Word: saddamism
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Jasim is a killer. In the past six months he claims to have helped assassinate 10 former members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime, most of them officials in the disbanded mukhabarat, Iraq's ruthless intelligence service. A construction worker who declines to give his full name for fear of retribution, Jasim, 31, has scores to settle. In 1999, after he participated in the murder of three Baathist officials, the mukhabarat threw him into prison, where he says he was whipped and beaten and tortured with electric shocks to his penis. Released in a general amnesty Saddam granted just before...
Until recently, U.S. authorities pointed to the absence of widespread civil conflict in Iraq--in particular, the general reluctance of Iraqi Shi'ites to retaliate against security officials who tormented them under Saddam's mostly Sunni government--as a harbinger of long-term stability. But seven months after the fall of Baghdad, a wave of revenge killings is sweeping Iraq. An investigation by TIME found that at least a dozen former intelligence officials have been killed in shootings in Baghdad since Oct. 1; several others have been wounded. In Basra, some 25 to 30 Baath Party members have been shot...
...fell and from former security officials who have fingered their colleagues. The vigilante cell was born of the teachings of Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a popular Shi'ite cleric who, before he was executed by the regime in 1999, according to Aws and Jasim, issued a fatwa ordering that Saddam's murderous henchmen be killed. Al-Sadr's son Muqtada, an outspoken young Shi'ite cleric, has incited violence against U.S. forces in Iraq. Former regime officials believe some of the revenge killings are being committed by members of the Badr Brigade, an armed militia loyal to Mohammed Baqir...
...victims, it turns out, are not always the worst of Saddam's brutes. According to former intelligence officers, some of those who have been slain by vigilantes were low-level bureaucrats. Most of the two dozen or so Baathists killed recently in Basra were teachers. Some teachers had senior positions in the old regime, but many others had joined the Baath Party just to further their careers. An abandoned lot near the Education Ministry's building in Basra has become a dumping ground for bodies that sometimes show up with letters identifying them as Baath Party members...
...officials say they are working to establish a court system that can prosecute the worst offenders from Saddam's regime. According to the plan, the tribunals will first try the 45 key Baathist leaders in custody, then move on to rank-and-file regime loyalists accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. But it could take years for such courts to bring former Baathist officials to justice. At a recent conference, Iraqi human-rights groups lashed out at a director of the reconciliation effort in Cambodia, where the process of trying members of Pol Pot's regime...