The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney - to no avail - that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before the war, during it and in the aftermath, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the US intelligence community's chief Middle East analyst, from Wayne White, the State Department's chief intelligence analyst on Iraq and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.

For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn't even alarming: they just didn't care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to John Bolton's arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney's shadow National Security Council in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.

In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq's] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."

Such black neoconservative fantasies - which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will - have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.

The bankruptcy of the Bush-Cheney Iraq policy is revealed in the fact that the United States has succeeded in pitting itself now against two major "resistance" groups in Iraq. The first is the Sunni-led, mostly Baathist and military resistance, which has battled US forces in Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle to the north and west. The second, which is growing in the ferocity of its anti-Americanism, is the Shiite religious forces led by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army, and their allies, who have begun routinely to denounce the United States for its opposition to their plans to create a Shiite-dominated, Iranian-allied Islamic Republic of Iraq. Abdel Aziz Al Hakim, SCIRI's chieftain and former commander of its Badr Brigade paramilitary force, has all but declared war on the United States, blaming Ambassador Khalilzad for giving a "green light" to the bombers by insisting that Shiite militias be disarmed. Proclaimed Hakim:

"For sure, the statements made by the ambassador were not made in a responsible way and he did not behave like an ambassador. These statements were the reason for more pressure and gave green lights to terrorist groups. And, therefore, he shares in part of the responsibility."

And even the oracle-like Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose supposedly nonpolitical stance looks more and more like a cover for shrewd and calculating political ambition, overtly threatened this week to order the unleashing of Shiite militias in a civil war mode.

But the escalating political rhetoric is built on a foundation of escalating inter-communal violence. Ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra ought not to be seen as a conspiratorial effort to provoke civil war, but merely as a symptom of that incipient war. As a Sunni city north of Baghdad, it is likely that ethnic cleansers planned the attack as a means of terrifying Shiites in that part of Iraq to flee southward to the Shiite enclaves. Scores of Iraqi cities, towns, and neighborhoods are undergoing a similar pattern of terrorism and death squads aimed at ethnic cleansing.

What is especially scary to Shiites is that the destruction of the Golden Dome follows an historic pattern first laid down by the Wahhabi conquerors of the Arabian peninsula in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the Wahhabi Arab army made demolition of Shiite mosque domes its signature and launched a crusade against alleged idolatry by Shiites, who were disparaged by the Wahhabis as heretics. The Kurds, too, standing back from the Sunni-Shiite battles, are engaging in their own, anti-Arab ethnic cleansing in and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which President Jalal Talabani of Iraq, a Kurd, has called "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan."

It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated, and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq on the knife's edge.

Like the Sarajevo assassination that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won't be the cause. The cause is far more deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the US invasion of Iraq and America's deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions. If the current crisis doesn't spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.

Our soldiers now stand with the Shiite-dominated authority that they helped to achieve power with the force of our nation's military. We know that our troops are still being sent out on search and destroy missions and all sorts of 'anti-insurgent' raids. Most of these missions and raids are almost certainly directed at Iraqis opposed to the government our troops are propping up.

At this point our soldiers are just muckraking along with the Shiite-dominated militias we have funded, equipped, and supported. This same band of armed government loyalists, Shiite Kurdish and Sunni combatants, is the force that many, in and out of government, both republicans and Democrats, say they rely on to take over 'security' of Iraq so our soldiers can withdrawal.

The reality is, the Iraqi militias are using our assistance as a wedge against their political opponents. That's not democracy forming, it's a junta, a recipe for perpetual resistance to the existing authority, and we're on tyranny's side.

Bush called the leaders of the major parties in Iraq to buck them up as he darted around the world to keep out of harm's way: Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite; the head of Iraq's largest Shiite political party, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim; President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; and parliament speaker Hajim al-Hassani, a Sunni.

Bush ``encouraged them to continue to work together to thwart the efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord among Iraq's communities.''

However, the AP had another report that signaled the Iraqi leader's impatience with Washington's 'protection' racket . . . the country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was hinting, as was Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, that their religious armies could get the security job done if the government couldn't defend the holy shrines.

There are reports of police finding dozens of bodies, cuffed and shot execution-style since Wednesday. The bodies of 14 Iraqi police were found burned inside their vehicles near a Sunni mosque. The deaths included three journalists working for Al-Arabiya television.

