmen masquerading as members of the Iraqi National Army abduct up to 30 civilians from the headquarters of the Red Crescent in central Baghdad. The brazen daylight raid is typical of what is usually assumed to be the work of Abu Deraa - but he refuses to go into the detail of specific operations.
Other such round-ups for which he is held responsible include the kidnapping of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, the mass abduction of about 150 staff and visitors from the Iraqi Education Ministry, and, last Friday, the disappearance of more than 30 people from the city's Sinak auto-repair strip. Usually Shiite victims of these mass abductions are released within 48 hours and, over time, the bodies of the abducted Sunnis are found dumped.
Questioned about a video circulating in Baghdad in which he is seen abducting and personally executing one of Saddam Hussein's lawyers - part of which was published by smh.com.au earlier this year - Abu Deraa is anything but contrite.
He sidesteps the question by urging death for all of the former dictator's legal team and by defending the killers of Khamis al-Obeidi: "They were good mujahideen. Al-Obeidi deserved to die … he deserved more than death. None who defends Saddam are honourable men."
Asked if he was responsible for the hundreds of mutilated Sunni bodies recovered from the Al-Sadaa area, Abu Deraa responds first with what he says is a quote from Sadr: "The Sunnis are our brothers in good times and bad."
He goes on in defence of Shiite relations with Iraq's Christians and some Sunnis, before making a declaration that does not constitute a denial of the charge of mass and cold-blooded murder. "I only want the people who kill women and children," he says.
Despite repeated calls from Washington and other capitals for the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to act against rampant militias and death squad leaders such as Abu Deraa, this warlord makes it perfectly clear that his work is far from complete.
Like most Shiites, he lumps Sunni insurgents and their supporters under the generic term "Takfiryeen", meaning those who would make Shiite outcasts from Islam.
Are there many Takfiryeen? He answers: "There are many, too many. There is no solution for Iraq - now it is in God's hands."
The power has failed and we're sitting in the dark when Abu Deraa decides the interview is over. He orders us out into the night - back through the tense streets of Sadr City and more than 20 Mahdi Army checkpoints before we arrive in downtown Baghdad.
January 21, 2007: His squad is thought to be responsible for the murder of thousands of civilians, mostly Sunnis, and he is said to take personal delight in killing -- sometimes with a bullet to the head, sometimes by driving a drill into the skulls of his victims.
On other occasions, Iraqis say, he gives them a choice of being shot or battered to death with concrete building blocks. Each day the police find more bodies dumped in shallow graves on wasteland known by Iraqis as the "Happiness Hotel".
They have been kidnapped, tortured and murdered after being accused of attacking Shia shrines or of involvement in the daily bombings tearing Baghdad apart.
The video shows Deraa, a short, well built and bearded man in his 40s, pouring the cola down the camel's throat.
"All of it. Drink to the bottom," he tells the gulping animal, asking his guards whether they paid for the bottle or took it.
Behind the video is a sinister story. Deraa has vowed to sacrifice the camel in celebration if he succeeds in killing Tariq al-Hashimi, the Iraqi vice-president.
Hashimi is Iraq's most important Sunni politician and Shia extremists such as Deraa regard him as a bitter enemy who must be eliminated. Hashimi was in London last week for talks with Tony Blair and for the time being is safe from assassination. But Deraa or another Shia death squad killed his sister and two brothers last year.
The hitmen will keep trying to fix him in their sights.
Another of Deraa's high-profile victims is Khamis al-Obeidi, Saddam Hussein's lawyer.
A grim video recorded on a mobile phone shows his hands being tied behind his back by a man believed to be Deraa.
He pleads for his life but is put into the back of a truck and paraded through Baghdad's Sadr city, where the crowds taunt him with Shia slogans and stone him. The vehicle stops. Obeidi is forced out and Deraa puts three bullets in his head.
In another operation, Deraa reportedly acquired a fleet of ambulances and drove them into a Sunni neighbourhood of Baghdad.
He tricked groups of young men to come forward and give blood to help Sunni brothers who, he said, were being "slaughtered by the Shi'ites".
Once the young men approached, he trapped and killed them.
By such deeds Deraa has won a reputation as perhaps the most brutal mass murderer in Iraq. He is seen as a Shia version of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the brutal Jordanian leader of al-Qa'ida in Iraq who was killed by the Americans last year."

===============

Nov 24, 2006: Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left Friday prayers and burned them alive with kerosene in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad's main Shiite district.

Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in Friday's assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children, in the same neighborhood, the volatile Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.
....
Most of the thousands of dead bodies that have been found dumped across Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq in recent months have been of victims who were tortured and then shot to death, according to police. The suspected militia killers often have used electric drills on their captives' bodies before killing them. The bodies are frequently decapitated.
But burning victims alive introduced a new method of brutality that was likely to be reciprocated by the other sect as the Shiites and Sunnis continue killing one another in unprecedented numbers. The gruesome attack, which came despite a curfew in Baghdad, capped a day in which at least 87 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence across Iraq.
In Hurriyah, the rampaging militiamen also burned and blew up four mosques and torched several homes in the district, Hussein said.

Nov 30, 2006: Baghdad (AINA) -- Followers of Moqtada al-Sadr have issued a fatwa1 concerning school girls, according to an Assyrian priest in Baghdad. The fatwa requires all girls to wear the veil while attending school. In an unusual twist of logic, the fatwa implies that failure to wear the veil would be tantamount on the girls' part to complicity in the death of the Imam Husayn ibn Ali (killed in 680 A.D. in Karbala in a battle with the army of the Caliphate.)
...In contrast, Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued a statement saying that the Najaf establishment had not called for forcible veiling."

Dec 13, 2006: While Ayatollah Sistani has continued to argue for moderation even in the face of increasingly savage Sunni-sponsored terrorist attacks on the Shiite population, Sadr and his militias have taken a much harder line, instigating terror campaigns of their own. This has been a major factor in the growth of the Mahdi Army’s power and reach. (After one recent car bombing in Sadr City, Mahdi Army men are said to have kidnapped several Sunnis at random from elsewhere in the city, then executed them in the bomb crater.)"
Dec 19, 2006:  14 November 2006 attack on the Ministry of Higher Education – headed by a Sunni Arab – in which dozens of employees were seized in broad daylight in the heart of Baghdad in the course of an operation involving numerous police cars and armed pickup trucks and which prompted only the mildest official reaction.
....
“The health ministry is being purged on sectarian grounds. Sunnis are identified and killed, whether in hospitals or in the ministry itself. A few days ago, Ahmad Mohamed, a pharmacist, was killed by militiamen in the ministry parking lot. This was done under the eyes of Iraqi security forces responsible for the ministry’s safety, yet infiltrated by militias”. Crisis Group interview, Iraqi journalist, 2 December 2006.  
.....
At one level, all sides claim to be targeting narrowly defined, fanatical and brutal enemies who can only be dealt with violently. For the most part, none of the Sunni insurgent groups – not even the jihadis – publicly claims responsibility for attacks against civilian Shiites. Faylaq `Umar, a group that was established in late 2005 or early 2006 to retaliate against attacks on Sunnis, professes to focus its operations exclusively on SCIRI’s militia, the Badr corps, and on the Sadrist Mahdi army (Jaysh al-Mahdi). Likewise, Shiite militias and death squads maintain they only go after Takfiriyin (i.e. jihadis who consider certain Muslim sub-sects as unbelievers and wish to excommunicate them) or Saddamiyin (i.e. followers of the fallen dictator).
On Dec. 22, 2006.....Iraqi militant, Azhar al-Dulaimi, had been trained by the Middle East’s masters of the dark arts of paramilitary operations: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran and Hezbollah, its Lebanese ally.  ...
Five months later, Mr. Dulaimi was tracked down and killed in an American raid in the sprawling Shiite enclave of Sadr City in Baghdad — but not before four American soldiers had been abducted from an Iraqi headquarters in Karbala and executed in an operation that American military officials say literally bore Mr. Dulaimi’s fingerprints. 


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/world/middleeast/23shiites.html 
Dec 23, 2006:  Large portions of Baghdad have become Shiite in recent months, as militias press their fight against Sunni militants deeper into the heart of the capital, displacing thousands of Sunni residents. At least 10 neighborhoods that a year ago were mixed Sunni and Shiite are now almost entirely Shiite, according to residents, American and Iraqi military commanders and local officials.
...
Few Sunnis claim compensation as victims of violence, since the application requires visits to police stations and hospitals, places no longer safe for Sunnis.
....
unlike a bomb blast, where everybody remembers how someone died, the Sunnis’ losses seems to melt away. The Mahdi Army-controlled police station had no record of them. 
At one point, in the summer of 2007, Petraeus concluded that the Mahdi Army, headed by the Shiite demagogue Muqtada al-Sadr, posed a greater “hindrance to long-term security in Iraq” than al Qaeda did. As recounted in The Endgame, Michael Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor’s magisterial history of the Second Iraq War, two-thirds of all American casualties in Iraq in July 2007 were incurred by Shiite militias. 


http://www.aina.org/reports/bgsdia.pdf
2007: "Sargon, was known in Baghdad for his collection of both Arabic and English music. He ran a famous music store with an office on the second floor. The Shiite Mehdi militia forbade all music and sent a threatening letter to him. They demanded him to close the store. The first time he was threatened he did not take it seriously. The second time he was barely able to save his life. They pushed a wheel chair with a bomb towards him; he gave way and understood the same second that it was over and that he had to leave Iraq. He closed the store but continued to sell CDs and videos from his home. He was robbed and assaulted. The next day he applied for a passport, sold all he owned and took the bus to Amman. He even left all his clothes. - If we would be able to return we would have returned. But we do not have a chance. Maybe one day, but right now we are on the black list of the Islamists. About a month ago the Mehdi militia found a picture of him and one of his Kurdish friends. The Kurd was kidnapped because the Islamists thought that he knew where Sargon was. When they arrested the Kurd they first sealed off the entire street and then went in to his house. In order to release the Kurd they demanded a ransom equivalent of eight thousand Euros or they would have Sargon’s head on a plate. That was half a year ago. His Kurdish friend was never found. "
....
"The landlords’ niece spread rumours that they worked with the Americans and the son of the landlord boasted he would get them killed. The landlord’s son had seen the Americans driving Linda and Rita home twice. He threatened to have the entire family killed three days before the two sisters were killed. Three of the landlord’s sons belong now to the feared Shiite Mehdi militia. ”You are spies for the Americans and we will teach you a lesson”, yelled several Shiite boys when the corpses of the girls were brought for burial."


https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZMD6w3FoWWsC&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=Sunnis+al-Zubayr+ethnic+cleansing&source=bl&ots=7Viu2L6fyh&sig=ropWsq2bbWjC21RA5MiLzffvzjE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwii1raeoofNAhVHBMAKHcb-A_EQ6AEIOzAD#v=onepage&q=Sunnis%20al-Zubayr%20ethnic%20cleansing&f=false
Page 36 of "Losing Small Wars" By Frank Ledwidge: Basra’s Sunni population reduced from 15% (of a population of a million) at the start of the war in 2003 to an estimated 4% by 2007 and mostly Sunni Al Zubayr town lost about half of its people by 2007.

http://www.bostonreview.net/nir-rosen-no-going-back-displaced-iraqis
2007: Until February 2006 the Sunnis and Shias were proportionally represented among Iraqi refugees registered with the UNHCR. But one month later the number of Sunnis shot up, far exceeding all the others...in January 2007 more than three times the number of Sunnis (3,144) were registered than Shia (901). The next month it was four to one.


January 27, 2007: men were taken to Sadr City, the Shia slum to the north-east of Baghdad, where they were interrogated by a "committee" which ordered their execution. "We ask the families of the terrorists for ransom money," said Fadhel. "And after they pay the ransom we kill them anyway."
Kidnapping in Baghdad these days is as much about economics as retribution or sectarian hatred. Another Shia man close to the Mahdi Army told me: "They kidnap 10 Sunnis, they get ransom on five, and kill them all, in each big kidnap operation they make at least $50 000, it's the best business in Baghdad."....His main job is kidnapping Sunnis allegedly involved in attacking Shia areas. It is men like Fadhel, responsible for the scores of bodies dumped on Baghdad's streets daily....
January 28, 2007: Mortar shells rained down on the playground of a girls' secondary school in a mostly Sunni area of western Baghdad during breaktime, killing five pupils and wounding 20.
....The mortar attack occurred at about 11am at the Kholoud Secondary School in the Adil neighbourhood of western Baghdad.  A Sunni group accused Shiite militias and said markings on the mortars indicated they were manufactured in Iran.   



January 29, 2007: Some 150 people, mostly Shia, have been killed by bomb attacks in Baghdad over the past week. But probably a majority of the 25 to 50 dead bodies, often bearing marks of torture, that are found by police every morning in the capital are Sunni. This is because the police and police commandos are Shia and often detain and kill Sunni at their checkpoints. Mixed neighbourhoods are disappearing in the capital. The sectarian cleansing started in 2005 and gathered pace after the destruction of the Shia al-Askarai shrine in Samarra in February 2006. Bomb attacks on Sadr City on 23 November last year killed 215 and wounded 250 more. Shia retaliation led to another mass flight of Sunni. Since there are no Sunni safe havens in Iraq, either in Baghdad or outside, many members of the community are fleeing to Jordan and Syria.

 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0130/p01s01-woiq.html 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/world/africa/31iht-militia.4418944.html?_r=0
January 30, 2007: The messianic Soldiers of Heaven militia that fought U.S. and Iraqi troops this week in one of the fiercest battles of the war is among more than two dozen extremist militias operating across Iraq that are fast becoming a powerful, and hidden, new enemy.
.....
Soldiers of Heaven were followers of Ahmed bin al-Hassan al-Basri, also referred to in some reports as Ahmad al- Hassaani, a prominent Shiite in Basra who claimed to be in direct communication with the Madhi, a messiah-like figure in Shiite Islam.  But an early report from the Arabic- language daily, Al Hayat, stated that the followers were led by a radical cleric, Mahmud al-Hassani al-Sarkhi, who is considered even more anti-American than his former ally, Sadr. ....
After the battle against the Soldiers of Heaven, specialists on Iraq cited yet another group as a possible combatant: the Fadila Party, headed by another cleric, Muhammad al-Yaqubi, who has his own militia. Yaqubi studied under Sadr's father, but is a rival of Sadr.
The Shiite bloc of political parties that controls Parliament has downplayed divisions among Shiites. But more than a dozen Shiite factions command their own armed followings in Southern Iraq, including two competing groups that both call themselves Hezbollah, a family-run private army of the Garamsha tribe and armed fighters loyal to the Prince of the Marshes, an autocratic leader of the Iraqi marsh Arabs, according to Juan Cole, a Shiite specialist and professor at the University of Michigan.
Another little known-group, Usbat Al-Huda, or the Daughter of Guidance, claims to be a group of female fighters loyal to Sadr who are willing to carry out suicide attacks.  Cole said that even the grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, a moderate Shiite cleric, controls a team of tribal body guards similar to a militia that calls itself Ansar Sistani.


http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/iraqis-on-the-run/
Feb 3, 2007:  ...Shia can move to safety in south Iraq and therefore make up the bulk of the internally displaced.  For Sunni there is no real place of safety in Iraq. In Baghdad they are being squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. Cities like Ramadi and Fallujah are partly ruined and very dangerous. Mohammed Sahib Ali, 48, a government employee, was forced out of the al-Hurriyah area by Shia militiamen. A Sunni, he took refuge in a school in Salah ad-Din province. 


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7260605
Feb 8, 2007: Attacks on the Sunni families still living in the neighborhood have continued; three women and two children have been killed. ..While the militiamen are forcing Sunnis out, they are threatening any Shiite who tries to leave, warning: Stay put — or else.

https://cpj.org/killed/2007/hamid-al-duleimi.php 
March 17, 2007:  Gunmen abducted al-Duleimi, a producer for the privately owned Nahrain satellite channel, as he left work in Baghdad's Al-Aamel neighborhood...The source said al-Duleimi had several gunshot wounds to the head, and his body showed signs of torture, including multiple burns and broken hands, legs, and neck.... Al-Aamel neighborhood was controlled by the Mahdi Army, led by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a local journalist told CPJ.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/world/middleeast/28cnd-iraq.html 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6502337.stm
March 28, 2007: Gunmen are reported to have killed at least 70 Sunni men in the north-western Iraqi border town of Talafar. The deaths were in apparent reprisal for bombings in a Shia area on Tuesday, which left about 55 people dead.


http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0418/p06s01-woiq.html 
April 18, 2007: The Interior Ministry said over the weekend that a bombing Saturday at a bus station in Karbala near sacred shrines that killed at least 50 people was the work of "renegade local elements and the Warriors of Heaven cult."



