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Iraqis pickup a coffin of a Sunni victim of sectarian violence at the morgue in Baqouba. |
CAIRO — His brutality and savageness has earned him the pseudonym "Shiite Zarqawi," the Jordanian militant notorious for his prolific beheadings in Iraq before being killed in a US strike in June.
His first name is Ismail and he is widely known as Abu Deraa or "The Shield" and, unlike Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi's favorite beheading, his no-less brutal trademark of killing is a drill through the skull of a badly tortured Sunni corpse.
"We are proud of leaders like Abu Deraa," Hassan Allami, 25, a fighter with the feared Mehdi army militia of Shiite leader Moqtada Al-Sadr's Mehdi, told Britain's Daily Telegraph on Sunday, November 12.
"His drills destroy the crazy minds of the Sunnis."
Known also as the "Butcher of Rusafa," a reference to the largely Shiite section of Baghdad, sadistic Abu Deraa was a Mehdi Army fighter before defecting and embarking on his grisly killings.
When Sadr joined the Shiite-led coalition government last January, controlling three ministries, Abu Deraa reportedly called him a "coward" and cut ties.
In the past year, he and his followers have murdered thousands of Sunnis whose bodies are usually dumped in road craters left by car bombs blamed on Al-Qaeda.
"What Abu Deraa does is just a reaction" to killings by Sunnis, Abu Ali, 46, a Shiite policeman who has met Abu Deraa, told the British paper.
Ali says some Iraqi police intelligence units in Baghdad occasionally hand detainees over to Deraa for "torture and killing."
Violence between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq has escalated since a 2003 US-led invasion toppled former president Saddam Hussein.
The International Organization for Migration said that the number of Iraqis fleeing their homes to escape sectarian strife is rising dramatically, and has now reached almost 9,000 per week.
Dozens of bullet-riddled bodies surface across Iraq every week.
United Nations and Iraq medical sources estimate that more than a 100 people are dying daily in sectarian violence across the country.
In a report issued on September 1, the US Defense Department said sectarian attacks in Iraq rose by 24 percent to 792 per week.
Uncontrolled
Abu Deraa and his ilk appear to operate beyond anyone's control.
"The whole thing is becoming increasingly localized, with people like Sadr being outflanked by extremists whom he can't control," Eric Herring, the British author of Iraq in Fragments study.
"It's possible that we may eventually remember Sadr as a moderate."
Analysts say that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki's political survival weighs on Shiite militias since he cannot antagonize the powerful Mehdi Army or the Badr Brigades, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
Instead, he hopes to convince militia leaders that stable Iraq would serve best their interests and men like Abu Deraa should be brought to justice.
"Maliki believes this is the best way to do it. If it works, it would be quite good," US Ambassador in Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad told Newsweek in its November 13 issue.
"But it's a huge gamble," he added.
The Americans admit that their influence on the ruling Shiites have dwindled and cannot force Maliki to crack down hard on Abu Deraa and death-squads.
"That prevents us from doing things that we might want to do, like going after Abu Deraa more aggressively," a senior US official told the Telegraph on condition of anonymity.
The National Concord Front, a bloc of three Sunni parties holding 44 seats in parliament, threatened Wednesday, November 8, to quit the political process and take up arms unless the Shiite-led government makes good on its pledge to take on militias and death squads.
After forming a unity government in May, al-Maliki, a Shiite, vowed to dismantle militias to help restore security to the war-torn country.
But since then, no action has been taken.
Instead, Maliki last month ordered the release of a high-level militia commander captured by US forces and then he forced US forces to lift a blockade imposed on the Baghdad Shiite slum of Sadr City, a hotbed for the Mahdy Army.
Iraq's most revered Shiite scholar Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani has recently admitted his inability to prevent a civil war, lamenting that he no longer has an influence on Shiites who have switched allegiance to militant groups and death squads.
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