There will never come a point where the U.S. military will be able to bring any reasonable political balance there and they shouldn't be expected to. They are designed to fight wars and defend our homeland against invasion or disaster, not iron out the intricacies of Iraqi politics and sectarian rivalry. Those are for Iraqi's to resolve themselves. The sectarian divisions can only be deepened and exaggerated by the heavy hand of our military occupation.

They want us to believe that the forces they are training (the ones that the politicians want to 'take control' of Iraq if we ever withdraw), will be some sort of beacon of democracy, but the reality is that there will always be a sect in Iraq who will be locked out of power and they will always be at the mercy of the ruling party's forces.

Our soldiers are now mercenaries of a supposedly independent government - Bush crowed the other day that Iraq's now a sovereign nation. "In less than three years," Bush claimed, the nation of Iraq has gone from living under the boot of a brutal tyrant to liberation, to sovereignty . . ."

"Our strategy in Iraq is, as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down." he said. Troop levels on the ground will be decided by commanders on the ground -- not by politicians in Washington, D.C." (Applause.)

Yet, these soldiers, and the Iraqis under their guns, are clearly at the point of Washington's politics. They were likely optimistic and hopeful that the elections signaled a turning point in the occupation. They probably expected, and may have seen for a time, that optimism and hope in the faces and attitudes of the folks around them.

Unfortunately, there will be more political and military meddling, fueling more violence directed at the symbols of the sponsors of the ruling authority, our soldiers. Until Bush can find his way into his next brawl with Iran or Syria, Iraq will remain the deliberate, jingoistic symbol of Bush's paranoid fear.

Bush's cohort, Blair, admitted that the assault on Baghdad was essentially a muscle-flexing exercise. They thought Iraq would be a cakewalk (the hunt for bin Laden was a bust) so they loaded up our national pride and covered all of us with Iraqi blood to go with the blood of innocent Afghans caught in our swaggering reprisal. Tens of thousands of innocents, in Iraq and Afghanistan have been killed by our cluster bombs, our search and destroy missions, and by the misguided hands of our nervous soldiers so that Blair and Bush could "draw a line in the sand" like bullies in front of a crowd.

So the numbers of bystanders slaughtered by our aggression quickly outpaced the numbers killed in the 9-11 attack, but that wasn't enough to satiate the fear of Blair and Bush. And they seem shocked (as bullies often are) at the lack of fear from those they sought to dominate with their violence. And their enemies multiplied. More shock. And their critics multiplied. More shock.

Yet, Bush pushed on, mesmerized by his own hypocritical rhetoric about freedom and democracy. It's more than clear to all in the Middle East that his rhetoric masks the bloody reality that the U.S., under Bush's leadership, has become the type of oppressor that all the suffering people around the world fear. According to our own military and intelligence operatives, our presence in Iraq is having the effect of creating more enemies and resistance to the U.S. than can be countered by any new recruits or any new Iraqi government intuitive sponsored or propped up by our heavy-handed military forces and their war of aggression against all who would resist our occupying army.

A military force, our military force is designed primarily to fight and win wars. Not that they don't do peacekeeping well. American compassion and generosity are reflected in many of the actions of our soldiers, most noticeably in their dedication to humanitarian pursuits like medical care, rebuilding schools, providing food and housing, and other instigations of the representatives of a prosperous nation.

But, there is great resentment among many in the Iraqi population that won't be assuaged by chocolates, bandages, or raising roofs. Bush has pulled the plug on those projects anyway. Our soldiers shouldn't be put at the point of such a murky policy of intentions in Iraq. Our military is the inevitable arm of an authority engaged in active armed conflict with Iraqis in opposition to their propped up regime. Americans don't know who our soldiers are being asked to kill and who they are dying for. That shouldn't be a secret anymore. Bush shouldn't be allowed to escape accountability by labeling everyone who gets slaughtered with our soldier's help and support, evil insurgents.

We know that Bush wants to use the troops for anything that keeps them in place for future meddling They're his protection racket for the oil that we're 'holding for the Iraqis. They're his personal prop for victory speeches. They're his hired muscle in hell's kitchen, waiting for a new contract.