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/12113138/Iraqi-militia-that-killed-four-British-hostages-suspected-of-three-Americans-abduction.html
"The League, which is also known by the Arabic name Asaib Ahl al-Haq, was responsible for the kidnapping in May 2007 of British computer expert Peter Moore and his four bodyguards, in what turned out to be one of the worst kidnap crises in modern British history. Mr Moore was eventually released in December 2009, while his four bodyguards - Jason Creswell, Jason Swindlehurst, Alec MacLachlan, and Alan McMenemy - were killed in captivity. Mr Moore's release was widely understood to have been in exchange for the freeing of senior League militants arrested on suspicion of carrying out attacks on US forces, including an abduction at a US army base the city of Kerbala in January 2007 in which six US soldiers were killed."


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/magazine/13refugees-t.html?_r=0
May 13, 2007: Following the 2005 elections that brought Islamist Shiites to power, Lujai said, the Sadrists initiated what they called a “campaign to remove the Saddamists.” The minister of health and his turbaned advisers saw to it that in hospitals and health centers the walls were covered with posters of Shiite clerics like Sadr, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Shiite religious songs could often be heard in the halls. In June of last year, Ali al-Mahdawi, a Sunni who had managed the Diyala Province’s health department, disappeared, along with his bodyguards, at the ministry of health. (In February, the American military raided the ministry and arrested the deputy health minister, saying he was tied to the murder of Mahdawi.) Lujai told me that Sunni patients were often accused by Sadrist officials of being terrorists. After the doctors treated them, the special police from the Ministry of the Interior would arrest the Sunni patients. Their corpses would later be found in the Baghdad morgue. “This happened tens of times,” she said, to “anybody who came with bullet wounds and wasn’t Shiite.”
....
In Basra, they told me, 20 members of the company were kidnapped. The 7 Shiites were released, and the 13 Sunni employees were murdered. In Baghdad, however, the violence went the other way: the company’s Shiite lawyer was killed by Sunni militiamen. The owner himself belonged to the al-Omar family, a name that gave him away as Sunni, and thus his company was known as a “Sunni company.” He fled Basra to Baghdad because of threats; after more threats, he fled to the United Arab Emirates.
....
Under Saddam Hussein, the Palestinians, who are mostly Sunni, received subsidized housing and, according to Shiite opinion, preferential treatment. Immediately following the American invasion and occupation, the Palestinians were among the first victims of reprisals by the inchoate Shiite militias. They were expelled from their homes and often ended up in tent communities. Palestinians are now obliged to register in Baghdad once a month, but merely to approach the (Shiite-dominated) Ministry of the Interior to register is to risk kidnapping, torture and murder. So most Iraqi Palestinians are essentially illegal now in Iraq.
...
Hussein was first threatened in 2005, when, he said, a letter containing a bullet and two drops of blood was sent to his house. “If you do not leave Iraq, this will be your fate,” the letter read. A second death threat was signed by the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia sponsored by Iran and belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. “They threatened me, telling me to leave because I am a Palestinian,” he said. “They think that because we are Palestinians the whole world helps us. But that’s not true. If we had an easy life, I wouldn’t be working as a taxi driver and working in restaurants sometimes. They blew up my car. Then they blew up my house.”  Two of Hussein’s uncles were kidnapped. The kidnappers, Hussein told me, had demanded $100,000 in ransom, but Hussein’s family did not have the money. The next day they received a phone call informing them that his uncles’ bodies were in the morgue. Hussein’s uncles had been tortured and mutilated, drills driven through their bodies — a signature practice of Iraq’s Shiite militias — and their genitals cut off. “We couldn’t even have a funeral because they said if you do it, we will blow you up,” Hussein said. “We had to bury them at night.” Hussein’s family was also given a CD containing a film of the murders. In March of last year, Hussein said, he was in his house when he heard attackers. With his wife and daughter he escaped to their roof and, from there, to a neighbor’s roof. The attackers then blew up his house. Two months later, Hussein and his family tried to flee to Syria after hearing rumors that it was accepting Palestinians. Stranded between the two borders, his wife’s family — she was not Palestinian — helped her divorce him and return to Baghdad.
Ayman, shrouded by darkness in a corner of the tent, still speaks in the Palestinian dialect he got from his family, which was expelled from Palestine when his father was 5 years old. “My grandfather was my age when he was expelled,” he said. “Now, it wasn’t Jews who expelled us, it was Arabs.” Shiite militiamen, he said, attacked his house and killed his mother and brother. Ayman fled with his wife and two children.

http://www.aina.org/news/20070529235134.htm
May 30, 2007: Baghdad (AINA) -- An undated letter issued by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army to Christians in Baghdad orders Christian women to veil themselves or face grave consequences. The letter, obtained and translated by AINA, states that the Virgin Mary was not unveiled and so Christian women should not be unveiled. The letter ends with an ominous note that committees have been established to monitor the Christian populace and enforce the decree.
For the Christian Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) in Baghdad, the imposition of Shari'a (Islamic law) is coming from both Sunnis and Shiites. On March 18 al-Qaeda moved into the predominantly Assyrian Dora neighborhood in Baghdad and demanded payment of the jizya (AINA 4-17-2007, 3-18-2007), the poll tax demanded by the Koran which all Christians and Jews must pay. Families that could not pay the jizya were instructed to give a daughter or sister in marriage to a Muslim (AINA 5-18-2007).


http://www.aina.org/news/20070601151953.htm
June 1, 2007: Terrorists, believed to be Shiites, yesterday occupied the Convent belonging to the Chaldean Sisters of the Scared Heart in Baghdad. Sources in the capital in contact with the nuns denounced the event to AsiaNews. The Angel Raphael convent lies in the Mikanik area of the oppressed Dora quarter where for months now a ferocious anti Christian campaign of persecution has been unfolding. The only two sisters who still lived in there tell that a group of terrorists broke into the building during their absence; on their return they found the convent had been sacked of all its goods and turned into a base for military operations.
According to anonymous sources, in all probability, Shiite militants are behind the attack; as they too join Sunnis in their anti-Christian campaign. Two days ago a letter signed by the Mahdi Army, linked to the radical leader al Sadr, which imposes the Islamic veil on Christian women in Baghdad. Today a spokesperson for the group in Najaf, denied all involvement with the message, yet according to priests on the round, the situation is "very worrying".
Sources maintain that the attack on the convent, "could be in response to the Chaldean, Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly's condemnation of the attack on the Sunni Abdul Qader Al Dilani mosque", which took place on May 28th in the capital. The leader of the Chaldean Church in fact joined the Council of Christian Churches in Iraq in denouncing the episode as an attack against "all Iraq and all Iraqis without exceptions, capable of undermining national unity and fomenting division and discord".




http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10741221

June 5, 2007: U.S. troops report that Shiite policemen in Baghdad are responsible for some of the roadside bombs targeting U.S. convoys...In one incident, militiamen abducted 16 men at a checkpoint, and gave each tests to determine whether he was Sunni or Shiite. Three of them, presumably Shiites, were released. The other 13, according to an eyewitness, were beaten; some of them were killed.

 


http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1077165.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-mosque-idUSBUL53193420070615
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/world/middleeast/16iraq.html?_r=0 
June 16, 2007: The explosion at the Talha Bin Obeidallah mosque, which is in a suburb about 10 miles south of Basra, occurred at dawn, according to reports from residents. The mosque was popular among local Sunni Arabs and pilgrims, but had been visited less in recent years because of the security troubles in Basra.  
... “Photographers and cameramen entered the mosque asking to take photographs, and they put bombs inside it,” said Gen. Ali Hamadi, a security official in Basra. However, local residents said they saw uniformed men enter the mosque just before the explosion.
June 16, 2007: Hooded gunmen clad in black blew up another Sunni mosque in the southern city of Basra today after ordering the police officers at the mosque to flee, and despite a curfew imposed by Iraq’s central government, witnesses and security officials said.  The blast at the Al-Ashrah Al-Mubashra mosque in central Basra — the second Sunni mosque razed in as many days — suggested that Shiite militias south of the capital have rejected calls for restraint from Iraqi leaders after explosions Wednesday toppled two minarets at a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra.
July 4, 2007: Six months ago Sunni militants forced the Shia family of Baqir Zaidan Najim out of their house in Baghdad's southern Sunni-dominated suburb of Dora. Two months earlier, Shia militiamen had broken into the house of the Sunni family of Abdul-Khaliq Mohammed Khayon, and told them they had 24 hours to leave Baghdad’s northern Shia district of Kadhimiyah or “face death”. 
....
As a result, a new phenomenon has emerged: Sunni and Shia families are swapping houses. Estate agents are providing lists of available properties, facilitating swap arrangements.  

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0606/p01s03-wome.html 
July 6, 2007: "Some Shiite death squads have tortured and killed up to 100 Sunnis a day in Baghdad alone. The current "surge" of US forces into the capital is meant to cut those numbers, and for a time, it did. But the sectarian poison that courses between the two branches of Islam was on display as Hussein was taunted at the gallows by Shiite hangmen. "Hasten his return [of the Mahdi, the Shiite Messiah], curse his enemy, and grant victory to his son, Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!" rejoiced the Shiite government executioner as the noose tightened on Dec. 30, 2006."
July 18, 2007:Two weeks ago, Fawziya Ibrahim Mohammed, a 36-year old housewife and mother of four, went through a grim experience when she had to go to downtown Baghdad to claim the bodies of her brother and two cousins from the main morgue: “Men would definitely be kidnapped and killed by Shia militia," she said. The three were allegedly kidnapped at a checkpoint manned by Shia-dominated police commandos south of Baghdad and handed over to the al-Mahdi army, a Shia militia loyal to radical religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr who is blamed for many killings. Their bullet-riddled bodies were found next day dumped in the street with their legs and hands tied. There were signs they had been tortured. 
"They [Shia militiamen] are always near the morgue to snatch Sunni men when they retrieve the bodies. We don’t want to lose any more men and that’s why I took the risk, although it was my first time to travel alone," Fawziya added.   Conversely, Shia men have stopped travelling through Sunni-dominated areas, where Sunni militants are active, in order not to be kidnapped and killed. 


http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/30/world/fg-interior30 
30 July 2007: Iraq’s interior ministry had become an “eleven-story powder keg of factions” where hostile militias and criminal organizations controlled various floors and settled their differences by assassinations in the parking lot. Offices guarded by armed men and officials who feared the elevators and took the stairs accompanied by heavy security.
 

===============

Suyuf al-Haq 
July 27, 2010: A group of masked, sword-wielding Shiite youths aiming to "promote virtue and fight vice" terrorised a southern Iraqi city from early July until its members were rounded up.
The group, calling itself "Suyuf al-Haq," or "Swords of Righteousness," issued death threats and sometimes beat up those it perceived as engaging in immoral behaviour in areas of Nasiriyah, said a colonel in the police, citing numerous complaints they had received.
Suyuf al-Haq adopted a broad definition of vice, going after people for using or selling drugs or alcohol and for prostitution, but also for having "Western" haircuts, according to Nasiriyah residents.
The group's black-clad members also checked residents' mobile phones and confiscated them if the ringtone was an Arabic or Western song, said the police colonel, who asked not to be identified by name. Suyuf al-Haq sprung up in early July in the Al-Shuhadah, Arido and Al-Sadr neighbourhoods of central Nasiriyah, said the police chief for Dhi Qar province, where the city is located.
Those areas were former strongholds of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army), which was expelled from Nasiriyah by the Iraqi military in 2008.
Police arrested members of Suyuf al-Haq on Thursday.
August 1, 2010:  Residents said the vigilantes would beat anyone they found drinking, along with women they believed to be having sex outside marriage. Listening to music and using the internet was also something they scorned as against Islamic laws. By June, the group's reputation was such that people in Nasariyah, long considered calm and secure, would stay in at night rather than risk a confrontation. Even that was no guarantee of protection, however, according to Sabah al Deyawi, a city resident who claims the group beheaded three of his neighbours for drinking alcohol.
....
Mr al Kadi, worried about the violent zeal of his friends in the Swords of Righteousness, was among those who began staying in after dark. "I stopped going to the internet cafe when they said that the internet was against Islam," he said. "I didn't want them to see me there. They were against anything they thought was immoral, they hated satellite television because of all the pornographic channels.
"They said girls in Nasariyah were all having sex with lots of different men, and that everyone was watching pornography on the television." The police deny the group was behind any killings. Last week, security forces arrested 24 men on suspicion of being members of the organisation, and 10 of them are to be charged under anti-terrorism laws, which can carry a death sentence.

================
http://www.niqash.org/en/articles/politics/1973/
August 20, 2007: People speak inaudibly about the murder of Sunnis in Basra. There are even Shi'ites who do not talk about the murder of Sunnis due to fear of militia revenge.  ...But murder in the city is not confined to Sunnis. Often, killings target the intellectual elites, doctors, pharmacists and university professors from among the Shi'ites themselves. ...  Even the phone number "130", designated to report incidences to the security services, is silent as no one dares to call because they fear of being answered by one of the militia members.  Militants have bombed the famous Lion of Babylon statue in the center of the city, put there in the 1940s, during the night when no other than the police and the militias of the different parties are moving through the streets.  None of the Sunnis volunteered to join the police or the Iraqi army despite the calls made by the new police chief, Major-General Jalil Khalaf Shwayer, after meeting with Abdul Karim Jarrad, head of the Sunni Waqf (religious endowment). Many believe that if they were admitted to the police they would be killed because the security apparatus is the "shelters of Mahdi Army members, Badr Organization, Hizbullah, Sayed al-Shuhada' and other Shi'ite militias" according to one of the Sunni observers in the city who holds that these Shi'ite organizations "by their nature are forces expelling Sunnis from participation in the political life, and who think that it is important to clean them out of the city." After the bombing of the Talha bin Ubaydullah Shrine (a Sunni Shrine) in Zubair four months ago one of the members of the Basra provincial council went as far as saying, "I would have destroyed it long time ago if I had been free to do so." 


August 28, 2007: Although members of the Mahdi Army pledge allegiance to Sadr, many operate according to conflicting agendas and some are linked to Iran, according to security officials. Last week, efforts by police chief Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf to hem in the notoriously corrupt and militia-controlled intelligence and criminal investigation units of the police force were met with protests and threats. There have already been two attempts on his life since Mr. Maliki appointed him three months ago. 

http://europe.newsweek.com/baghdads-new-owners-100331 
Sep 9, 2007: When Sunni homeowners flee, say U.S. soldiers, their furniture is often locked up and their houses listed at local Sadr offices. Shiite families - many of them displaced earlier from Sunni neighborhoods - can peruse the listings, sometimes even photos of the property. For around 110,000 Iraqi dinars (about $88) per month, they can rent a furnished home and receive deliveries of cooking oil from the Mahdi Army. The militiamen earn even more money by controlling the gas stations in various neighborhoods, and by carjacking the nicest vehicles - usually, but not always, driven by Sunnis - at the checkpoints they set up.
Sep 17, 2007: Last month saw the assassination of two top Badrists – Muthana Province Gov. Muhammad al-Hassani and Diwaniyah Gov. Jalil Hamza – with most fingers pointing to elements of the Mahdi Army.  
"I expect the tit-for-tat assassinations to increase," says a Basra-based newspaper editor, adding that at least 300 partisans of Badr and its sister parties in the Supreme Council have been assassinated in Basra alone since the start of the year.
....
Maliki also appointed Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf to purge the police force of militias. He has already faced two assassination attempts and street protests as he seeks to fire unqualified officers, prevent policemen from using the force's vehicles when moonlighting as militiamen, and enforce a requirement that all policemen shave their beards.
Sep 18, 2007:  Shiite Taliban in Basra __ The billboard in Umm al-Broom Square was meant to advertise a cellphone service. Instead, it has become a message to those who dare to resist the rising tide of fundamentalist Islam in Iraq's second largest city. The female model's face is now covered with black paint. Graffiti scrawled below reads, "No! No to unveiled women."
...
Public parties are banned. Selling musical CDs is forbidden in shops. Those who sell or consume alcohol face recrimination, even death. Artists and performers are severely restricted and even labeled as heretics. A famous city landmark, a replica of the Lion of Babylon statue that stood here for decades was blown up by militants in July. It was considered idolatrous, according to the strict interpretation of Islam.
Signs ordering women to cover up appear throughout the city. One woman, an Iraqi female activist from Basra, says the notices even threaten death. One banner, she says, said unveiled women could be murdered and no one could remove their bodies from the street. 
....
One Christian woman in Basra says that she has witnessed an exodus of families from traditionally Christian areas like Braiha, Maaqal, and Jumhouriyah over the past two years. Sunnis in Basra have not been as fortunate. Many have been killed or forcefully pushed out from inside the city as part of the sectarian war that has swept the whole country. Most are now concentrated in areas south of Basra. A warning given to Sunnis in the city reads, "You have 10 days to leave our blessed land in southern Iraq and you have been forewarned."

