Raid on Baghdad torture dungeon

The raid was at a building in central Baghdad. Men armed with automatic rifles burst in and made their way to underground cells where they found 175 people huddled together. They had been tortured and were terrified.

What made this unusual even in this, the most violent of cities, was that the raid was taking place in an office of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, and the raiding party were Iraqi police and American soldiers.

Iraqi police had called in US help when their search for a missing 15-year-old boy took them to the ministry dungeons at Jadriyah. It was an unofficial prison, but just one of many throughout the country.

Brigadier General Karl Horst of the 3rd Infantry Division attempted to be diplomatic. The prisoners were found "in need of medical care. I brought in a legal team to sort through their files". The Iraqi police were more forthcoming. "These men were in a very bad way. They have obviously been tortured, some had been there a long time and they were very frightened," said an officer calling himself Yasin. He would not give any other name: "I don't want to end up in one of these rooms myself."

The incident gives a glimpse of how paramilitary units working for the Government, and death squads allegedly linked to it, are carrying out a savage war in the shadows. People are arrested and disappear for months. Bodies appear every week of people executed with their hands tied behind their backs. Some have been mutilated before their deaths.

The paramilitaries are not accused of responsibility for all the deaths: some are the handiwork of the insurgents murdering supposed informers or Government officials or killing for purely sectarian motives.

American soldiers are seldom seen on the streets of Baghdad now, even the entrance to the Green Zone is manned by bemused looking Georgian troops. The Iraqi police are in evidence outside, but so are increasing numbers of militias running their own checkpoints. Men in balaclavas or wrap-around sunglasses and headbands, with leather mittens and an array of weapons.

An American official acknowledged: "It is getting more and more like Mogadishu every day out there."

Travelling through the Iraqi capital one would meet Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army; fellow Shiites from the Badr Brigade; the Kurdish Peshmarga and a variety of Western and Iraqi security guards. Then there are Iraqi soldiers and policemen and Government paramilitaries equally "tooled up" - the special police commandos and the Wolf Brigade of the Ministry of Interior.

Many of these units have been created, trained and armed by the Americans. According to reports, US$3 billion out of a US$87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved last year was earmarked for the creation of paramilitary units to fight the insurgence.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counter-terrorism, said: "they set up little teams of [Navy] Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were former senior intelligence people under the Saddam regime."

His next charge - "they're clearly cooking up joint teams to Phoenix-type things, like they did in Vietnam" - draws protestations of outrage from the American military. The CIA's Phoenix programme targeted and assassinated Viet Cong suspects and sympathisers.

Iraqi politicians have accused the CIA of refusing to hand over control of the Iraqi intelligence service to the Iraqi Government and the paramilitaries are run by Adnan Thabit, allegedly a former CIA "asset".

The 2000-strong Wolf Brigade, which has a snarling wolf's head as its motif, formed in October 2004 after training with US forces. It is led by a 41-year-old former lieutenant general in Saddam's army, Abul Waleed, who has a poster of the Shiite saint Imam Ali on his wall and a Koranic chant as his mobile ring tone.

He began the practice of videotaping arrested suspects and this became a hit television show, Terrorism in the Grip of Justice, in which alleged insurgents confess to crimes.

A spokesman for the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars said: "Forces like them carry out illegal killings and arrests, they intimidate people. They are Iraqi government forces, but they do not protect the people. We need to be protected from them."

- INDEPENDENT