Deadly place for Shias

Amid talk that blames Iraqi police for some assassinations, professors, judges, doctors are increasingly targeted for death

BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS

August 25, 2005

BASRA, Iraq - The professor sat at his computer, insistently pulling up pictures of Basra as the gem it was 30 years and four wars ago. He seemed fixated on the past, deflecting questions about the present and the future.

After much time, he reluctantly turned from the screen to face a visitor and the reality of "the awfulness" of what is happening now.

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.

Basra's police chief, Gen. Hassan al-Sade, complained publicly to a British newspaper several months ago that half his men were working not for him, but for the militias. Some Iraqi sources say he has now been given a "promotion," to a job with no power, and replaced by a man from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a religious party with close ties with Iran.

Most troubling for U.S. policy in the Middle East is that many Iraqis believe the police who commit these killings are working ultimately for Iran, where most of them lived for many years in exile from Saddam Hussein. Sources with access to U.S. intelligence confirm that Shia Iran has infiltrated large numbers of agents into both police security and Interior Ministry paramilitary forces stationed here in the south of Iraq.

"I am Shia, but I am afraid of these parties that were in Iran. They are like the fire under the ash," said an expert on Shia religious movements who was in exile in Iran with many of them. "I am afraid of those Iranians who are behind them, also."

"Of course I'm afraid," the professor, a Shia, said emphatically in response to a question, telling a reporter not to use his name. "Some assassinations are political. Some are ethnic. Some are simply of scholars. They are targeted because they are influential, and they are not protected." In Basra, he said, "there is no longer a distinction between order and freedom."

Khamas may have been seen as disloyal, "but he is a human being in the first place, a professor in the second place and, thirdly, a source of knowledge for Iraq," the professor said despairingly.

Some leaders beg to differ

Political leaders from the religious parties deny these charges.

Salah Al-Batat is a member of the Provincial Council and a leader in Basra - Iraq's second largest city - of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a religious party close to Iran. He attributed the assassinations to former members of Hussein's government. "We are a target of terror," he said. But he said he was "20 times 100 percent certain that there is not one person from Iran in the land of Basra. If there was anybody from Iran, we would arrest them."

Some citizens, like Hamid el-Musawi, 37, an unemployed welder wounded in the 1991 uprising against Hussein, embrace revenge. "Most of the Baath [Hussein's party] joined new security offices. Some of them formed new political parties. So it is very normal to see these assassinations against the Baath because people felt oppressed," he said. "So don't be surprised if you see they killed Baath; Iraqi people believe in revenge."

Reminded that secular professors and women who work for the United States and Britain are also being killed, he said, "It is difficult for Iraqi people to accept that women work for foreign forces or occupation forces. We have a tradition and norms" that are "different from the American people."

No one keeps any records of the assassinations. Indeed, the police, when asked, say they do not occur or are the work of terrorists. One political leader said they are in the hundreds and may have reached a thousand.

Nazar Habib, 45, is the dean of the College of Education at Basra University, a huge institution with two campuses. He is also one of two professors elected to the Basra Provincial Council. Born in Basra, he said he, like other Shias, "lived under the former regime in terror." But for him the danger has not ended. Two weeks before a recent interview with Newsday, he said, men with submachine guns opened fire on his car near his home. He was not in the car and no one was injured. He hinted that he was targeted because he had dared to suggest an end to the killings. "Sometimes I said, forget the past, let us begin from zero point. This speech was hated by others," he said.

A 40-year-old Sunni journalist who asked not to be identified said life in Basra "is very terrible and very risky because of the interference of the Iranians whose border is just 10 miles away. Each Sayyed [religious figure] in the government in Iran has a movement here in Basra. They commit a lot of assassinations for the intelligence service in Iran. They killed the sellers of alcohol. They even killed the barbers [who shaved people's beards in contradiction of religious teachings]. They are working to cut the South [off from the rest of the country,] so that in the future it will belong to Iran."

Abdul Hussein el-Fayath was a secular Shia television journalist with political aspirations. He was a correspondent for the Hurra [Freedom] station, started by the United States, until he was assassinated by gunmen Feb. 9. with his 3-year-old son, Mohammed, as they left their house here. His brother, Salaam el-Fayath, said in an interview he thinks Abdul was killed because of his coverage of the local elections in January, as well as for his interest in running for office as a secular alternative to the religious parties.