Oct 2, 2007: People still there, and those forced to flee like Abu, have described how rival Shia Islamist militias are struggling to control the city, with the British-trained police force proving to be a source of insecurity. They say the militias have turned Basra into a "Shia Taleban" city.
 
Oct 4, 2007: BASRA, Iraq — Women in Basra have become the targets of a violent campaign by religious extremists, who leave more than 15 female bodies scattered around the city each month, police officers say.
....
Like all of southern Iraq, Basra is populated mostly by Shiite Muslims, so sectarian violence isn't a major problem, but security has deteriorated as Shiite militias fight each other for power. British troops in the area pulled out last month.
Khalaf, who has a reputation for outspokenness in a city where that can get you killed, scoffed at the groups, calling them no better than criminal gangs. He said he didn't care if some were affiliated with the militias, he planned to crack down on them.
"If there is a red line related to the insurgents and militias, we will pass it over, because it's one of the factors that destroy the society," he said.
The violence is displacing the few members of religious minorities in the area. Fuad Na'im, one of a handful of Christians left in the city, said Thursday that the way his wife dressed made the whole family a target.
"I was with my wife few days ago when two young men driving a motorbike stopped me and asked her about her clothes and why she doesn't wear hijab," he said. "When I told them that we are Christians, they beat us badly, and I would be dead if some people nearby hadn't intervened."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1565413/Iraqi-officers-want-UK-patrols-back-in-Basra.html 
Oct 7, 2007:  Up to 40 people are being killed each day in Iraq's second city, say officers who have set a two-week deadline for security to be improved before they approach the British for help.  
...  "We can't control Basra any more," said one Iraqi colonel, who disclosed that political divisions were leading to bloodshed even within the ranks of the army. "Our forces in the streets don't obey us — they obey their parties."  He described a recent outbreak of fighting at a checkpoint manned by troops from rival Shia political factions. One of the soldiers was shot.  
Neighbourhoods in Basra have been divided between the two factions and another Shia grouping, the Al Fadila party, according to the officer, who also pointed to continuing sectarian killings of Sunnis, a minority group in the south.  ....  
Sunni Muslims in Basra are also mourning the absence of British patrols. Ahmed al-Dulaimy, a member of the Sunni Islamic party, told of more than 50 people killed by Shia militiamen in Al Zubair city and Abu Al Khaseeb after being kidnapped at checkpoints manned by Iraqi security forces.  "The British were watching the checkpoints to stop the kidnapping and killings, but now the Shia militia do what they want to do and no one can stop them," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/world/middleeast/12mahdi.html
Oct 12, 2007: Among the people killed in the neighborhood of Topchi over the past two months, residents said, were the owner of an electrical shop, a sweets seller, a rich man, three women, two local council members, and two children, ages 9 and 11.
......
One of the most notorious killers in Topchi, who residents say was a Mahdi Army fighter, Haidar Rahim, was born in 1989. On a hot August afternoon, he and two accomplices shot and killed a woman named Eman, a divorced mother, in front of her house, residents said. The fighters said she was a prostitute, but shortly after her death they brought tenants to rent her house.
.....
Criminals began to give the organization a bad name. The price for used cars plummeted as militiamen sold vehicles that had belonged to their dead victims. A Sadr City sheik issued a religious edict permitting the confiscation of the property of Sunni militants who see Shiites as heretics. But many took it as a blank check to seize property, as long as the victim was Sunni.
http://www.niqash.org/en/articles/politics/2040/  
Oct 20, 2007: A researcher specializing in minorities' affairs, who prefers to remain anonymous, said that, "assassinations do not only target the minorities of the city but also the Shi'ite citizens of the city, especially due to the influx of tribes from al-'Amara, al-Nasiriyah, the Mi'dan tribes, and the people from the marshes, who form the major components of the militias dominating Basra today


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E2D9153EF936A35752C1A9619C8B63&pagewanted=all 
Nov 5, 2007:  Under Mr. Zamili and General Shammari's direction, about 150 members of the agency's protection service were organized into a company that acted like a private militia. Using Health Ministry identification to move freely around Baghdad and ambulances to ferry weapons, they carried out hundreds of sectarian killings and kidnappings from 2005 to early 2007, the investigation reports.
It found that Sunni patients at three major Baghdad hospitals -- Al Yarmouk, Ibn al-Nafees and Al Nur -- were abducted and many were killed, as were their relatives who came to visit them. Sunnis who went to hospital morgues to recover the bodies of their relatives were also killed, the investigation found.
At the Health Ministry, the investigation found, Sunni doctors who refused Mahdi Army demands that they quit working for the agency were also killed. The head of the Diyala Province hospital, Dr. Ali al-Madawi, a Sunni, was summoned to the Health Ministry in Baghdad, disappeared and is presumed dead.
At times, the Health Ministry headquarters itself was used to hold kidnap victims. To cover up many of the killings, morgue officials were ordered to draft phony death certifications, the Iraqi inquiry noted.
Mr. Zamili's activities, including alleged efforts to divert ministry funds to himself and the Mahdi Army, did not go without challenge. But several ministry officials who stood up to him were kidnapped and killed, the investigation found. Those who were murdered include Mr. Zamili's own personal assistant. A deputy health minister, Ammar al-Saffar, vanished after telling close associates that he had been threatened by Mr. Zamili. The inspector general of the Health Ministry was also threatened in order to discourage an internal investigation, the inquiry found.
Members of the security force, in a reflection of their religious beliefs, were adamant that autopsies should not be conducted on Mahdi Army fighters and threatened to kill morgue personnel who carried them out, the investigation reported.
http://www.niqash.org/en/articles/politics/2060/
Nov 5, 2007: Journalists in Basra forced to use aliases as Shia militias kill and abduct them.

Nov 15, 2007: "There is a terrible repression against women in Basra," Maj-Gen Khalaf told the BBC. "They kill women, leave a piece of paper on her or dress her in indecent clothes so as to justify their horrible crimes." Forty-two women were killed between July and September this year, although the number dropped slightly in October, he said. In one case, he added, a woman was killed in her home along with her six-year-old son, who was rumoured to have been conceived in an adulterous relationship.
Nov 20, 2007:  Hana Youssif was one of hundreds of Christians driven out of Basra.
Nov 24, 2007:  Four members of an Iranian-backed Shiite cell confessed to bombing a public market in central Baghdad, a U.S. spokesman said Saturday......The blast Friday in the al-Ghazl pet market killed at least 15 people, wounded 56.....
“Based on subsequent confessions, forensics and other intelligence, the bombing was the work of an Iranian-backed special groups cell operating here in Baghdad,” Smith said, adding that he was not accusing Iran itself of ordering the blast.
The market is located in a Shiite area and has been targeted before by Sunni extremists. But Smith said the attackers wanted people to believe that the bomb, packed with ball-bearings to maximize casualties, was the work of al-Qaida in Iraq so that residents would turn to Shiite militias for protection. He also said Shiite “special groups” were believed responsible for a series of rocket and mortar attacks against American bases in eastern Baghdad on Nov. 18.

Dec 5, 2007:  More than 40 have been killed and their bodies dumped in the streets in the past five months for behaviour deemed un-Islamic, the city's police chief says. A warning scrawled in red on a wall threatens any woman who wears makeup or appears in public without an Islamic headscarf with dire punishment.
"Whoever disobeys will be punished. God is our witness that we have conveyed this message," it says. 
...
"Some women were killed with their children," Basra police chief, Major-General Abdul-Jalil Khalaf, told Reuters. "One with a six-year-old child, another with an 11-year-old." 
...
Rita Anwar, a 27-year-old Christian, said she was thinking of leaving Basra, or even Iraq, altogether. 
"You would not believe that I also wear the headscarf sometimes. It is terrifying to read this graffiti in red threatening murder," she said.
.....
Police in Basra showed Reuters pictures of women whose bodies were found with notes attached, accusing them of adultery and other "honour crimes". One photo was of Hayat Jassem, 45, found dead with two gunshot wounds in the stomach. Another was of an unidentified woman in her 30s who was found dead and blindfolded. 

Dec 8, 2007: He was talking very aggressively and I was scared,” Zeena recalled.  The girls explained that they were Christians and that their faith did not call for headscarves.
He said: ‘Outside this university you are Christian and can do what you want; inside you are not. Next time I want to see you wearing a hijab or I swear to God the three of you will be killed immediately’,” Zeena recalled. Terrified, the girls ran home.
They now wear the headscarf all the time.  In the past five months more than 40 women have been murdered and their bodies dumped in the street by militiamen, according to the Basra police chief. Major-General Abdul-Jalil Khalaf said that some of them had been killed alone, others gunned down with their children. One unveiled mother was murdered together with her children aged 6 and 11.
....
At the university, Sunni students complain of being harassed by Shia militias. Ahmed, a 19-year-old Sunni freshman, was told that he had to grow a beard but keep his hair short to adhere to Islamic norms. He said that boys and girls who try to sit next to each other will be told to stay apart and given a lecture on Islamic virtue.
Self-appointed morality police, similar to the Bassiji who haunt students across the border in Iran, also grab people’s mobile phones and scroll through them looking for “immoral” video clips, music or pictures, Ahmed said.
Another student, Ali Yusuf, said that militiamen halted a freshers’ week party for new students, turning off the music system and ripping down the decorations. One armed thug picked up the DJ’s microphone and started praising Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, the fanatical cleric who leads al-Mahdi Army, the most powerful Shia militia, before reading out a list of rules.
Dec 11, 2007: The bodies of a Christian woman and her brother were found in a garbage dump, police and church officials said Tuesday in the southern city of Basra, where women have grown increasingly fearful of religious vigilantes blamed for the deaths of at least 40 women.
....
A 21-year-old history student at Basra College of Arts said women are harassed both at the school and in the street... She said she was stopped once by two fellow students and ordered to cover her hair and stop wearing makeup "otherwise it's better for me not to attend class."
Another woman, a 43-year old Christian housewife, said her family was driven from the city where they had lived for years, and fled to a Christian neighborhood of Baghdad.
 "It started last May when gunmen stopped me and my husband as we were walking and asked me about my clothes and why I did not wear the hijab," she said. "Then we were beaten when I told them that we are Christians, and they threatened to kill me if I would not respect Islam in this city."
Dec 11, 2007:  Religious extremists have killed at least 40 women this year in Basra because of their "un-Islamic" dress, according to Iraqi police.  The police said women were being apprehended by men patrolling on motorbikes or in cars with tinted windows before being murdered and dumped in piles of rubbish with notes saying they were killed for "un-Islamic behaviour". He said men had been victims of similar attacks.  Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the rise of Iraq's Shia-dominated government, armed men have forced women to cover their heads or face punishment. In parts of the predominantly Shia south, even Christian women have been forced to wear headscarves. In some areas of Basra, graffiti warns women that forgoing the headscarf and wearing make-up "will bring you death".  In September, the headless bodies of a woman and her six-year-old son were among those found. A total of 40 deaths have been reported this year but police believe many go unreported for fear of reprisals.
Dec 11, 2007: Video footage of the clashes provided by Sadr's aides in Karbala shows black-clad men loyal to the cleric taunting guards, who are largely made up of Badr partisans, and then hurling shoes at them for refusing them entry into the shrine. Later, these guards are seen firing directly at throngs of pilgrims.
Mr. Maliki himself came down to Karbala at the time and gave police chief Brig. Gen. Raed Shaker, carte blanche to go after the Mahdi Army.
About 500 people were arrested at the time, including several provincial council members loyal to Sadr. General Shaker also declared publicly that the Mahdi Army was responsible for the assassination of at least 400 people in Karbala since 2004. "These are only the bodies that we found," he said in an interview. "This is all documented. I am not doing this for any political agenda."
Umm Bassem says the Mahdi Army killed her son Bassem Hassoun, an Iraqi Army officer. She says they crippled her second son, Haidar.
"It's the fault of Sayyed [honorific] Moqtada; he encouraged them and armed them," says a tearful Umm Bassem, a nickname that means "mother of Bassem," as she clutches a portrait of her late son.
Mahamadawi, Sadr's aide in Karbala, says there may have been bad apples in the ranks of the Mahdi Army.
"We are not saying they are all angels, they are humans that can make mistakes; we have punished some and kicked out others," he says, adding that there is an intent by the government to sully the image of the Mahdi Army and finish it off. He also accuses the Karbala police of committing unspeakable crimes against the Sadrists including the killing of two children of a wanted militiaman in October and the torture of prisoners.
Dec 17, 2007:   “Militiamen approached us to tell us we must wear the hijab and stop wearing make-up,” college student Zahra Alwan who fled Basra for Baghdad recently told IPS. “They are imitating the Iranian Revolution Guards, and we believe they receive orders from the Islamic Republic (of Iran) to do so.”
Graffiti in red on walls across Basra warns women against wearing make-up and stepping out without covering their bodies from head to toe, Alwan said.  “The situation in Baghdad is not very different,” Mazin Abdul Jabbar, social researcher at Baghdad University told IPS.
“All universities are controlled by Islamic militiamen who harass female students all the time with religious restrictions.”  Jabbar said this is one reason that “many families have stopped sending their daughters to high schools and colleges.”
Earlier this year Iraq’s Ministry of Education found that more than 70 percent of girls and young women no longer attend school or college.  Several women victims were accused of being “bad” before they were abducted, residents say. Most abducted women are later found dead. The bodies of several were found in garbage dumps, showing signs of rape and torture. Several bodies had a note attached saying the woman was “bad”, according to several residents who did not give their name.
A Shia cleric in Baghdad spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity to defend killings.  “We are an Islamic country and we must commit to the restrictions of our religion,” he said. “We must not allow corruption to invade our families under flag of freedom and such nonsense.”
Sunni clerics offered a different view.  “It is against Islamic regulations for women to expose their hair and bodies,” Sheikh Tariq al-Abdaly told IPS in Baghdad. “But this is not an Islamic state, and so all we can do is to advise women, same as we advise men, to follow those regulations. In any case, punishment for such mistakes should certainly be much less than execution.”