But, they are also our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, waiting for some rationality to their mission . . . and a ticket home. Our leaders should spell out just what they expect our soldiers to do in Iraq that is in tune with our own values and democratic principles. To ask them to defend anything less is a tyranny of our nation's leadership in Washington and in Foggy Bottom

Ron Fullwood, bigtree_75@msn.com is an activist from Columbia, Md. and the author of the book 'Power of Mischief : Military Industry Executives are Making Bush Policy and the Country is Paying the Price'

There, while grasping a metal rail with his left hand, McCoy takes a step and winces; he repeats the move a few times, catches his breath and reverses the path backward.
His physical trainer jokes about learning how to ride bulls; McCoy wishes he could teach him.
Back in his room, a once-sterile white-on-white rectangle that now looks like a college dorm, his first move is to take off a New York Yankees cap. He's not a fan; it was a gift from two widows of the 2001 terrorist attacks and he wears

At a Washington hospital, Sgt. Daniel Gubler, 37, originally from La Verkin, shows where his arm was amputated. (Peter Lockley/Special to The Salt Lake Tribune)
it in remembrance. He dons his signature black, wide-brimmed cowboy hat.
It was hard to depart for war, he says, leaving his parents and younger siblings and worst of all, his 18-year-old fiancée, Emily, whom he married while on leave in October. McCoy would introduce her to a visitor, but he doesn't know where she is at the moment. He later learns she was under the blankets in the bed, dead asleep until almost noon.
Joining the Guard wasn't about the money to go to college or even a peer pressure thing to McCoy, he says as he leaves his hospital room to check out his new living quarters, a red-brick home shared by several other families. He's become quite adept at maneuvering his electric wheelchair.
Becoming a soldier wasn't a huge family priority, though it was somewhat of a legacy with a grandfather and uncles splitting service in the Navy, Air Force and Marines.
McCoy filled out the remaining branch, signing up for the Army National Guard.
"I really can't tell you where it came from," he says of his patriotic leaning. "Saying the Pledge of Allegiance always just meant more to me."
McCoy entered Iraq with his 222nd Field Artillery Unit last June. In January, the soldiers in his headquarters company were patrolling around Ramadi Ð the "Wild, Wild West."
There are no bulls to ride there.
"There's lots of donkeys, though," McCoy quips, but no Iraqi rodeos.
On Jan. 4, McCoy and his guys were dispatched to help protect a recruiting station for Iraqi police officers at a glass factory. At least a thousand people were already lined up when he arrived at 7:30 a.m. It was Day Four of a four-day operation. And it would be McCoy's last day on patrol.
Later in the morning, a military K-9 dog started growling at an Iraqi. Then the guy pushed the trigger of a bomb concealed under this clothing.
Two explosions ripped through the crowd, killing some 60 Iraqis and injuring about the same. Two U.S. soldiers were killed. McCoy, some 15 yards away, was thrown back, blood and guts strewn across his belly.
"As far as you could see there were dead people and body parts," McCoy says. "I thought I'd been blown up from the waist down. I was just like, 'Son of a bitch,' I thought I was done."
His

# Survivors: Wounded in Iraq

legs were still there, but his left femur was snapped in three places and felt like gelatin. Ball bearings from the bomb had shot through his right hand and peppered his face. Somehow, a bullet from an Iraqi guard's AK-47 hit him in the left shoulder. The guts covering him were not his own, it turns out, but from a dead body on top of him.
"I thought there was absolutely no way I was going to live," McCoy says now. "All I could think about was my wife."
His friend Johnny Humphries hovered over his body.
"I told him, 'Tell my wife that I love her,' " McCoy recalls, now tipping his hat down to cover his face.
"You're going to tell her yourself," Humphries responded.
"I thought, 'Bullshit. There's no way,' " McCoy says.
But he does get to tell her.
Thousands of miles away and a month withdrawn, McCoy pulls out a can of Copenhagen and talks about his friends Humphries, Zane Williams and Lyle Gardner.
"Them guys are heroes," McCoy says. "They saved my life."
McCoy says he doesn't want to get into the politics of the war but he does believe, "we're overstaying our welcome."
"We're trying to do good things, trying to help them," he says, "and those people hate us. You can only do so much."
And he thinks about his injuries and how it will affect his life.
"My life will never be the same. [But] that sacrifice to me is worth it. It's worth it to protect my guys."
The rest of his life won't be as easy as he once thought. Still, he adds, "I'm not going to let this stop me from living my dream."
He has friends who are soliciting lumber and home supply companies to donate materials to help build a home in Scipio.
He has a good friend, Sonny Murphy, of Herriman, a bull rider who's pretty good on the rodeo circuit.
"Hopefully," McCoy says, "he'll be a world champion for me."

