"We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated," Allawi said.

CAIRO, November 27, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Human rights violations in Iraq are as bad now as it was under deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, if not worse, former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi said Sunday, November 27.

"People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse," Allawi told Britain's the Observer newspaper.

"It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things."

Allawi, a secular Shiite, accused the incumbent government of Ibrahim Jaafari of being responsible for forming death squads and setting up secret torture centers in the war-torn country.

"We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated," he added.

Two weeks ago, more than 170 malnourished and beaten prisoners, many of them Sunni Arabs, were found locked in a bunker belonging to the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry.

Allawi, who served from June 2004 until the Jaafari government took over, said that the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police.

"A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Shari`ah courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them."

Allawi, who gained a reputation as a tough politician with security as his main trump card, had accused Jaafari government of allowing powerful militias to hold sway, posing a threat to communal harmony in the country.

He urged the government to take immediate actions to dismantle militias operating in the country with impunity.

"If nothing is done, the disease infecting [the Ministry of the Interior] will become contagious and spread to all ministries and structures of Iraq's government," he said.

The Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), the highest Sunni religious authority in Iraq, had accused the Shiite Badr Brigades of abducting and assassinating Sunni scholars.

The former premier said he now had so little faith in the rule of law in Iraq, following the implication of police units in many of the rights abuses.

He stressed that he had instructed his own bodyguards to fire on any police car that attempted to approach his headquarters without prior notice.

"The Ministry of the Interior is at the heart of the matter. I am not blaming the minister [Bayan Jabr] himself, but the rank and file are behind the secret dungeons and some of the executions that are taking place."

Allawi warned of the gave consequences of leaving Iraq disintegrated into chaos.

"Iraq is the centerpiece of this region. If things go wrong, neither Europe nor the US will be safe."

 Head of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, however, urged Sunday the United States to give the Iraqi interior and defense ministries leeway in fighting what he termed "insurgency".

"There are plans to confront terrorists, approved by security agencies, but the Americans reject that," Hakim told The Washington Post.

"For instance, the ministries of Interior and Defense want to carry out some operations to clean out some areas in Baghdad and around the country, including volatile Anbar province, in the west," he said.

"There were plans that should have been implemented months ago, but American officials and forces rejected them," he said. "This has led to the expansion of terrorism."

Iraqi cities with Sunni majority have been a favorite target for US-led onslaughts over charges that Sunnis were feeding the Iraqi resistance.

The northern city of Tal Afar came under successive US offensives over the past few months, sending residents into panicky flight and turning the city into a ghost town.

Resistance hub Fallujah was the scene of one of the bloodiest US raids in November 2004 with at least 700 people killed, including children and women, and thousands injured.