Dec 27, 2007: For fear that the faithful could be attacked by radical Islamists on their way to the church of Mari Afram the parish has cancelled the service, reported the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) on Friday. Three quarters of the approximately 5000 Aramaic-speaking Christians still in Basra in 2003 have now fled because life has become unbearable for them there. Today there are not more than 500 Christians in the southern Iraqi city. They are threatened and attacked if they do not abide by Islamic custom.
Precisely in Basra the Islamic rules and laws are evidently being constantly more severely interpreted, reported the GfbV. Press reports speak of at least 40 women, many of whom were Moslems, being killed in the street in recent months because they violated Islamic customs. On the street and in public places like the university women can no longer go about without a veil, reported a student on the telephone to the GfbV. The university is completely under the control of Moslem students, who dress in black as do normally the Shiite militia. All those who do not keep to their rules are threatened with violence by Moslem students, both male and female.
The murders also of the two Christians Usama and Maisun Farid, whose bodies were found by the police on 12th December on the main road between al-Fao and Abi al-Khasib southwest of Basra , increase the feelings of insecurity of the Christians still in Basra . The two murdered brothers had been abducted a few days previously by unknown persons.


http://www.irinnews.org/report/76065/iraq-islamic-extremists-target-women-basra 
2 Jan 2008: One hundred and thirty-three women were killed last year in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, either by religious vigilantes or as a result of so-called “honour” killings, a report said on 31 December. The report, released by Basra Security Committee at a conference on women’s rights in the city, said 79 of the victims were deemed by extremists to be “violating Islamic teachings”, 47 others died in “honour” killings and the remaining seven were targeted for their political affiliations.“The women of Basra are being horrifically murdered and then dumped in the garbage with notes saying they were killed for violating Islamic teachings," Bassem al-Moussawi, head of the committee and a member of Basra’s Provincial Council, told the conference.
“Sectarian groups are trying to force a strict interpretation of Islam… They send their vigilantes to roam the city, hunting down those who are deemed to be behaving against their [the extremists’] own interpretations,” al-Moussawi said. 
The Basra office of Iraq’s radical Shia religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr said his movement opposed the killings and blamed “gangs with foreign support [which are out] to defame the religious movements”. 
“It is a sin,” said Harith al-Ethari, a spokesman for al-Sadr’s office in Basra, not to wear a headscarf. “But killing women is a bigger sin,” al-Ethari said. 
“There is a concrete religious principle that says that wearing makeup and foregoing a headscarf in public is a sin, but it must not be dealt with like this,” he said.


http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/08/iraq.women/index.html?iref=topnews 
8 Feb 2008: The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion -- some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.  The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other "rules" that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce. ... Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, is a stronghold of conservative Shia groups. As many as 133 women were killed in Basra last year -- 79 for violation of "Islamic teachings" and 47 for so-called honor killings, according to IRIN, the news branch of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
....
Boldly splattered in red paint just outside the main downtown market, a chilling sign reads: "We warn against not wearing a headscarf and wearing makeup. Those who do not abide by this will be punished. God is our witness, we have notified you." ...
Amnesty International has raised concern about the increasing violence toward women in Iraq, saying abductions, rapes and "honor killings" are on the rise.  "Politically active women, those who did not follow a strict dress code, and women [who are] human rights defenders were increasingly at risk of abuses, including by armed groups and religious extremists," Amnesty said in a 2007 report.  Sometimes, it's just the color of a woman's headscarf that can draw unwanted attention.  "One time, one of my female colleagues commented on the color of my headscarf," Safana says. "She said it would draw attention ... [and I should] avoid it and stick to colors like gray, brown and black."  


https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/world/middleeast/14justice.html 
14 Feb 2008: While most prisoners are Sunni Arabs, most guards are Shiites. Guards affiliated with Shiite militias regularly freed their comrades in arms and they abused Sunni prisoners, he said. “We’ve had reports of them taking prisoners out of their cells in the dark of the night and smacking them around,” Mr. Pannek said.
26 Apr 2008: Iran, the officials said, has shifted tactics to distance itself from a direct role in Iraq since the American military captured 20 Iranian operatives inside Iraq in December 2006 and January 2007. Ten of those Iranians remain in American custody.
Since then, Iran seems to have focused instead on training Iraqi Shiite fighters inside Iran, though the exact number remains unclear. Some officials said only handfuls of fighters at a time had recently trained in Iran. At the same time, Iran has sought to retain political and economic influence over a variety of Shiite factions, not just the most extremist militias, known as ''special groups.''


 
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/returning-to-basra/  
4 Mar 2008: The militias’ handiwork is evident. On my way to an appointment, I saw a statue of a river nymph standing in a traffic circle. Shiite militiamen are believed to have defaced it because the nymph was partly nude.
Real women are also under threat by religious extremists. The Basra police report that scores of women have been killed here over the past year for perceived immodesty. Shiite militias run their own Shariah courts and punishment squads here, and they have deep influence in the government courts and police forces as well. Basra residents tell of assassination and kidnapping squads within the police forces.

http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079688.html  
March 26, 2008: Al-Basrah's female residents also came under increasing pressure, including threats and harassment for wearing what their accusers considered inappropriate attire. In a March 20 report in "Al-Azzam," residents were gripped by fear after the discovery around the city of several women's mutilated bodies. Police officials claimed they arrested an armed gang that eventually admitted to killing nine women, but local officials suggest that other similar gangs operate relatively unhindered in the city.  


http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2008-04-10-iraqnews_N.htm 
April 11, 2008:  Ahmed Sattar Jamil, commander of a Sunni watch group formed six days ago, was gunned down Thursday in a Baghdad Shiite neighborhood. Four Mahdi Army members peppered Jamil with 24 bullets as he drove to a meeting of local leaders, said Abu Mohammad, one of his deputies....Jamil was killed a few days after his group clashed with Iraqi police, many of whom come from Shiite neighborhoods controlled by the Mahdi Army.

http://www.irinnews.org/report/78010/iraq-shia-militiamen-attack-aid-convoys-baghdad-suburb  
May 1, 2008: Government officials and residents of Baghdad's mainly Shia district of Sadr City on 30 April accused pro-Moqtada al-Sadr militiamen of attacking aid convoys and closing down schools. The militiamen have used roadside bombs to target aid convoys which carry food rations and medicines. They have also targeted schools, ambulances and public service vehicles, Tahsin al-Sheikhli, a government spokesman, said. 

"The terrorist groups [reference to Shia militiamen of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army] have closed six medical centres, and 86 schools by threatening their employees and families not to send their children to the schools, which they use as bases for their operations," al-Sheikhli said. 


http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/06/mahdi_army_cell_lead.php http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/desperation-move-by-sadrists.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7460793.stm  
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/18/AR2008061800344.html  
June 18, 2008: U.S. military officials on Wednesday accused a Shiite militant group of carrying out a truck bombing in northwestern Baghdad on Tuesday evening that killed at least 65 people, the deadliest attack in the capital since March.
The accusation was startling because the bombing in the Hurriyah neighborhood had the hallmarks of earlier large-scale attacks in predominantly Shiite areas that had been attributed to Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq.
A U.S. military spokesman said intelligence reports indicate that Haydar Mehdi Khadum al-Fawadi, the leader of a Shiite "special group," planned the bombing in an effort to fuel animosity toward Sunnis in the largely Shiite district. The U.S. military uses the term special groups to describe what it says are smaller Iranian-backed militias. 


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7564154.stm
August 15, 2008: In the past few weeks gunmen travelling the city [Basra] on motorcycles have attacked hairdressers (for shaving off men's beards) and alcohol shops.
"A few months ago some people tried to hold large parties in the city," said one young man.
"They had a band, which was playing music but they had to stop when they were attacked by the militias."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmj-pXjjjGs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIvJxM5SL3k 
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/08/19/iraq.mosque/   
August 19, 2008:  "There are the bloodstains on the wall, and here it is dried on the floor," says Abu Muhanad as he walks through a torture chamber in a Baghdad mosque where more than two dozen bodies have been found.
...... 
The horrific scene at this southwestern Baghdad mosque is what officials say was the work of a Shia militia known as the Mehdi Army. Residents who live near the mosque say they could hear the victims' screams. The militia had been in control of the mosque, called Adib al-Jumaili, for at least a year and a half.
The neighborhood lies in an area that became one of the capital's many sectarian fault lines when violence was at its worst.
It's been about three months since the Mehdi Army, loyal to radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr abandoned this mosque, as it withdrew from several strongholds across the country.
Spray painted on the walls is a chilling warning: "Spies, you will dig your own graves. Long live the Mehdi Army."
Now the mosque is under the watch of the Sons of Iraq, a local armed group that is largely financed by the Americans working alongside the Iraqi police. They are charged with trying to keep the peace in the neighborhood. Muhanad is their leader.
"We found this chain on an old man's corpse that we dug out of the grave," he says, gesturing to a bloodied chain on the floor. "We recovered about 22 corpses and then another five."
Only now are people able to understand the true magnitude of the Shia militia's atrocities and the brutal laws they were enforcing on the people.
"This was my son's grave," says Abu Wissam pointing to one of the many shallow holes in the mosque's garden. "We recovered his corpse completely rotten. His hands and legs were amputated and his head was decapitated."
"He was just a college graduate," his mother sobs clutching her 25-year-old son's photo. They say the Mehdi Army abducted their son about a year ago, accusing him of being a traitor. They shot up and looted his home. The family fled. A gruesome video of their son's mutilated body was delivered to their doorstep.
Izady believes that the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad by the Shiite militias and the Sons of Iraq movement were the major reasons why the civil war ended...
The BBC did a similar set of maps comparing pre-2006 Baghdad to 2007 based upon information from the International Medical Corps. It found a very similar pattern of Shiite expansion in the east and northwest, the vast reduction of mixed neighborhoods, and the concentration of Sunnis in the west.


http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/11/in_hurriyah_sunni_fa.php  

Nov 7, 2008: In Hurriyah, another affluent community, the Mahdi Army’s advance was so bloody that to the soldiers of the last American unit here, the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, the neighborhood became known as the “Hurriyah killing fields.” In all, according to Iraqi and American officers of the 1-22 and 1-502 battalions, somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 Sunni families fled Hurriyah, some for more secure areas of Baghdad like Adl and Jamia, and others for more distant destinations – Tarmiyah, Baqubah, and other Sunni towns outside the capital.
To consolidate control in Hurriyah after forcing Sunni residents to move elsewhere, the Mahdi Army brought impoverished Shia families into the area from poorer parts of greater Baghdad, according to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph McLamb, the 1-502 battalion commander.
....
But over the past few months, some Sunni families have begun to trickle back into Hurriyah, the soldiers of 1-502 say. The return has been prompted by the decline in violence across Baghdad and the dramatic defeat that Shia militias in northwest Baghdad suffered last spring at the hands of American and Iraqi troops. 
....
Another problem has been intimidation of returning Sunnis by militia loyalists. Abdullah, a recent returnee, showed the American platoon leader the threatening text messages that he had received on his cell phone from a militiaman named Abu Sayf. According to Ward, the officer from 1-502’s headquarters, there have also been incidents of concussion grenades tossed into Sunni houses. In other cases, Mahdi militia loyalists have set tires on fire in houses where they knew Sunni families planned to return. Outright violence against returnees has been scarce, though. There has been only one murder. The number of returning Sunnis is not dramatic, at least not in comparison to how many families fled Hurriyah in 2006 and 2007. In all, just under 400 Sunni families have returned to Hurriyah, according to records kept by 1-502 Infantry.

https://rsf.org/en/news/hate-campaign-shiite-party-against-government-newspaper-journalist 
August 11, 2009: ISCI, a Shiite party, issues death threat against the government newspaper Al-Sabah and its news editor, Ahmed Abd Al-Hussein.

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m60546&hd=&size=1&l=e  
Nov 27, 2009: In Basra, Shia militias kill Iraqis working for British army and foreign companies

 
http://www.stripes.com/news/christians-in-basra-subdued-for-holiday-1.97279 
Dec 15, 2009: In Basra, Christians made up an important part of the city’s once-thriving merchant class. Their small numbers and lack of a security force made them vulnerable targets for kidnappings and extortion by the Shiite militias and criminal groups that took control of the city in 2007.  That year, al-Banna urged his parishioners not to celebrate Christmas after two Christians, a brother and sister, were murdered and left in a garbage dump.
Dec 25, 2009: A group of armed Shabaks attacked the Assyrian (also known as Chaldean and Syriac) town of Bartilla ...Witnesses reported the Shabak attackers are also residents of Bartilla and are led by Hassan Ganjou, allegedly a former member of the Mahdi Army (JAM) and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), before working as a private security guard for Shabak Parliament member Dr. Hunain. Mr. Ganjou is currently a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Witnesses report that Mr. Qusay Abbas, the only Shabak member of the Nineveh Provincial Council, was touting a gun and amongst attackers.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/19/world/la-fg-iraq-prison19-2010apr19 
April 19, 2010:
Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's military office, where many were routinely tortured.


http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2010/10/iran_sends_another_d.php
October 18, 2010: "Sheibani is the second dangerous Shia terror commander known to have returned to Iraq since last summer. Ismail Hafiz al Lami, who is also known as Abu Dura and the “Shiite Zarqawi” for his brutality towards Iraqis, was also sent back to Iraq by Qods Force’s Ramazan Corps sometime last summer. Abu Dura is a commander in the notorious Asaib al Haq, or the League of the Righteous, a Mahdi Army splinter group that is also backed by Iran’s Qods Force. The return of Sheibani and Abu Dura to Iraq signals that Iran is preparing to increase the pressure on the dwindling number of US forces operating in the south and Baghdad, while attempting to exert influence over Iraqi affairs, US officials said."


 
http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/12/grenades_bombs_hit_homes_of_te.html 
Dec 30, 2010: The Christmas holidays also coincide this year with the Shiite holy month of Muharam...Some Christians said they were also playing down the Christmas holiday this year out of respect for their Shiite neighbors, but other Christians reported intimidation by members of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia backed by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who pressured them not to celebrate the holiday publicly.



https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/02/21/crossroads/human-rights-iraq-eight-years-after-us-led-invasion 
Feb 21, 2011:  Torture of Sunni detainees in Iraq army prisons. ..
They described in detail how their torturers kicked, whipped, and beat them, asphyxiated them, subjected them to electric shocks, burned them with cigarettes, and pulled out their fingernails and teeth. The prisoners said that interrogators sodomized some detainees with sticks and pistol barrels. Some young men said they had been forced to perform oral sex on interrogators, and guards and that interrogators forced detainees to molest one another. If the detainees still refused to confess, interrogators would threaten to rape the women and girls in their families.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-violence-mehdi-idUSTRE76K22E20110721 
July 21, 2011:  a recent spree targeting police and army officers in Baghdad was the work of Shi'ite militias concerned about a return of Saddam's outlawed Baath party, security officials told Reuters.



 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-emo-killings-idUSBRE8290CY20120310
March 10, 2012: At least 14 youths have been stoned to death in Baghdad in the past three weeks in what appears to be a campaign by Shi’ite militants against youths wearing Western-style “emo” clothes and haircuts, security and hospital sources say.
Listing of some activities of Shia militias in Iraq.


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-militias-specialreport-idUSKCN0IW0ZA20141112
Special Report: The fighters of Iraq who answer to Iran


http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/02/iraq-rise-assassinations-security.html#ixzz4OKhBDpNc
Feb 23, 2013: Regarding the incidents of Feb. 19, 2013, a source in Iraqi intelligence told Al-Monitor, “An armed militia wearing an official military outfit executed eight members of al-Sahwa in the city of Tuz Khormato (north of Baghdad).”
....The intelligence source stated, on condition of anonymity, that there has been a resurgence in assassinations, especially in Baghdad.
...The sectarian murders, however, took place in the mostly Sunni neighborhoods of al-Saidiya, al-Amiriya and al-Bayaa, located in the north and west of the capital.
The Iraqi police, alongside testimonies from eye-witnesses, recorded assassinations of Sunni civilians, in the wake of threats launched by the leader of the Hezbollah Movement in Iraq, Wathiq Battat. ...The assassination attempts targeting civilians in Baghdad were preceded by the distribution of flyers threatening to kill the Sunnis and urging them to leave.
https://twitter.com/UticaRisk/status/305626722362085376 
24 Feb 2013: Christians say their antiquity sites in Najaf are unprotected and subject to vandals, theft. @EaNasir …


http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/03/201331883513244683.html
https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/16000/mde140012013en.pdf
March 11, 2013: A Decade of Abuses: Armed groups opposed to the government continue to kill and maim large numbers of civilians in suicide and other bomb attacks. In response, the authorities have engaged in widespread detentions, torture, unfair trials and executions.


https://www.ifex.org/iraq/2013/04/04/attack_on_newspapers/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/02/iraq-gunmen-attack-journalists-newspaper
April 2, 2013: Iraqi gunmen attack journalists at four newspaper offices Editor from one of the raids claims militants were from Shia militia, responding to articles criticising cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi


http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/05/201351417379409212.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22534435
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/iraq-alcohol-vendors-attacks-extremism.html#ixzz4OHuSKr78
May 14, 2013: Gunmen killed 12 people for selling liquor in Shia-majority Zayouna, East Baghdad.


http://www.alsumaria.tv/news/76496/reverse-migration-of-iraqi-yazidis-who-f/en#
May 22, 2013: Yazidi workers in Baghdad told Alsumaria that hundreds of their relatives and friends left the city in the past few days and went back to their hometowns in fear of getting killed.

...

On May 14, 2013 in Baghdad, 8 Yazidis were killed and 14 were injured in an attack during which unidentified armed men targeted alcohol shops in Zayuna region east of Baghdad. Unknown militants threw a hand grenade on May 2 onto a liquor store in Al Shaab region, north of the capital leading to the death of the five Yazidis working there.

 


www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/11/iraq-abusive-commander-linked-mosul-killings 
June 11, 2013: Iraqi authorities should immediately investigate evidence that federal police executed four men and a 15-year-old boy on May 3, 2013, south of Mosul....He said that police insulted him and Sunni Islam, cursing Omar, a reference to Omar ibn Al-Khattab.
 

http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/iraqs-shiite-militias-trying-to-impose.html
July 2013: Moral policing in Baghdad by Shia militias and Iraqi security forces.


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-violence-liquor-idUSBRE9B60CZ20131207 
Dec 7, 2013: Shia militias suspected of attacking 12 liquor stores in Baghdad on Saturday, killing 9 people, mostly Yazidis.



http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2014/02/12/Iraq-Execution-style-killings-signal-return-of-Shiite-death-squads/44901392242380/
Feb 12, 2014: The growing number of dead men found in the streets and canals of Baghdad, mostly shot in the head, some bearing the marks of torture, is stirring fears Shiite death squads who slaughtered hundreds, possibly thousands, of Sunnis during the dark days of Iraq's sectarian bloodbath are back in business.
A few weeks ago, children playing in the eastern sector of the Iraqi capital discovered the corpses of 10 young men -- all shot in the head, blindfolded and handcuffed -- piled up in a room in an abandoned apartment block.