'I still have a life; I still have options'
Thrown some 30 to 90 feet, Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Gubler knew the homemade bomb had taken his left arm. His vision was gone too, replaced with white flashes.

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But that didn't stop him from shouting orders to his soldiers.
"I started to scream at them to get security out," Gubler recalls, at the time fearing an ambush by insurgents. "It set me at ease to do something, not just sit there and be hurt."
Months later, Gubler, a native of La Verkin, is learning how to use his shoulder muscles to move a prosthetic arm; it's one that can include a cosmetic hand, a hook or even a paddle for swimming.
Things are different now.
"I'm doing well, but it's not always been like that," Gubler says, his open shirt sleeve dangling over the remaining stump on his left arm and a black patch over his right eye. "You think about what was and how it's going to be."
The worst, he says, is how frustrating it is to wait for the injuries to heal. Especially for the robust, get-it-done type of guy Gubler is. You get a sense from talking to him for a few minutes that he'd rather be at home or working or doing something, anything but sit in a chair and talk about the past.
"I still have a life; I still have options," Gubler says, taking the positive look that he says has helped him pass the days holed up at Walter Reed Medical Center. His wife, Robalyn, is there as well, but the couple's four kids are at their new home in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Back home, Gubler was a general contractor for commercial buildings; it's a job that will be tough to do without his natural arm. The new plan is to go back to school to finish that engineering degree Gubler started at Dixie State College in St. George, where he met his wife. His children understand, he says. Except maybe for 3-year-old Kaleb. When the child first saw his dad missing an arm, Kaleb asked what happened.
"I lost it in Iraq," Dad told him.
"Well, let's go find it," the son responded.
Gubler had always wanted to be a pilot. But when he couldn't get in the full-time military because of a minor juvenile record, he entered the Utah National Guard instead, hoping to end up flying. He never did. Or will.
At dusk Nov. 16, Gubler and his soldiers were sent to patrol a section of a road going to Ramadi when they came upon a 5-gallon drum in the roadway. It was staged, the soldiers were sure, and they shot at it from a distance to see if


it was a bomb. Assured it wasn't, they approached and found just an empty can.
But a few yards away, there was a small section of a Humvee hood, an older piece of metal from a blown-up military vehicle, just sitting off the side of the road. Gubler went to check it out. On first glance, there was nothing under the metal.
But, "I just had a feeling there was something there," Gubler recalls.
There was.
Gubler was 2 1/2 feet from the buried explosive device; it had a kill range of 50 meters.
He never lost consciousness, even after the explosion blew him far away. He landed on his arm, or what was left of it. That's when he yelled to his troops to prepare for small-arms fire from insurgents; none came. Other soldiers came to his rescue. Zane Bybee of Cedar City applied a tourniquet.
"I was telling jokes with the guys," Gubler recalls, forgetting now what the jokes were, only that they were self-deprecating.
Months later, Gubler says maybe he should have done something different Nov. 16; maybe he should have approached the bomb differently or shot it first. But he has accepted his new life.
"I don't look back and wish it didn't happen," he says.
Gubler's religion - he's a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - is important to him, but he doesn't want to talk about it much.
"I have a lot of faith and that's what helped me in the tough times here," Gubler says, ending questions about religion right there.

Doctors say Gubler will be able to see clearly again out of both eyes; right now, he sees blurry out of his left eye and the right eye needs more time to heal. His new arm is made in Utah. It's called a myoelectric prosthetic for its use of natural muscle and electronics to operate.
Gubler must learn how to control his muscles in his remaining shoulder so they can send electronic impulses causing the elbow and device to move.

For now, Gubler is focused on what will be, not what has been.

Anything else? he is asked.
"Life's great," he answers. "Life's good. Life's a great thing."
"I think we'll be all right," Robalyn adds.
"We will," he says.

