Erin Evers talking:
we essentially documented that after U.S. coalition strikes in the town of Amerli, in Salahuddin province, routed ISIS from the town of Amerli, along with—along with militias and security forces fighting on the ground—
Amerli is in Salahuddin, which is north of Baghdad. It’s the same province that Tikrit is in. And the town itself is kind of the northeast of the province. So, ISIS had been laying siege to this town for two months. The ground forces alone were unable to route ISIS from the town, but then, after the U.S. airstrikes on August 31st, they cleared ISIS from the town, then proceeded to spread out throughout Salahuddin province and neighboring Kirkuk province, and attacked the Sunni villages in those provinces. So they essentially laid siege to all of the Sunni villages in a pretty broad area, set homes on fire, looted them, in some cases destroyed them with explosives and earth-moving equipment.
We used satellite imagery. We were on the ground, obviously, and saw some of the destruction with our own eyes, spoke to about 30 persons who were displaced as a result of—as a result of this clearing operation. And then we used satellite imagery in order to determine that the damage that we saw was in fact caused by militias and not in the course of fighting or by ISIS. So we had determined the timeline, essentially, of when what we saw happened, so that we could be clear that those areas were under the control of militias and not under the control of ISIS or not, you know—not engaging in battle at the time.
the militias are not under any formal chain of command. They are leading the fight against ISIS, and they are responsible, essentially, to themselves.
Why they’re doing this, I think, is really anybody’s guess. But from statements that—you know, statements that we’ve heard from militia leaders and from what people on the ground have told us that militia—you know, militia fighters were saying to them when they were on the ground, it seems like they were essentially trying to clear the area of Sunnis.
And after this campaign, several months afterwards, in January, the same militias went through Diyala province, which is a province neighboring Iran, and essentially carried out the same kinds of operations, except at an even more extreme kind of level. So, whereas in this report we documented militias kidnapping people and torturing people, in Diyala we documented the same militias carrying out summary executions of Sunni civilians and even a large massacre of 72 civilians in one town in Diyala in the course of their fighting.
We’ve seen them with U.S. weapons. We don’t know exactly how they’ve gotten their hands on these weapons, you know, so there’s a lot of speculation as to how they’re getting the weapons. Some people say that they’re getting them through the Iraqi army, which is the official recipient of the weapons. And other people—you know, other people are saying that they’re getting them from ISIS, which obviously is also getting the weapons in the course of their fight on the ground.
even though, in Iraq right now we have a new government with a reformist prime minister, and his allies are also, you know, definitely keen to rein in these militias, to undo some of the kind of very abusive legislation and practices that the former prime minister put in place, unfortunately, the power on the ground that is the strongest right now is the militias, and they are not answerable to the government. There is no accountability for any of the abuses that we’ve documented on the part of militias. And this is going back even before—you know, even before Mosul fell, the militias were gaining power within the security forces. Once Mosul fell, that relationship flipped, and the militias became the leading force on the ground, and the security forces are kind of following behind.
The White House has not specifically addressed the issue of militias getting their hands on U.S. weaponry. But they have, in recent weeks, kind of ratcheted up their language. They’re voicing concern about militia abuses, about the possibility of militias being sectarian—which obviously is a foregone conclusion. So, I think that it’s something that the U.S. is seriously considering. But they haven’t—they haven’t publicly addressed specifically the issue of militias getting their hands on weapons.
A report by ABC News revealed U.S.-trained and -armed Iraqi military units are under investigation for committing war crimes. This is an except of ABC’s report by Brian Ross:
“Innocent civilians massacred, prisoners tortured, acts that shock the civilized world—all discovered by ABC News online, not from the usual ISIS accounts, but on social media sites connected to elite units of the Iraqi army, the very forces the U.S. is counting on to help stop such atrocities.
Here, a group of men in Iraqi army uniforms give a sign of approval after a civilian is beheaded behind them. In this video, a young boy, a suspected ISIS recruit, is about to be executed, shot dead in the street with men in what appear to be Iraqi uniforms crowding around the scene. This appears to be an insignia of the Iraqi special forces. There are dozens of such videos and still images now being investigated by U.S. and Iraqi authorities to determine if they are in fact part of the Iraqi army, like these men with a severed head or these men dragging the body of a captured prisoner. In this video, what appears to be two unarmed Iraqi civilians are about to be murdered, like the others already dead next to them. This video, slowed down, shows militia fighters with U.S.-supplied weapons.”
the sad thing about all this footage is that it’s essentially visual documentation of abuses that we, other organizations and the media have been documenting for years on the part of Iraqi security forces, and that successive U.S. and Iraqi governments have turned a blind eye to. So, the kinds of abuses that we saw in that report, these atrocious—you know, absolutely atrocious acts of no accountability whatsoever, is something that the U.S. government has known about for a long time and just failed to do anything about.
Human Rights Watch response to the report was that they have actually withheld aid from specific groups who they knew were committing these abuses before. That’s the first time that I ever heard about the U.S. actually withholding aid from abusive groups. That’s, of course, their obligation under the Leahy Law, which prohibits the U.S. from providing weapons to human rights-abusing forces. But they have never responded directly to us in terms of the allegations, you know, the kind of documentation that we’ve done of these kinds of abuses by Iraqi security forces.
— source democracynow.org
Erin Evers, Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch. She co-wrote the new report, “After Liberation Came Destruction: Iraqi Militias and the Aftermath of Amerli.” She has been on the ground in Iraq with Human Rights Watch since September 2012.