....
Maliki's overwhelmingly Shiite security forces, which included many ex-militiamen, failed repeatedly to kill or capture Abu Deraa and other Shiite death squad chieftains whose victims were invariably Sunni.
Indeed, they were widely believed to have turned a blind eye to his barbarous depredations. Most of his victims were tortured before being killed. Bodies were found left in the streets, on garbage dumps and in the city's canals, pierced by nails and bolts, or bored by hand-held power drills that became his gruesome trademark.
In those days, the bodies of Abu Deraa's victims were usually dumped on a stretch of waste ground known as al-Saddeh on the outskirts of Sadr City, a vast Shiite suburb of Baghdad that was a Medi Army stronghold.
It became known with macabre humor as ""Happiness Hotel."
Abu Deraa disappeared in 2007. The Asharq al-Awasat newspaper reported then he'd fled to Iran because the Americans were getting too close.
He was reported to have returned to Baghdad in summer 2010.
U.S. officials at the time linked him to one of Iran's "special groups" fighting the Americans known as Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous, which supports Maliki and carried out some of the major attacks on foreigners during the Iraq war.
It's not clear whether Abu Deraa -- whose real name is either Ismail al-Lami, twice married with a dozen children, or Ismail Hafidh, depending on who one talks to -- engaged in any assassinations at that time.
But a Feb. 9 Washington Post report quoted an AAH commander using the nom de guerre Abu Sajad as admitting the group is once more killing Sunnis to avenge al-Qaida suicide bombings.


http://www.thetower.org/article/how-iraq-became-a-wholly-owned-subsidiary-of-the-islamic-republic-of-iran/
Dec 2014: Iran, however, does not want any of these groups to become powerful enough to break off and follow its own agenda. To prevent this, it maintains multiple proxy militias competing against each other. Among the main proxies in question are Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), which developed particularly close relations with ex-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki; Kata’ib Hezbollah (with its front group Saraya al-Difa’ ash-Sha’abi); and the Badr Organization. All three of these organizations have deployed fighters to Syria to assist the Assad regime...Besides these three important actors, other Iranian proxies exist, including Saraya al-Khorasani, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, and Harakat al-Nujaba’, all of which have also deployed in Syria. 
....The Iranian proxy militias, quite naturally, also embrace Iran’s ideology, which is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and indeed, anti-Semitic. They parrot, for example, Iran’s official propaganda line, according to which the I.S. is supposedly a creation of “the Great Satan” (i.e., the United States) and/or the Jews.


http://iswresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/iraq-sectarian-crisis-reignites-as-shi.html 
http://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iraqs-sectarian-crisis-reignites-shia-militias-execute-civilians-and-remobilize
May 2013:  Several attacks over recent days bore the signature of Shi’a militant groups. On 28 May, the bodies of two university students were found in northern Baghdad in Agarguf area of the Mansour District with hands bound behind them, shot in the chest and head. They had been thrown from an unmarked vehicle according to witnesses who also noted that false checkpoints had been set up in the same area. Agarguf area was used by Shi’a militant groups to dump hundreds of bodies in 2007. Three people had been kidnapped by armed persons in an unmarked vehicle on the evening of 26 May at al-Mu’atham bus stop in central Baghdad, which is frequently used by students. It is possible that these events, both involving signature tactics of Shi’a militant groups, had the same victims. Additionally, on 26 May, armed persons wearing police uniforms invaded a home in al-Za’franiya in southeast Baghdad, dragging the owner outside and shooting him. The method of attack and geographic location correspond with historical patterns of Shi’a militancy and make attribution to Sunni terrorist groups implausible. Sunni mosques were also attacked in the Baghdad neighborhoods of Mansour and Saydiyah and twice in Diyala province, which clearly points to Shi‘a militancy.
Morality policing executions have also been reported in areas of Baghdad just outside of Sadr City. On 14 May, unidentified armed men attacked a police checkpoint in Zayunah, handcuffing security personnel but leaving them unharmed. Afterwards, the same gunmen traveling in an SUV raided five liquor stores and killed 12 people. A week later, on 22 May, unidentified armed men attacked a brothel in Zayunah and killed five men, five women, the owner, and his wife with silenced weapons and knives. Also on 22 May, unidentified armed men travelling in a car shot a liquor shop owner while driving near a market in al-Shaab, in northeast Baghdad. Zayuna and al-Shaab are predominantly Shi’a neighborhoods, and militia activity there most likely indicates the militia’s intent to re-establish control.
Additionally, several assassinations this week fit patterns of violence historically characteristic of Shi’a militant groups. On 26 May, the imam of the al-Qadisiyah Mosque was attacked by unidentified armed men with silenced weapons while driving in Diyala Province. The same day, unidentified armed individuals shot a policeman in al-Waziriyah, in the northeast quadrant of Baghdad, again using silenced weapons, and a primary school teacher was killed with silenced weapons in al-Qahirah, a neighboring area in the northeast of Baghdad. On 27 May, another teacher was shot with silenced weapons near the militia stronghold of Khalis in Diyala. Additionally, in an assassination that drew more public attention to this rise in targeted killings, Abbas Ja’far, the brother of a famous soccer player, was shot on 25 May by two armed men on a motorcycle outside his home in Habibiyah, a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad abutting Sadr City. Two other attacks involved drive-by shootings of civilians in Jisr Diyala in southeast Baghdad, one a civilian as he was leaving his home, and another the owner of a grocery store. Other variants of these militia signature attacks included the killing of four civilians as they exited a taxi in al-Kadhimiyah, north of Baghdad, and the killing of two owners of a goldsmith shop in al-Mashtal, on the rim of southeast Baghdad. Some of these instances clearly demonstrate sectarian violence because they hit obviously Sunni targets. Others, in predominantly Shi’a areas of Baghdad, instead demonstrate intra-Shi’a violence.
Other attacks likely conducted by Iraqi Shi‘a militias can be detected by method and by target. The most recent target set has included cafés, where larger groups congregate. They include an improvised explosive device (IED) attack on a café in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Ameriya on April 18 that killed 27 people. Another café attack took place in Baghdad in the nearby Jamia neighborhood on May 5 (killing or wounding 15 people) and another on May 29 in the Hib Hib area in Diyala province that resulted in 22 people killed and wounded. While these attacks have not been clearly attributed, they differ from attacks customarily attributed to AQI, such as car bombs, suicide bombings, and attacks against Iraqi Shi‘a targets. These attacks all took place in predominantly Iraqi Sunni locales. In four of them, IEDs were used; in the fifth, the attack on the Ihsan mosque in Mansour, was conducted by hand grenades. On May 31, police sources in Babil revealed that gunmen killed four people in Hilla. The sources describe the gunmen as traveling with impunity and using silenced weapons, killing former members of the Baath party and one shop owner in Hilla—again, hallmarks of Shi’a militia rather than AQI activity. This comes one week after the VBIED attack upon a Shi’a mosque there.


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-violence-iranians-idUSBRE9BP0HC20131226 
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/iraq-impartial-investigation-camp-ashraf-deaths-crucial 
Sep 2, 2013: Amnesty International is urging the Iraqi authorities to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into violence at Camp Ashraf that reportedly left at least 47 dead yesterday.  ....  On 15 June Camp Liberty, now home to more than 3000 Iranian exiles, came under rocket attack. Two residents were killed and dozens were wounded. An earlier rocket attack on Camp Liberty on 9 February left eight residents dead and scores wounded.  No effective investigations are known to have been conducted into either attack.    
A leader of the Mukhtar Army, a Shi’a militia, has told the media on several occasions that his group was responsible for attacks on Camp Liberty.
 

Sep 15, 2013:  On Sept. 15, the bodies of two brothers, owners of a grocery store, were found. Both were killed under torture after they had been kidnapped the day before in Basra as part of a series of sectarian killing and cleansing targeting Sunnis. Militias carry out the assassinations with the knowledge of local authorities and the federal government in Baghdad, which has been receiving regular reports about the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Sunnis to western Iraq and Gulf countries, leaving their houses and properties for fear of being assassinated.  The Sunni religious endowments authority decided to close all mosques in Basra and shorten adhan prayers. On Tuesday, Sept. 17, Basra’s tribes and prominent figures staged a demonstration against sectarian displacement. Political sources informed Azzaman that militias were carrying out killings against Sunnis in Basra, notably in mixed neighborhoods, for sectarian cleansing purposes. Authorities did not announce the number of those who had been killed. Sources, however, told Azzaman that killings were a daily occurrence in Basra and sometimes targeted entire families. The previous week, two Sunni parents with their three daughters had been found dead, the same sources noted.  The sources explained that sectarian killing and cleansing in Basra had been preceded with notices that had been hung on the doors of Sunni mosques calling on Sunnis to leave the city within one week or face death. The historical district of al-Zubair, home for Sunnis for centuries, no longer has Sunnis living in it. Its residents moved to Gulf countries following death threats from militias, the sources clarified.
According to the same sources, more than 100 families from the Al-Saadun tribe, whose members have lived in southern Iraq for centuries, were forced to move from Basra and Nasiriyah to Tikrit due to threats.



Sep 19, 2013: Abdelkarim Al-Khazraji, leader of the Sunni Waqf movement in the southern region said the closure of mosques in Basra would continue until sufficient protection was provided for worshipers.
...
In the port city of Basra, gunmen have shot dead 15 Sunnis since the start of the month, including a cleric and mosque employees, according to Abdulkarim al-Khazraji, a representative of the local Sunni community. “Messages have been left in envelopes at night near Sunni mosques telling Sunnis to leave Basra” or face revenge attacks for violence against Shias in the northern city of Mosul. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” the messages warn, according to Khazraji, a religious leader.

http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/security-going-from-bad-to-worse-in-iraq.html
http://iraqhurr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/emergence-of-new-militias-threaten.html
Sep 19, 2013: Displacement of 150 families of Sunni Al Sadoun tribe from Dhi Qar.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/world/middleeast/sectarian-violence-reignites-in-an-iraqi-town.html
Sep 19, 2013: As Sunni families have fled Muqdadiya — at least 365 families have left, according to a government official — locals say militiamen have burned agricultural lands, shut off electricity, killed farm animals and poured cement into irrigation canals, in an effort to assure they would not return. And the violence continues: according to a local official, bombs recently destroyed two vacant Sunni homes.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/10/iraqi-shiites-join-syrian-war.html
Oct 29, 2013: In central Baghdad’s Liberation Square, posters eulogizing those who died “while defending the Sayyeda Zeinab Shrine [in Damascus]” have become a common sight.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24838333
Nov 6, 2013: They are Sunni Muslims and say they received an ultimatum to leave their house from Shia extremists who have been spreading fear among Sunnis living in the al-Zubair district of the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
....The mother told us that they were taking the threat seriously because they knew of other Sunnis who had been either shot dead or had left Basra.


http://iswresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/rise-in-targeting-of-iraqi-sunni-tribal.html
Nov 25, 2013: bodies of Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders Adnan al-Ghanim and Kadhim al-Juburi were discovered in al-Tannumah, Basra. According to reports, the two tribal leaders were shot in the head and chest and their bodies were disfigured. Furthermore, al-Ghanim was beheaded while one of al-Juburi’s legs was cut off. ....In Dhi Qar, the leader of the Rfei tribe, Jamal Mohsen al-Faris, was killed by unidentified gunmen in al-Fajr sub-district on November 25. Al-Faris is also an Iraqi Sunni tribal leader


http://www.thearabweekly.com/Opinion/4509/Caricature-in-Iraq-%E2%80%94-a-resilient-art-under-threat 
2014: “I have left Iraq in 2014 after receiving threats from Jaysh al- Mukhtar militia for drawing a caricature of their leader, Wathiq al-Battat, on the cover of al-Fikr magazine,” says Fallah, who now lives in Indonesia.



https://rsf.org/en/news/baghdad-newspaper-bombed-after-cartoon-irans-supreme-leader

Feb 11, 2014: Baghdad headquarters of the Al-Sabah Al-Jadid newspaper, five days after it published a much criticized cartoon of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. The explosion caused a great deal of damage but no injuries.


http://www.rferl.org/content/iraq-army-battles-militants/25264025.html
Feb 13, 2014: security forces shelled the hospital in Fallujah for the seventh straight day on February 13 in an effort to dislodge snipers.


http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-iraq-strife-idUKBREA3Q0FO20140427
March 23, 2014: Massacre of 23 Sunnis in Buhriz


http://iswresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/overt-shi-militia-mobilization-in-mixed.html
mass departure of [Sunni] families from 15 villages around Qarah Tapa in northern Diyala on March 28, 2014, following the Shi’a militia mobilization in Buhriz.


http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/125153
April 4, 2014 : Christian families have been disproportionately affected by the home seizures...According to Ahlam's lawyer, those who took control of her house claimed they were sanctioned to do so based on a Shiite Muslim scholar's ruling that homes belonging to those allied to the regime of Saddam Hussein, ousted by a US-led invasion in 2003, were free to be used for prayer.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/iraqi-forces-battle-swiftly-moving-militants/2014/06/17/f472df6e-00a6-4815-acfa-0f23506ef0e8_story.html
June 17, 2014: Imam Nihad al- Jibouri and two of his aides were executed after being abducted by men dressed as members of the security forces.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/world/middleeast/shiite-violence-traps-sunnis-in-baghdad.html?smid=tw-share
June 25, 2014:  The bodies arrive in twos and threes most every day in the Baghdad morgue now, a grim barometer of the city’s sectarian tensions. Most have gunshot wounds to the head, some have signs of torture, and most of them are Sunnis.


https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/iraq-scores-sunni-detainees-summarily-killed-government-and-shia-militias-new 
Jun 27, 2014: Amnesty International has gathered evidence pointing to a pattern of extrajudicial executions of detainees by government forces and Shi’a militias in the Iraqi cities of Tal ‘Afar, Mosul and Ba’quba. 
...
The Mayor of Ba’quba - Abdallah al-Hayali - told Amnesty that his 21-year-old nephew Yassir al-‘Ali Ahmed al-Hayali was among up to 50 people extrajudicially executed in a incident in al-Wahda police station in the Mufaraq district of central Ba’quba in the early hours of 16 June. He said that Yassir was arrested about a month earlier and tortured, including by having his nails removed and being given electric shocks in custody. He was killed along with a number of others by members of a Shi’a militia in the presence of the head of al-Wahda police station in Ba’quba. According to a medical report obtained by the mayor, he had been shot in the head. Many of those killed with him had been shot in the head and the chest. Sunni policemen who witnessed the killing fled their posts afterwards for fear of reprisal.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/sectarian-killings-return-to-baghdad-as-war-rages-elsewhere/2014/06/29/16812bcc-ddb7-4ffd-8d95-cecfc9c098ca_story.html
June 29, 2014: In the once-mixed neighborhood of Shaab, where Sunnis are now a small minority and where Hammoudi was abducted and killed, resentment mingles with fear. Sunni families are moving out as Shiites stroll through the streets wearing their militia uniforms. Sunnis have no recourse, because they agreed to surrender their arms, said Hamid Majid, Hammoudi’s uncle, speaking several days after his funeral.
“Maliki’s army is dominated by Shiites, and Sunnis don’t have the right to hold even a pistol,” he said. “We have no weapons, while his militias circulate through our neighborhoods with their arms.” Majid believes that his nephew was killed because his name was Omar, a uniquely Sunni name that was associated with discriminatory killings in 2005-2007.


http://europe.newsweek.com/militias-baghdad-287142?rm=eu 
June 2014: Baghdad morgue director called a “spike” in the number of Sunni disappearances and murders in the capital: clear reprisals for the ISIS killings. One June morning, he showed me and other reporters’ photographs of the work of the Shiite militias: Sunni men tortured, beaten, dead, their bodies thrown into fields, bloated and purple.