John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

Much of the statistical information provided to Mr Pace and his team comes from the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute, which is located next to the city's mortuary. He said figures show that last July the morgue alone received 1,100 bodies, about 900 of which bore evidence of torture or summary execution. The pattern prevailed throughout the year until December, when the number dropped to 780 bodies, about 400 of which had gunshot or torture wounds.

"It's being done by anyone who wishes to wipe out anybody else for various reasons," said Mr Pace, who worked for the UN for more than 40 years in countries ranging from Liberia to Chile. "But the bulk are attributed to the agents of the Ministry of the Interior."

Coupled with the suicide bombings and attacks on Shia holy places carried out by Sunnis, some of whom are followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qa'ida's leader in Iraq, the activities of the death squads are pushing Iraq ever closer to a sectarian civil war.

Mr Pace said the Ministry of the Interior was "acting as a rogue element within the government". It is controlled by the main Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri); the Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, is a former leader of Sciri's Badr Brigade militia, which is one of the main groups accused of carrying out sectarian killings. Another is the Mehdi Army of the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is part of the Shia coalition seeking to form a government after winning the mid-December election.

Many of the 110,000 policemen and police commandos under the ministry's control are suspected of being former members of the Badr Brigade. Not only counter-insurgency units such as the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpions and the Tigers, but the commandos and even the highway patrol police have been accused of acting as death squads.

The paramilitary commandos, dressed in garish camouflage uniforms and driving around in pick-up trucks, are dreaded in Sunni neighbourhoods. People whom they have openly arrested have frequently been found dead several days later, with their bodies bearing obvious marks of torture.

Mr Pace, a Maltese-Australian who has now retired from his UN post to his home in Sydney, says the constant violence and utter lack of security in Iraq are creating a vicious circle in which ordinary citizens are turning to extremist sectarian groups for protection. Fear of anybody in official uniform inevitably strengthens the militias and the insurgents. In Sunni areas people will look to their own defences, and not to the regular army and police.

But ordinary Sunnis are caught between the death squads and the desire of some of the insurgents on their own side to start a civil war - an aim they are now not far from achieving. The so-called Salafi, Sunni fundamentalists, want not only to eject the Americans but also to build a pure Islamic state. They see Iraqi Shias, even though they are 60 per cent of the population, as heretics allied to the US who should be slaughtered.

Last week's attack on the Golden Mosque is only the latest in a long series of outrages against the Shia community. They started in August 2003 when Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, then leader of Sciri, was killed, along with more than 100 of his followers by a suicide bomber in a vehicle outside the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. There have been repeated massacres of the Shia ever since - some targeting the security forces, such as the attacks on queues of young men trying to join the police or army, but others, such as the slaughter of Shia day labourers waiting for a day's employment, for no other reason than that they are Shia.

Despite extending a 24-hour curfew into a second day yesterday in Baghdad and other major cities, the authorities were unable to prevent further revenge killings and outrages against holy sites. The current cycle of violence, which began with the bombing of the Azkariya shrine in Samarra on Wednesday, has claimed at least 200 lives so far, including those of 47 factory workers pulled from buses and shot on the outskirts of Baghdad.

This was the sort of killing that touched off Lebanon's civil war in 1975. Already an exchange of populations is taking place in Baghdad as members of each community move to districts in which they are in the majority.

The ability of the US occupiers to influence the situation is not only limited, but some of their actions are seen as making things worse. The Americans have been trying to dislodge Mr Jabr as Interior Minister, accusing him of turning his ministry into a Shia bastion. But the Shia believe that the US and its allies, the Kurds, simply want to prevent the majority community from gaining full power over security despite winning two parliamentary elections in 2005.

One important development over the past few days is that it is clearly becoming very difficult to use American or British troops to keep the peace, undermining the argument that they are the only bulwark against civil war. The occupation forces lack the legitimacy to play the role of UN peacekeepers; it is almost impossible to have US soldiers defend a Sunni mosque against a Shia crowd, because if they open fire they will be seen as having joined one side in a sectarian struggle.

In Mr Pace's view, the violence in Iraq is being made worse by the seizing of young Iraqi men by US troops and Iraqi police as they move from city to city carrying out raids. "The vast majority are innocent," he said, "but they very often don't get released for months. You don't eliminate terrorism by what they're doing now. Military intervention causes serious human rights and humanitarian problems to large numbers of innocent civilians ... The result is that such individuals turn into terrorists at the end of their detention."