July 5, 2014: Bodies dumped around the city arrive every day at the central morgue. On Wednesday and Thursday, the total was 41. Most have been shot; usually once, in the front of the head. Among those identified, the names offer a telling clue to the reasons for their murder. Omar is by far the most common.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/blindfolded-shot-iraq-officials-find-50-bodies-south-baghdad-n151581
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-iraq-security-idUKKBN0FE1UV20140710 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/iraq-forces-find-53-blindfolded-bodies-south-of-baghdad-1.2700760
July 9, 2014: Iraqi security forces found 53 corpses, blindfolded and handcuffed, in a town south of Baghdad early on Wednesday, local officials said. They said the bodies had been left in the mainly Shia Muslim village of Khamissiya, about 25 km southeast of the city of Hilla.
.....
Amnesty International and the United Nations have reported several other suspected incidents of mass killings of prisoners in government custody.
....In Falluja, in the mainly Sunni western Anbar province that borders Syria, the general hospital said nine civilians died and 44 were wounded on Wednesday from aerial shelling and what residents call "barrel bombs".  
 

https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/11/iraq-campaign-mass-murders-sunni-prisoners
July 11, 2014: "Iraqi security forces and militias affiliated with the government appear to have unlawfully executed at least 255 prisoners in six Iraqi cities and villages since June 9, 2014. In all but one case, the executions took place while the fighters were fleeing Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) and other armed groups. The vast majority of security forces and militias are Shia, while the murdered prisoners were Sunni. At least eight of those killed were boys under age 18.


http://dailym.ai/U3Xidz 
July 14, 2014: Shia militias kill 25 alleged prostitutes in Zayouna, Baghdad.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/shiite-militia-display-jihadist-bodies-iraq-city-104709941.html?ref=gs
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-idUSKBN0FZ1VL20140730
July 27, 2014: Shi'ite militia forces executed 15 Sunni Muslims and then hung them from electricity poles in a public square in the town of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, on Wednesday.


nyti.ms/1nM47xG
July 27, 2014: Shiite militias abduct Riyadh al-Adhadh and his 4 guards and release them after torture.


July 31, 2014: Human Rights Watch documented the killings of 61 Sunni men between June 1 and July 9, 2014, and the killing of at least 48 Sunni men in March and April in villages and towns around Baghdad, an area known as the “Baghdad Belt.” Witnesses and medical and government sources said that militias were responsible in each case. In many cases, witnesses identified the militia as Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-idUSKBN0G01ZV20140731 
July 31, 2014: Iraqi Shi'ite militias have drawn up hit lists of suspected Sunni insurgents to be kidnapped, executed and hung in public, security and police officials said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musab_bin_Umair_mosque_massacre 
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/11/02/iraq-survivors-describe-mosque-massacre-0 
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/dozens-dead-attack-sunni-mosque-iraq-2014822121452319807.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-idUSKBN0GM0L620140822
Aug 22, 2014: Shi'ite militias machine gunned 70 Sunnis in a village mosque.
 
www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/24/iraq-frontline-shia-fighters-war-isis
August 24, 2014: In Baghdad a senior Shia politician said... "We are in the process of creating Shia al-Qaida radical groups equal in their radicalisation to the Sunni Qaida".


http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/09/iraq-satire-programs-criticize-politician-clerics.html#ixzz4aZRycHcD
Sep 2014: Bashir and his crew are filming the show in the Jordanian capital Amman out of fear of being attacked, since he had received several threats from armed militias. “I have been receiving threats from both militias and terrorist groups, and from certain clerics,” he said.
Sep 6, 2014: Part Sunni, part Shia, with mixed Arabic, Kurdish and Turkmen heritage, the 18-year-old made an unlikely target for a sectarian death squad, but the next time his father saw him he was lying in a mortuary, alongside two other men, with a single bullet in his head.
... Qahtan al-Joburi, a local activist, said up to 50 people — mostly Sunni Arabs — had been murdered since three car bombs hit the city on August 23. Three men were found on railway lines and had been eaten by dogs, Mr Joburi said. Some relatives were too scared to name those responsible for fear that they could be next. “That is the government’s job,” Mr Kani’s father said. The murders bear the hallmarks of Iraq’s Shia death squads.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/18/all-the-ayatollahs-men/
18 Sep 2014: In early June, Shiite militias, along with Iraqi security forces, reportedly executed around 255 prisoners, including children. An Amnesty International report from June detailed how Shiite militias regularly carried out extrajudicial summary executions, and reported that dozens of Sunni prisoners were killed in government buildings.



http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/increasing-reports-of-sectarian-attacks.html 
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/09/26/beyond-mosul 
26 Sep 2014:  On June 11, militiamen took 137 men from the Um Weilha market in Latifiyya, according to residents and local media reports. Police have found the bodies of about 30 of them.
.....
On July 5 or 6 members of the League of the Righteous went into Ballor, Diyala and destroyed nine homes. They were also accused of wrecking five mosques in the Mansuriya and Muqtadiya districts of Diyala. July 10 militias abducted 23 farmers in Balad, Salahaddin. 

https://next.ft.com/content/5f1d44d4-44c7-11e4-9a5a-00144feabdc0 
Sep 26, 2014:  The irrigation canals that nourished farmland in the volatile Latifiya district until four months ago are now dry, the adjacent fields barren....In addition to cutting off water to vitally important irrigation canals, the Shia militias have bulldozed hundreds of homes and ordered residents to move out. 



https://www.amnesty.org.uk/sites/default/files/absolute_impunity_iraq_report.pdf
Oct 2014: Amnesty International's report on Shia militias of Iraq
 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-29603272
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/shia-militias-abducting-and-killing-sunni-civilians-in-revenge-for-isis-attacks-9792838.html
Oct 14, 2014: According to a detailed Amnesty International report published today, the militias enjoy total immunity in committing war crimes against the Sunni community, often demanding large ransoms but killing their victims even when the money is paid.


https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BAGHDAD3175_a.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/appointment-of-iraqs-new-interior-minister-opens-door-to-militia-and-iranian-influence/2014/10/18/f6f2a347-d38c-4743-902a-254a169ca274_story.html  
Oct 18, 2014: A leaked 2009  State Department cable said sources had indicated that Amiri may have personally ordered attacks on up to 2,000 Sunnis. Amiri has denied such allegations....in 2005 and 2006, sectarian killings in Iraq surged as Badr death squads worked under the cloak of the police force. The 2009 State Department cable, referring to that era, said that “one of [Amiri’s] preferred methods of killing allegedly involved using a power drill to pierce the skulls of his adversaries.”


http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/baghdad-shootout-highlights-growing-threat-of-shiite-militias 
Oct 21, 2014: The gunfight early on Monday pitted Iraqi police against the Asaib Ahl Al Haq Shiite militia holding a Kurdish woman related to one of the country’s deputy prime ministers, officers said.  Officers said that Asaib Ahl Al Haq...kidnapped Roz Nuri Shaways’s cousin in the port city of Basra last month.


http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/11/03/the-gangs-of-iraq/ 
Nov 3, 2014:  in Yengija... Beyond the main road, an entire neighborhood of two-story homes was razed and flattened, with concrete slab roofs heaped atop piles of rubble. Personal belongings, children’s toys, and furniture peeked out from under the debris, a poignant reminder of the Sunni Arab families who, until recently, had lived there. All these families had fled in August when the militia started battling the Islamic State fighters in the surrounding area.......The militia had made no effort to conceal its crimes, but instead advertised their destruction by spray-painting "Khorasani" and Shiite slogans on the walls that were still standing.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/12/shia-militia-fightback-against-isis-leads-to-massacre-of-sunnis 
12 Nov 2014: In Salam village – ironically enough it means peace in Arabic – Shia militiamen now roam the streets. They have burned down the homes of Sunni inhabitants, all of whom have now fled.
....
the planes taking off from the al-Rashid military base near Baghdad often have one Iraqi Shia and one Iranian pilot.


http://aina.org/news/20141205214721.htm
http://www.wsj.com/articles/shiite-militias-win-bloody-battles-in-iraq-show-no-mercy-1417804464
Dec 5, 2014: JURF AL-SAKHER, Iraq—Ahmed al-Zamili flipped through pictures on his mobile phone: an Islamic State fighter’s corpse hanging from a crude noose, a dead man on the ground clutching an AK-47 and a kneeling, blindfolded man uttering a confession. Mr. Zamili says the men were captured when his militia of more than 650 Shiite fighters, known as Al Qara’a Regiment, drove Islamic State out of Jurf al-Sakher in late October. After briefly interrogating the enemy soldiers, Mr. Zamili ordered their executions, he says.
.....
Militia groups have been accused of a plethora of human-rights violations, including mass shootings of prisoners and Sunni civilians and the forced displacement of Sunni families on a scale approaching ethnic cleansing. Shiite fighters boast about executing enemy soldiers after they surrender. In Jurf al-Sakher, some Al Qara’a members hurried out of a meeting with a reporter for The Wall Street Journal to deliver the severed head of an Islamic State fighter to relatives of a slain militia member before his funeral ended.
....
[Mr. Zamili] says it has set the scene for a sectarian rematch that heralds the resurrection of the Hidden Imam, a messiah-like figure who will usher in Al Qara’a, or judgment day.


http://www.niqash.org/en/articles/security/3594/

Dec 11, 2014: Baghdad's uniformed kidnappers



http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/world/middleeast/sunnis-fear-permanent-displacement-from-iraqi-town.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=2 
Dec 5, 2014:  when they expelled the militants in late October, the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces and their allied militias also drove out the last of the town’s [Jurf al-Sakhar] civilian residents — about 70,000 Sunnis. The town’s representative on the provincial council was its lone Sunni member, and he was found dead with a bullet through his forehead not long after the battle. Now the all-Shiite provincial council has barred any of the displaced Sunni residents from returning for at least eight to 10 months and possibly longer. The council says security forces need time to clear explosives left behind. But some former Sunni residents do not believe it.
http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCAKBN0JU1ZG20141216 
Dec 16, 2014: The mayor of Khan Bani Saad, a mainly Sunni town 30 km (20 miles) northeast of Baghdad, and three local council members were kidnapped. Two Shia members releasedbut the bodies of Mayor Saad al-Girtani and one council member, both Sunnis, were found blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs with gunshot wounds to the head, police and hospital sources said. Both appeared to have been tortured.
Dec 17, 2014:  Shi'ite militias and Iraqi security forces... are blasting the Sunni farmlands that encircle Baghdad with heavy weapons. Military officers call their target areas in the rural belt "killing zones."
"In these parts, there are no civilians," said Lieutenant Colonel Haider Mohammed Hatem, deputy commander of the armed forces around Abu Ghraib, just west of the capital. "Everyone in these killing zones we consider Islamic State."
The death zones now scar the more than 200 km-long (124 mile) Baghdad Belt, as it is commonly known. Since January, at least 83,000 people, the vast majority of them Sunnis, have abandoned their homes in the rural area around the capital.
...
A Reuters correspondent witnessed Shi'ite militiamen setting homes ablaze during their October offensive. Militia fighters kicked and hit three suspected IS members, and then executed the men with gunshots to the head.  


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2885162/Chilling-image-shows-child-aged-ten-used-fire-rockets-car-mounted-missile-launcher-Iraq-against-ISIS-targets.html 
Dec 24, 2014:  A child under 10 wearing a Shia militia uniform and firing rockets
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-idUSKBN0K909K20141231
Dec 31, 2014: a powerful Shi’ite paramilitary organization has started redrawing the geography of central Iraq, building a road between Shi’ite parts of Diyala province and Samarra, a Sunni city that is home to a Shi’ite shrine.  ... More than 130,000 people, mostly Sunnis, fled central Iraq in 2014, counting just Baghdad's agricultural belt and northeastern Diyala province, the International Rescue Committee told Reuters. The exodus has left villages empty as Shi’ite paramilitaries, tribes and security forces fill the void.



http://masaratiraq.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/AT-CROSSROADS.pdf 
2015: Since the formation of Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs) to fight ISIS, however, kidnapping has seen a resurgence in the Iraqi capital. In some cases, militias and armed groups use kidnapping and extortion of Christians and other minorities as tools to finance their operations and/or to display their power.... reported seizures of Christian property in Baghdad


http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/kataib-al-imam-ali-portrait-of-an-iraqi-shiite-militant-group-fighting-isis
Jan 5, 2015: [Kataib al-Imam Ali] In Salah al-Din province, fighters from the group posed in videos with the severed heads of their slain enemies.... Muhandis (a.k.a. Jamal Jaafar Muhammad Ali) first came to prominence as one of the Iraqi Dawa Party terrorists who partnered with Hezbollah to carry out the 1983 embassy bombings in Kuwait and the 1985 assassination attempt on the Kuwaiti emir.


https://uk.news.yahoo.com/iraqs-war-against-extremists-quiet-sectarian-purge-174007712.html
http://uk.businessinsider.com/iraqi-shia-militias-fighting-isis-are-kicking-sunnis-out-of-their-homes-2015-1
January 6, 2015: Rawashid, Iraq - The war is being used by Shiite militiamen to change the demographics of Sunni areas, in an attempt to solidify Shiite control. The practice appears mostly focused on Sunni areas astride roads leading to important Shiite shrines to the north and south of the capital, Baghdad... Sunni residents have mostly been prevented from returning, on the grounds that the regions are not yet safe. In many cases, they have been unable to return because their homes have been destroyed in the fighting or blown up by militiamen...The militiamen appear to be the ones enforcing the demographic change, unsettling the Shiite-led government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/middleeast/government-allies-are-said-to-have-killed-dozens-of-sunnis-in-iraq.html
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde14/1812/2015/en/ 
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-killings-idUSKBN0L20FD20150129

Jan 28, 2015: they were taken from their homes by men in uniform; heads down and linked together, then led in small groups to a field, made to kneel, and selected to be shot one by one Accounts by five witnesses interviewed separately by Reuters provide a picture of alleged executions in the eastern village of Barwanah on Monday, which residents and provincial officials say left at least 72 unarmed Iraqis dead.  The witnesses identified the killers as a collection of Shi'ite militias and security force elements.


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-03/forces-tied-to-iraqi-government-accused-of-sectarian-cleansing 
Feb 3, 2015:  Residents of the al-Qatul neighborhood in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, said that after a voice from a loudspeaker demanded they abandon their homes, all did so over the following 72 hours. Shiite militiamen now occupy their homes, they said. A similar call went out in the Albu-Abbas neighborhood and it too is empty of its Sunni residents.
The accounts were offered in a series of telephone interviews over several weeks. Residents asked not to be named to protect their identities.
Since November, residents and others say about 11,000 Sunni families have been forced from those districts near a Shiite shrine in the town. Hundreds of men from the area have been detained, said one official, who asked not to be identified. 
About 26,000 residents have fled Samarra and registered as displaced persons in temporary accommodation as a result of the violence since June, according to the International Organization for Migration. 
  
https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/02/15/iraq-militias-escalate-abuses-possibly-war-crimes
Feb 15, 2015: Iraq: Militias Escalate Abuses, Possibly War Crimes



http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/19/irans-shiite-militias-are-running-amok-in-iraq/
Feb 19, 2015: Perhaps the most vivid and disturbing evidence that the Iraqi government simply does not share America’s core values emerged on Feb. 6. In a grainy video posted on YouTube, a three-minute horror show plays out on the front lines somewhere in Iraq. Iraqi military officers and presumably Shiite militiamen — dressed in black, skull-adorned “Sons of Anarchy” shirts — crowd an ambulance emblazoned with the Iraqi state seal. Inside, a blindfolded and hog-tied man in military fatigues pleads for mercy as the Iraqi vigilantes beat him over the head, taunting him with expletives.
“We will f— your sisters,” they shout.
“No, God,” the prisoner weeps.
One of the vigilantes picks up a metal toolbox and slams it down on the crying man, as others enter the ambulance to beat and kick the helpless prisoner. A minute into the video, the man is dragged out of the ambulance and onto the ground, still blindfolded, arms bound behind his back. A dozen fighters surround him and begin kicking him until he lies motionless, blood dripping from his head. With some yelling “enough,” a man in camouflaged trousers walks up to the prisoner and beats him over the head repeatedly with a sandal, a gesture of monumental insult. Another man, also in camouflaged trousers, leaps up twice and lands with his full weight on the detainee’s skull. A third man, in full military uniform, kicks and punches the hemorrhaging man, whose blood spills across the sand below.
In the final horrific minute, the vigilantes carry the man a few feet away and drop him to the ground. Several men armed with U.S.-supplied M4 rifles then empty several magazines — perhaps more than 100 rounds — into the man. The video concludes with one man chillingly yelling, “Enough! What’s wrong with you?
...
During a January 2015 press conference celebrating the “liberation” of Iraq’s Diyala province, Ameri stood in front of Iraqi military officers and militia fighters, thanking the Badr Organization and AAH for their efforts — without once mentioning Prime Minister Abadi or the international coalition. One of Ameri’s Badr commanders then told the New York Times  that Sunni tribes had backed IS, and pledged that “their punishment will be more severe than [IS’s],” guaranteeing the continuation vigilante justice and sectarian bloodletting. ...Hakim al-Zamili, an Iranian-backed militia commander notorious for ethnically cleansing Baghdad of its Sunni inhabitants while serving as Maliki’s deputy health minister, is now chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s security and defense committee. ...Mohammed al-Bayati, another Badr leader, serves as Iraq’s human rights minister, with the sacred responsibly of investigating and curtailing the abuses of Iraqi security personnel.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/06/iraq-sectarian-killing-name-changing.html#ixzz48UAdyAg5 
March 2015: The Emirati newspaper Akhbar al-Khaleej reported March 1, “Three thousand Iraqi citizens bearing the [Sunni] name Omar asked that their name be changed for fear of being killed.” 


 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-baghdads-brutal-battle-against-isis-20150313
March 2015:  One website that tracked press reports counted 421 bodies found in the capital between June and January. The government has forbidden journalists from visiting the morgue. "After the return of sectarian killings, they're trying to do a press blackout," says a doctor who works there. "They've expelled the old manager because he was a Sunni. The new one is a leader in Asaib. He brags about it. The killings began after Maliki entered Anbar and escalated after Mosul. The situation is very difficult. The militias have taken over Baghdad." 
...Medhat Dahri lost his nephew, and son kidnapped and killed in Sep 2014 by Shia militia despite paying ransom.
March 18, 2015: "The 31-page report,  “After Liberation Came Destruction: Iraqi Militias and the Aftermath of Amerli,” documents, through field visits, analysis of satellite imagery, interviews with victims and witnesses, and review of photo and video evidence, that militias looted property of Sunni civilians who had fled fighting, burned their homes and businesses, and destroyed at least two entire villages. The actions violated the laws of war. Human Rights Watch also documented the abduction of 11 men during the operation, in September and October."


http://middle-east-online.com/english/?id=70196
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/28/the-united-states-is-providing-air-cover-for-ethnic-cleansing-in-iraq-shiite-militias-isis/
March 28, 2015: Asaib was most recently responsible for burning down homes in Albu Ajil, a village near Tikrit in retaliation for massacres carried out by the Islamic State. It has also been implicated in the abduction and murder of Sheik Qassem Sweidan al-Janabi,.


http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/life-in-iraqs-tikrit-returns-to-normal.html
https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/09/20/ruinous-aftermath/militias-abuses-following-iraqs-recapture-tikrit
"In the aftermath of the fighting [in March and April 2015], militia forces looted, torched, and blew up hundreds of civilian houses and buildings in Tikrit and the neighboring towns of al-Dur, al-Bu ‘Ajil and al-Alam along the Tigris River, in violation of the laws of war. They also unlawfully detained some 200 men and boys, at least 160 of whom remain unaccounted for and are feared to have been forcibly disappeared.
The largely Shia militias responsible for the brutal aftermath to the fighting included the Badr Brigades, the Ali Akbar Brigades, the League of the Righteous (Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq), the Hizbollah Battalions (Kata’ib Hizbollah), the Khorasan Companies (Saraya Khorasan), and the Soldier of the Imam (Jund al-Imam). In the town of al-Alam, local Sunni volunteer forces carried out the destruction."


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/05/iraqi-sunnis-forced-abandon-homes-identity-survival-shia-militia-isis
5 April 2015: “Last month, we started receiving requests to change names … like changing Shia or Sunni names,” said Maj Gen Tahseen Abdul Razak, the manger of the residency bureau in Baghdad. “The most common name was changing Omar to Ammar or deleting the family name from the citizenship card. We had many cases but not to the level that it was overwhelming.”


https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2015/4/30/police-and-militias-clash-in-baghdad
30 April 2015: Armed clashes between Iraqi police forces and militia near the National Theatre in the Karrada district


http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/four-killed-pilgrims-attack-sunni-district-baghdad-164629924 

May 14, 2015:  Four people were killed on Thursday in Baghdad's Sunni district of Adhamiyah after Shiite pilgrims passing through the area set 17 houses and a religious endowment building on fire.

https://www.facebook.com/IraqiSMCEn/posts/438924619609389 
May 18, 2015: Asaib militia attacked the home of Sheikh Aboud Al-Rashid Al-Timimi in Abu Khuseib in Asmida area and forced him to flee.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/video-purports-show-militia-atrocity-iraq-150531150815036.html  
May 31, 2015: "In March, a graphic image that went viral on Arab websites, purported to show a Shia militia member beheading a Sunni shepherd in Iraq. In the same month after Iraqi forces captured large parts of Salahuddin province from ISIL, a video emerged showing a Sunni civilian being hit on the head with an axe, with militiamen shouting Shia religious slogans and praising victims of earlier ISIL massacres.
"This is for the heroic martyrs we lost in Camp Speicher," one of the men is heard saying, referring to the ISIL massacre of hundreds of fleeing Iraqi soldiers at a military base near Tikrit in June 2014.
3 June 2015: "Abu Azrael (or Abu Ezra), a commander in the Imam Ali Brigade, was awarded the “Martyrdom Medal of Honour” by representatives of Grand Ayatollah Sistani sometime in May

http://gulfnews.com/news/mena/iraq/iraq-s-sunnis-damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don-t-1.1532846
13 June 2015: Sunnis in Tuz Khormato district were targeted with “explosive devices, adhesive bombs, drive-by shootings, abductions and executions.”  Often, the bodies of victims are dumped in open areas bearing torture marks...Local websites and social media shared the news of Mohammad’s killing widely claiming that the Khorasani Brigades were behind this crime.


http://www.rferl.org/content/iraq-child-soldiers-fighting-islamic-state/27084123.html
June 21, 2015: Hashd al-Shaabi members told RFE/RL on June 11 that Abnaa al-Karrar, a new student volunteer regiment in Babil Province, had recruited members as young as 10 years old. 

http://www.dawn.com/news/1193488 
July 10, 2015:  Three Iraqi policemen wounded in clashes with Shia militias in an unfinished health ministry building in the Zayyounah, Baghdad.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/08/iraq-iran-child-soldiers.html#ixzz44JcKHdLR
20 August 2015: "The Saudi-owned satellite channel Al-Arabiya recently aired footage showing a number of teenagers undergoing training at a military camp run by Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units. Another recent video features hundreds of children being trained in the use of AK-47 automatic assault rifles and tactical skills. The footage also showed the children undergoing ideological training led by Shiite clerics.
.....
During the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian military sent many children to the front lines. The paramilitary Basij was mainly responsible for organizing and deploying them. While Iran has always denied this use of child soldiers, the large number of battle fatalities under the age of 15 shows that Iranian military commanders had little trouble dispatching children to the front lines.
.......As the main state supporter of Shiite militant groups in the Middle East, the IRGC is well engaged in psychological warfare against IS in Iraq. The IRGC has long experience in this field. Hossein Fahmideh, a 13-year-old Iranian killed during a military operation in which his own death was certain and then promoted as an Iranian national hero, is a case in point. The IRGC, Iranian media outlets and military propagandists have no qualms about expressing pride about similar operations involving children, not only in Iran but also in places such as Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria. Of note, ads praising teenage “martyrs” are also commonplace on websites associated with Iraqi Shiite militants. Third, both the Basij and the Popular Mobilization Units have heavy ideological and religious components. The Shiite clerics on Basij bases in Iran regularly teach ideology and religion to local children and adolescents. In Iraq, videos and media reports indicate that Shiite clerics fill a similar function among Popular Mobilization Units units and in some cases teach the ideological concepts of the Islamic Republic of Iran, such as the velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist), martyrdom, commitment to religious edicts (including those issued by Sistani) and the regional interests of the so-called "resistance" (the vision for the region espoused by the Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian governments as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement)."


http://www.niqash.org/en/articles/security/5108 
30 Sep 2015:  Shia militias kidnapping for cash, and killing.


http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/10/us-praises-role-of-iranian-backed-shiite-militias-in-baiji-operation.php
22 Oct 2015: "For more information the role these militias played in the retaking of Baiji, including photographs and video of Iraqi forces operating alongside these militias, see LWJ report, Iraqi Army, Shiite militias report success in Baiji."


http://www.niqash.org/en/articles/security/5138/ 
22 Oct 2015: Shia tribes in Balad not letting 110,000 Sunnis back to their homes because the latter sided with ISIS.

 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34674185 
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/world/middleeast/iran-backed-militia-claims-responsibility-for-attack-on-iraqi-camp.html 
30 Oct 2015: BAGHDAD — A Shiite militia supported by Iran claimed responsibility on Friday for a rocket attack on a camp near Baghdad that killed 23 members of an Iranian opposition group and provoked condemnation by the United States. In a statement published by the Iranian news agency Fars, the militia, the Mukhtar Army, threatened more strikes as long as members of the opposition group, Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, remained in Iraq.


http://gulfnews.com/business/analysis/the-wanton-dismantling-of-an-iraqi-refinery-1.1662932 
http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/news/AN_1446205173387474000/iraqs-main-oil-refinery-looted-offiical-says.aspx 
30 Oct 2015: Baiji refinery looted after defeat of ISIS.


https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/10/30/no-childs-play-kids-fighting-one-another-iraq-conflict 
30 October 2015: at the Beiji refinery -- some 300 kilometers north of his home town -- al-Kilabi [15 yeard old] died in battle, becoming the youngest known combatant casualty in Iraq's war against the extremist group. Other militias within the PMF are sending even younger children into battle. Nur, an 11-year old boy, told Human Rights Watch that he returned to Baghdad on October 18 after fighting for several weeks alongside his father in the First Martyr / Free Iraqis' Movement , a new militia under the PMF. Nur also saw battle in Beiji, which PMF and Iraqi counterterrorism forces re-took from ISIS on October 21. He left the frontline to start fifth grade.


http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/11/us-designated-terrorist-of-iraqi-militia-reportedly-in-aleppo.php
12 Nov 2015: Akram al Kaabi, the leader of the Iranian-supported Harakat al Nujaba militia .. has said that he would and could depose the Iraqi government if ordered to do so by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei


https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2015/11/25/iraqi-mp-shoots-at-opponent-at-tv-station
Nov 25, 2015: An argument between an Iraqi lawmaker and a political bloc spokesman escalated from angry words to gunfire at a TV station in Baghdad, eyewitness said on Wednesday.

The fracas between member of parliament Kadhim al-Sayadi, of the State of Law bloc, and Citizen's Bloc spokesman Baligh Abu Gallal - both members of Shia parties - broke out at the al-Dijla TV station on Tuesday night. 


http://almon.co/2m69
Dec 2015: Sheikh Ibrahim Saffar, a professor at the Najaf seminary, demanded that a man who wore a Santa Claus costume in Najaf face criminal charges.


http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/mideast-crisis-iraq-militias/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-militias-specialr-idUSKBN0TX1DG20151214 
14 Dec 2015: The documents show how Washington, seeking to defeat Sunni jihadists and stabilize Iraq, has consistently overlooked excesses by Shi'ite militias sponsored by the Iraqi government. 



http://europe.newsweek.com/ramadi-mosul-iraq-isis-shia-millitas-sunni-baghdad-iran-iraqi-security-forces-407085
19 Dec 2015: "Iran-backed militia Saraya al-Jihad using crude artillery pieces launching unguided bombs on Ramadi” to carry out the “indiscriminate targeting of” civilians.



http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/iraq-abadi/ 
21 Dec 2015: Three big militias – Amiri’s Badr Organisation, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Hezbollah – use the Iranian Shi’ite cleric’s image on either their posters or websites. Badr officials describe their relationship with Iran as good for Iraq’s national interests...On Aug. 10, an Islamic State suicide bomber attacked a Shi’ite wedding party in the eastern city of Baquba, killing 58. Shi’ite militia fighters responded by killing local Sunnis and dumping 25 or more bodies in the city’s river, according to local officials. The massacre went unreported in local media.  In Tikrit, where thousands of residents returned after the defeat of Islamic State in April, people say they now live in fear of militias. Kidnappings and robberies by men in security uniforms have also risen in Baghdad.  Alarmed, Abadi addressed the issue at a gathering of police, warning “there was a challenge against the state.”

https://www.worldwatchmonitor.org/2015/12/4166660/ 
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/12/popular-mobilization-force-threatened-to-persecute-christian-celebrating-christmas-in-baghdad.php
30 Dec 2015: The Popular Mobilization Force (PMF)...began harassing Christians in Baghdad by suggesting women wear the hijab, or veil, and instructing the religious minority not to celebrate Christmas. 


 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/the-hell-after-isis/476391/ 
2016: In 2015, seven members of the extended Sabar family were murdered by Shiite militiamen.....a network of under-the-radar NGOs and human-rights workers have been documenting cases, and they allege that—in certain areas, at least— anti-ISIS forces may have killed as many Sunnis as ISIS has. .... After the fall of Mosul to ISIS in 2014, she learned that hundreds of Sunnis had been rounded up and disappeared by Iraqi forces outside Baghdad. Following the fall of Ramadi one year later, Shiite militias similarly took revenge on Sunni refugees in the capital.
12 Jan 2016: Colonel Hussein al-Tamimi from Diyala police told The New Arab gunmen riding in cars belonging to the government and wearing uniforms of the Shia-dominated Popular Mobilisation militia kidnapped and killed on Tuesday Sharqiya TV correspondent Saif Talal and his cameraman Hassan al-Anbaki. Tamimi said that locals found the bodies of the two journalists riddled with bullets an hour after they were kidnapped."
12 Jan 2016: At least seven Sunni mosques and dozens of shops in eastern Iraq were firebombed on Tuesday, security sources and local officials said, a day after 23 people were killed there in two blasts claimed by Islamic State.  Ten people were also shot and killed in Muqdadiya, 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Baghdad, security and hospital sources said.  ...At least two Sunni mosques south of Baghdad were attacked last week after a Shi'ite cleric was executed in Saudi Arabia.

 
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde14/3396/2016/en/ 
12 Jan 2016: militia members were driving police vehicles and using loudspeakers calling on Sunnis to leave the town, and that the words irhal (leave) or matlub damm (we call for blood/revenge) were written on Sunni homes. 
....
On 21 January, a medical source in Muqdadiya reported to the media that some 70 bodies had been left at the city’s hospital as families were too scared to go collect them. The source was quoted by media as stating that many of the bodies could not be identified as they had been disfigured as a result of torture or by being burned.