In such circumstances, family members often contacted UN officials asking for help in getting a young man outside of the country and away from the influence of insurgents they had met in jail. They were among many Iraqi citizens fleeing the country as a result of the violence. "Those with money go to Jordan. The poor go to Syria," he said.

Mr Pace, who first made his comments to The Times of Malta newspaper, said the situation in Iraq had "definitely, definitely" got worse over the two years in which he headed the UN human rights team. The interim government and the international community were trying to restart the country's crippled economy, but, he said, they would not succeed "until people are secure".

THE KILLERS

BADR BRIGADE:

Armed wing of the most powerful Shia party. Many police and paramilitaries 'still wear Badr T-shirts under their uniform,' a US general said.

MEHDI ARMY:

Loyal to the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Apart from open clashes with Sunnis, its members in the police are accused of death squad killings.

DEFENDERS OF KHADAMIYA:

Followers of Hussein al-Sadr, Moqtada relative. Among forces set up to guard Shia shrines, but having more sinister links.

SPECIAL POLICE

COMMANDOS:

Feared by Sunnis, despite having had some Sunni commanders.

Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.

John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

Much of the statistical information provided to Mr Pace and his team comes from the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute, which is located next to the city's mortuary. He said figures show that last July the morgue alone received 1,100 bodies, about 900 of which bore evidence of torture or summary execution. The pattern prevailed throughout the year until December, when the number dropped to 780 bodies, about 400 of which had gunshot or torture wounds.

"It's being done by anyone who wishes to wipe out anybody else for various reasons," said Mr Pace, who worked for the UN for more than 40 years in countries ranging from Liberia to Chile. "But the bulk are attributed to the agents of the Ministry of the Interior."

Coupled with the suicide bombings and attacks on Shia holy places carried out by Sunnis, some of whom are followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qa'ida's leader in Iraq, the activities of the death squads are pushing Iraq ever closer to a sectarian civil war.

Mr Pace said the Ministry of the Interior was "acting as a rogue element within the government". It is controlled by the main Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri); the Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, is a former leader of Sciri's Badr Brigade militia, which is one of the main groups accused of carrying out sectarian killings. Another is the Mehdi Army of the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is part of the Shia coalition seeking to form a government after winning the mid-December election.

Many of the 110,000 policemen and police commandos under the ministry's control are suspected of being former members of the Badr Brigade. Not only counter-insurgency units such as the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpions and the Tigers, but the commandos and even the highway patrol police have been accused of acting as death squads.

The paramilitary commandos, dressed in garish camouflage uniforms and driving around in pick-up trucks, are dreaded in Sunni neighbourhoods. People whom they have openly arrested have frequently been found dead several days later, with their bodies bearing obvious marks of torture.

Mr Pace, a Maltese-Australian who has now retired from his UN post to his home in Sydney, says the constant violence and utter lack of security in Iraq are creating a vicious circle in which ordinary citizens are turning to extremist sectarian groups for protection. Fear of anybody in official uniform inevitably strengthens the militias and the insurgents. In Sunni areas people will look to their own defences, and not to the regular army and police.

But ordinary Sunnis are caught between the death squads and the desire of some of the insurgents on their own side to start a civil war - an aim they are now not far from achieving. The so-called Salafi, Sunni fundamentalists, want not only to eject the Americans but also to build a pure Islamic state. They see Iraqi Shias, even though they are 60 per cent of the population, as heretics allied to the US who should be slaughtered.

Last week's attack on the Golden Mosque is only the latest in a long series of outrages against the Shia community. They started in August 2003 when Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, then leader of Sciri, was killed, along with more than 100 of his followers by a suicide bomber in a vehicle outside the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. There have been repeated massacres of the Shia ever since - some targeting the security forces, such as the attacks on queues of young men trying to join the police or army, but others, such as the slaughter of Shia day labourers waiting for a day's employment, for no other reason than that they are Shia.