21 Jan 2016:  Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous accused of kdnapping 3 Americans ... It also has been accused by rights groups of killing Sunni civilians. The group was believed to be behind the massacre
of as many as 30 people, including 20 women, at an alleged brothel in Baghdad’s Zayouna neighborhood in 2014, according to reports at the time. Before that, the United Nations said the militia may have been responsible for the deaths of dozens of young Iraqis who were suspected of being gay or who identified as “emo” because they embraced alternative music and a distinctive style. "

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/01/31/iraq-possible-war-crimes-shia-militia
31 Jan 2016:  Shia militia attacks in Muqdadiya

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/03/iraq-popular-mobilization-units-seize-christian-homes.html 
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/02/iraq-christian-properties-confiscated.html 
http://www.foreigndesknews.com/breaking-news/pro-iranian-militia-seizes-christian-neighborhoods-in-baghdad/  
8 Feb 2016: Shia militias have seized homes, businesses and cultural sites, including churches belonging to Baghdad’s Christian communities.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-samarra-idUSKCN0VO1OH 
15 Feb 2016:  Samarra's Sunnis fear displacement...Local authorities are trying to incorporate nearby districts into the site...Around 2,500 shops and 1,000 homes owned by Sunnis have been closed and shuttered.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/05/27/why-accountability-iraqs-militias-matters 
9 March 2016: One militia fighter said that he had participated as his militia executed over 90 captured Sunni men from the Jazira area earlier in March. A member of a specialized military command in Tikrit said that around the same time militias had rounded up and abused thousands of Jazira families, destroyed Sunni homes and mosques, and also carried out some executions. 


http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:9696d8589a774c33a2e29aaf9699330c
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/mar/20/fears-in-iraqi-government-army-over-shiite/all/?print 
20 March 2016: Shia militias confront Iraqi police and release their leader who was accused of attacking Sunnis...
 [Samarra]Local dignitaries and officials air a flood of grievances blamed on militias, including killings of Sunnis, takeovers of schools and the forcing of Sunnis to sell property in the prime real estate area close to the shrine. To the thud of artillery shelling in the distance, the city council's deputy chairman, Muzher Fleih, said 650 Sunnis have disappeared, believed abducted and killed by the militias. Among them was his brother, who disappeared last year and was found dead soon after.
....
Last month, militiamen refused orders to vacate a building in a military base north of Baghdad, and the army sent troops to take it over. They found the militiamen ready for a fight, with snipers stationed on the roof and in sandbagged positions around it. The dispute was resolved when a substitute building was found for the militiamen.

https://twitter.com/JoelWing2/status/717187611211595776 
http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/babil-government-still-not-allowing.html 
April 4, 2016: Babil government still not allowing Sunnis to return to Jurf al-Sakhar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/world/middleeast/iraq-falluja-anbar-province-isis.html?_r=1 
25 April 2016: In the siege of Falluja, a Sunni city, the Shiite militias have prevented civilians from leaving Islamic State territory while resisting calls to allow humanitarian aid to reach the city. Sunni Arab civilians in the province are increasingly reporting kidnappings and murders by the militias, accounts that American and Iraqi officials say are credible. In some cases, after civilians have disappeared, their families have received ransom demands. 

https://twitter.com/BeyondTheLevant/status/735456221524791296
May 25, 2016: Advisor to Soleimani - "Iran entered Fallujah to protect its role as the center of Shiism [meaning its borders]"

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-town-idUSKCN0YM13O
May 31, 2016: The town became increasingly lawless, with kidnappings and killings targeting mainly Sunni Arabs, many of whom fled the town.
The fuse was lit in April when members of the Martyrs of Sadr militia threw a grenade into the base of a Kurdish peshmerga commander whose men responded with rocket propelled grenades, drawing other factions and armed locals into deadly street battles.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/anti-is-alliance-in-iraq-could-turn-on-each-other-a-1095041-2.html
June 1, 2016: At the end of April, the remaining 300 Sunni families left their previously mixed quarters in the Turkmen part of the city for the safety of the Kurdish sector.
..... There is a list of Sunni men who have been similarly kidnapped in Tuz Khurmatu in the last year and a half with 156 names on it. But it only includes those whose families "are brave enough to follow up,".


https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/01/13/iraq-ethnic-fighting-endangers-civilians 
Jan 13, 2016: The mass arrests, killings, and torture prompted many Arab families to leave Tuz Khurmatu, with most heading toward Kirkuk. The community leader said about 3,000 families had left and that only about 80 Arab families remained in the town. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-36458954 
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/fallulah-civilians-killed-by-islamic-state-or-tortured-by-shia-militias/news-story/ae144381f20a25240249e5a94e9a271f 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/06/hundreds-feared-tortured-in-advance-on-falluja/ 
 June 6, 2016: Hundreds of civilians are suspected to have been tortured after being captured by Shia militiamen advancing towards the Isil-held city of Fallujah in central Iraq, with reports of “broken” corpses being discovered by local authorities.  .....  Photographs obtained by The Telegraph on Monday appeared to show at least seven different people recovering from their detentions. All are bandaged and bloodied, with several bodies covered in deep welts and bruises. In at least one case, the surface of a man’s flesh appeared to have been removed.  “The men arriving at our hospital say they watched field executions and that militiamen mocked their suffering and used filthy sectarian slurs,” said the nurse, adding that bodies of the alleged victims had not been found.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/06/09/iraq-fallujah-abuses-test-control-militias
June 9, 2016: Human Rights Watch, however, has received credible allegations of summary executions, beatings of unarmed men, enforced disappearances, and mutilation of corpses by government forces over the two weeks of fighting, mostly on the outskirts of the city, since May 23..... The woman said the men told her that four men died from beatings and from being dragged behind cars. She told Human Rights Watch that hospital staff in Amiriyat Fallujah said a fifth man died on June 5 in the hospital. .....In recent years Human Rights Watch has documented extensive laws of war violations by the ISIS as well as by Iraqi military and the largely Shia militias that make up the Popular Mobilization Forces, including summary executions, disappearances, torture, use of child soldiers, widespread demolition of buildings, indiscriminate attacks, and unlawful restrictions on the movement of people fleeing the fighting.


http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/security-in-iraq-june-1-7-2016.html 
8 June 2016: There have also been reports of abuses by the Hashd. 17 civilians were said to have been executed in Garma, and another 40 in Amiriya Fallujah. Finally, government shelling killed 18 civilians in Fallujah and another 5 wounded. 

https://news.vice.com/article/shiite-militias-in-iraq-reportedly-tortured-and-executed-sunnis-fleeing-fallujah 
14 June 2016: Iraq's Defense Minister Khalid al-Obeidi said four military personnel were arrested after video footage showed them abusing people displaced from Fallujah.


http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/abuses-of-iraqs-hashd-in-fallujah.html
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-admits-17-civilians-murdered-shia-fighters-fallujah-1262230191
June 16, 2016: A Shia fighter shot dead 17 civilians who were fleeing the Islamic State (IS)-held city of Fallujah.

http://www.basnews.com/index.php/en/news/kurdistan/282444 
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20160620-militia-accused-of-killing-50-people-in-iraq-prison/ 
19 Jan 2016: Shia militia accused of killing 50 Sunni prisoners in Amerli as revenge

http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/24062016
24 June 2016: Many Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Sunni Turkmen are leaving their homes in Khurmatu due to increasing killings and threats. .... The threats are believed to be mainly coming from the Shiite militias but people are not clear whether they are linked to the Hashd al-Shaabi or not.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/28/they-survived-isis-then-disappeared.html 
June 28, 2016: According to the Anbar Council and the mayor of Ramadi, Dr. Ibrahim al-Awsaj, however, in addition to the 643 missing from Saqliwia and the 49 deaths, about 1,200 civilians have gone missing over the past year from the Razaza Checkpoint, a key checkpoint that many internally displaced Anbaris have had to use to get to Baghdad during the military operations in Anbar over the past year. Kataib Hezbollah was responsible for two checkpoints here.

http://bigstory.ap.org/13376bf19d044b5bbf47103539997d15
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-falluja-idUSKCN0ZJ0T2
3 July 2016: Two sources from the elite counter-terrorism service (CTS) said looting and arson had followed the end of combat. One of them blamed the PMF and showed Reuters three militiamen caught in the act.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-36716494
5 July 2016: some 1,500 men and boys over the age of 14 were captured on 1 June by Kataaib Hezbollah militia, Mr al-Hussein said, quoting witnesses.
He said they were later separated into two groups, with the smaller group of about 605 people later being transferred in a government-run clearance centre near Falluja.
He also said the UN had received reports of severe maltreatment, including denial of food and water, beating, torture, and even the beheading of some detainees.

https://twitter.com/HuaidaYn/status/769862440947449856
https://twitter.com/DeadmanMax/status/769847212272553989
August 2016: It seems even when Christian Assyrians are dead, buried in #Iraq, we are not left in peace. Grave robbery in Najaf:


https://twitter.com/abdullahawez/status/763397133118672896
10 August 2016: 20 killed & wounded in three days of clashes between 2 shia militias (Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq & Al-Mukhtar) in Diyala.


goo.gl/F0XZwT
23 August 2016: Shia militias kidnap a Sunni and his 5 sons in Jabara's al-Jadida village, Diyala

reut.rs/2bDkQTE
23 August 2016: Fallujah offensive: 66 Sunnis killed, 1500 abused and 700 still missing.


http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2016/Sep-08/371191-iraq-police-clashes-with-militia-near-baghdad.ashx
http://ara.tv/8v3mj
8 Sep 2016: The violence in Zaafaraniya, south of Baghdad, involved exchanges of fire that lasted more than two hours between police forces and the Harakat al-Nujaba group.


https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/10/iraqis-fleeing-is-held-areas-face-torture-disappearance-and-death-in-revenge-attacks/
Sunnis fleeing IS-held areas face torture, disappearance and death in revenge attacks by Shia militias

https://www.niqash.org/en/articles/security/5384
26 Oct 2016: Harakat al-Nujaba forcibly remove some Sunnis from Zafaraniyah, Baghdad.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161027-iraq-shia-militias-blow-up-mosques-in-rutba-revenge-attacks/
sabahdai.ly/HuejI8
27 Oct 2016: Abu al-Fadl Abbas group militiamen destroy 2 mosques, torch vehicles and homes, abduct youngsters in Rutba


https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/investigate-reports-iraqi-forces-tortured-and-killed-villagers-near-mosul-in-cold-blood/
10 Nov 2016: Iraqi Federal Police [Badr-dominated] killed 6 people near Mosul, and tortured others.



Atrocities by Shia militias in Iraq and Syria (visual)

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ca1HsC6MH0 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/mar/06/james-steele-america-iraq-video 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/06/el-salvador-iraq-police-squads-washington 
The Guardian documentary about Iraq's sectarian war

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/articles/all/iraqs-death-squads-reporter-feature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up9UNKQcO_E
Channel 4 Dispatches documentary about Shia death squads in Iraq.


http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=007_1365342391
Apr 7, 2013: "Following a car bomb explosion near the football stadium in Khan Bani Saad, a young male was arrested by police and promptly handed over to psychotic shiite militiamen to be murdered." 

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=077_1371065346 
June 12, 2013: Shia militias drag and kill Omar Al-Mafraji, a student.


http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a8b_1399248437#Mgp8Y91FWbiJIQmA.99
5 Jan 2014: high school students are detained in Nasyriah Central Prison as suspects, yet they are verbally and physically abused in a sectarian way only because they are from Fallujah.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c5e_1402961930
June 16, 2014: 2 Palestinian Iraqis tortured to death

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f3e_1403364557
June 21, 2014: Baghdad police torture a man to death

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6f2_1404371007 
July 3, 2014: Shia militias cut captives' backs, pour salt on their wounds. "We'll kill you after this".

http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/urgent-video-hezbollah-militias-torture-execute-sunni-civilians-iraq/ 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awGqb8KGcQc 
August 16, 2014: Hezbollah militias torture, execute Sunni civilians in Iraq
  

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=feb_1408962012 
August 25, 2014: Shia militias behead and cut body parts of Sunni civilians who they killed in Jurf Al Sakhar north Babil province.
 

http://observers.france24.com/en/20140909-iraq-shiite-militia-islamic-state
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ1Ay9-FnY8
Sep 6, 2014: Kitaib Imam Ali militants display severed heads of alleged IS militants in Amerli town in Iraq. Incident was reported in July 2014.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=338_1414063493&comments=1 
Oct 23, 2014: Militias throw petrol on corpses and burn them.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=200_1414273974&comments=1
Oct 25, 2014: Beheading of a corpse

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=abc_1414594976
Oct 29, 2014: Shia militias skin a corpse


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXnW1Tn0XOc
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2014/Iraqi_Shiite_militias_grow_brutal_in_anti-IS_fight/id-66e1e41df41c4dcba2514928e4870cb9
Nov 11, 2014: a Shiite fighter shouts the name of a revered imam in victory as he poses beside decapitated bodies. Another militiaman sits nearby, grinning as he maims a corpse. One bearded militiaman explains the bodies are those of fighters who "killed our comrades." Another man shouts, "Our fighters were good guys. These are dogs."


https://twitter.com/ErshadAlijani/status/532472244984098816 
https://twitter.com/ajaltamimi/status/532195483414835200 
Nov 11, 2014:  Shi'a militia display severed heads in plastic bags in a funeral in Basra


http://observers.france24.com/en/20141230-video-shiite-groups-using-same-horrific-tactics-used-islamic-state
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-izB3nu6Xls
Dec 30, 2014: This video was reportedly filmed outside the town of Amerli in Iraq, when Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers were fighting alongside Shiite militants to recapture the town from Islamic State jihadists. It shows the bodies of two ‘IS’ fighters reportedly beheaded by Shiite militias being dragged along a dusty road. The two flags attached to the vehicle belong to the Badr Brigade and Saraya al-Khorasani."

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=53e_1422639131&comments=1 
Jan 30, 2015:  Shia forces mutilate ISIS corpses and play around with separated heads


http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3aa_1423235620 
Feb 7, 2015:  Iraqi army and Shiite militias beat a blindfolded & handcuffed alleged ISIS spy and shoot him.


http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2015/03/04/Shocking-video-shows-Iraq-soldiers-execute-child.html 
http://www.voanews.com/content/video-claims-to-show-shia-forces-in-iraq-executing-sunni-boy/2667978.html
March 4, 2015: Iraqi forces and Shi'ite militia executing a 9-year-old handcuffed Sunni boy. 
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1ad_1453388509&comments=1
https://twitter.com/Omar_Madaniah/status/690117002954969091 
https://twitter.com/Malcolmite/status/735871268478668800
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=516_1428760958 
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a53_1425825808 
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f19_1426293659 
March 8, 2015: Shias beating a person with rods to death and behead him afterwards.

http://observers.france24.com/en/20150311-video-shiite-militias-sunni-village-tikrit
https://news.vice.com/article/report-says-iraqs-shia-militias-laid-waste-to-tikrit-after-kicking-out-the-islamic-state
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcQF7ktSu8k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdEDp6Li6jE
March 9, 2015: Shia Militias Burning Sunni Homes In Tikrit

March 11, 2015: An investigative report on atrocities committed by Iraqi forces and Shiite militias.



http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fdc_1426669994#PLVO8SAfy5VcmrD0.99
18 March 2015: Sunni Man Lynched to Death and Sexually Violated (his anus torn apart by metal objects) by Mob of Shi’ites in Baghdad Hospital



http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=345_1426769496#m5ORpL6frHhdMYvf.99
19 March 2015: Sunni Man Tortured by Having His Face Burned with Lighter, and Forced to Drink Human Waste


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-tikrit-special-re-idUSKBN0MU1DP20150403 http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/4/after-iraqi-forces-take-tikrit-a-wave-of-looting-and-lynching.html 
April 4, 2015: "On April 1, the Shia-led Iraqi central government liberated the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) after a month-long battle.Then, some of the liberators took revenge.Near the charred, bullet-scarred government headquarters, two federal policemen flanked a suspected ISIL fighter. Urged on by a furious mob, the two officers took out knives and repeatedly stabbed the man in the neck and slit his throat. The killing was witnessed by two Reuters correspondents."

http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/once_ned_parker_saw_his.php
http://in.reuters.com/article/mideast-iraq-reuters-idINKBN0N20G020150411 April 11, 2015: The Baghdad bureau chief for Reuters has left Iraq after he was threatened on Facebook and denounced by a Shi'ite paramilitary group's satellite news channel in reaction to a Reuters report last week that detailed lynching and looting in the city of Tikrit..... 

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fe7_1432418662&comments=1 
May 23, 2015: Shia militias shoot an ISIS militant.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9c2_1432411952&comments=1 
May 23, 2015:  Shia militias drag a dead ISIS militant.
http://observers.france24.com/en/20150608-imam-ali-brigades-brutal-fighters-skilled-propagandists
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aba_1433018185
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTw7onRDoYc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7jsqFiIf4U
 May 31, 2015: Imam Ali Brigade militiamen burn a man.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/isis-terrorist-strung-up-burned-6343903
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3214167/We-cut-like-shawarma-Gruesome-video-shows-Angel-Death-Iraqi-fighter-carving-flesh-charred-body-ISIS-fighter-burned-death.html#ixzz43wGcS7Kx
August 28, 2015: "Gruesome video footage shows an Iraqi soldier known as the 'Angel of Death' carving the flesh from the body of a charred ISIS fighter. Ayyub al-Rubaie, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Azrael, burned the man alive and hung his body from an electricity pylon in Baiji, it is claimed."


http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a08_1445895642 
Oct 26, 2015: PMU soldiers behead a corpse of ISIS militiant

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c3f_1446929780
Nov 8, 2015: Iraqi Shia Militia fighters from Hezbollah al Nujaba burn a Syrian rebel corpse with petrol in South Aleppo


June 7, 2016: Iraqi Sunni civilians displaced from Fallujah tortured with his children by Shia militias

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdXCaePnK64
June 7, 2016: Torture by Shia militias in Saqlawiya


https://twitter.com/latifyahia/status/747607115183816704
June 28, 2016: Shia militias torturing handcuffed prisoners

https://twitter.com/_Kurd_/status/749200258790457345
July 2, 2016: Shia militias beating a man and shoot him


https://twitter.com/Omar_Madaniah/status/786596342910955520
https://twitter.com/Abdullahazam245/status/786607488992997377
Oct 13, 2016:  Shia militias (Americas allies in Iraq) ripping the body of a dead sunni man, they pull out his heart & eat it

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161026-video-iraqi-soldiers-abuse-children-near-mosul/
26 Oct 2016: Iraqi children being beaten and insulted by government forces.

http://www.niqash.org/en/articles/security/5458
https://twitter.com/Conflicts/status/797070849727729665
11 Nov 2016: Iraqi forces allegedly crushed a boy under a tank.

https://twitter.com/JoumanaGebara/status/828655359824896000
Thread on videos of abuses
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