Despite extending a 24-hour curfew into a second day yesterday in Baghdad and other major cities, the authorities were unable to prevent further revenge killings and outrages against holy sites. The current cycle of violence, which began with the bombing of the Azkariya shrine in Samarra on Wednesday, has claimed at least 200 lives so far, including those of 47 factory workers pulled from buses and shot on the outskirts of Baghdad.

This was the sort of killing that touched off Lebanon's civil war in 1975. Already an exchange of populations is taking place in Baghdad as members of each community move to districts in which they are in the majority.

The ability of the US occupiers to influence the situation is not only limited, but some of their actions are seen as making things worse. The Americans have been trying to dislodge Mr Jabr as Interior Minister, accusing him of turning his ministry into a Shia bastion. But the Shia believe that the US and its allies, the Kurds, simply want to prevent the majority community from gaining full power over security despite winning two parliamentary elections in 2005.

One important development over the past few days is that it is clearly becoming very difficult to use American or British troops to keep the peace, undermining the argument that they are the only bulwark against civil war. The occupation forces lack the legitimacy to play the role of UN peacekeepers; it is almost impossible to have US soldiers defend a Sunni mosque against a Shia crowd, because if they open fire they will be seen as having joined one side in a sectarian struggle.

In Mr Pace's view, the violence in Iraq is being made worse by the seizing of young Iraqi men by US troops and Iraqi police as they move from city to city carrying out raids. "The vast majority are innocent," he said, "but they very often don't get released for months. You don't eliminate terrorism by what they're doing now. Military intervention causes serious human rights and humanitarian problems to large numbers of innocent civilians ... The result is that such individuals turn into terrorists at the end of their detention."

In such circumstances, family members often contacted UN officials asking for help in getting a young man outside of the country and away from the influence of insurgents they had met in jail. They were among many Iraqi citizens fleeing the country as a result of the violence. "Those with money go to Jordan. The poor go to Syria," he said.

Mr Pace, who first made his comments to The Times of Malta newspaper, said the situation in Iraq had "definitely, definitely" got worse over the two years in which he headed the UN human rights team. The interim government and the international community were trying to restart the country's crippled economy, but, he said, they would not succeed "until people are secure".

Kishkovsky is the rector of Our Lady of Kazan Church in Sea Cliff, New York, and is an officer in the Orthodox Church of America.

Taking an unusual stand among U.S. Christian leaders, the United States Conference for the World Council of Churches (WCC) criticised Pres. George W. Bush's actions in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"We are citizens of a nation that has done much in these years to endanger the human family and to abuse the creation," says the statement endorsed by the most prominent Protestant Christian churches on the Council.

"Our leaders turned a deaf ear to the voices of church leaders throughout our nation and the world, entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of our own national interests. Nations have been demonised and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous."

The message, written like a prayer of repentance and backed by the 34 Christian churches that belong to the WCC, mourns those who have died or been injured in the Iraq war and says, "We confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to deter our leaders from this path of preemptive war."

Among the attendees was the Rev. Bernice Powell-Jackson, North American President of the World Council of Churches. A civil rights activist for more than 25 years, Jackson previously served as executive director of one of the Justice and Witness Ministries predecessor bodies, the Commission for Racial Justice.

The U.S. Conference of the WCC also criticised the government's position on global warming. "The rivers, oceans, lakes, rainforests, and wetlands that sustain us, even the air we breathe continue to be violated... Yet our own country refuses to acknowledge its complicity and rejects multilateral agreements aimed at reversing disastrous trends," reads the message.

Earlier this month, a group of more than 85 U.S. evangelical Christian leaders called on Congress to enact legislation that would reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, which most scientists believe contribute to global warming.

The U.S. Conference of the WCC message also said, "Starvation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the treatable diseases that go untreated indict us, revealing the grim features of global economic injustice we have too often failed to acknowledge or confront."

"Hurricane Katrina," it continues, "revealed to the world those left behind in our own nation by the rupture of our social contract. As a nation we have refused to confront the racism that infects our policies around the world."

The statement comes days after the National Council of Churches (NCC), the United States chapter of the WCC, endorsed a U.N. report on the situation of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

Separately, in a letter addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, NCC General Secretary Robert W. Edgar called on the U.S. to bring the detainees to trial, release them, or to "close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility without further delay". It also asked Rice for access to the Guantanamo facility "to monitor the physical, spiritual and mental conditions of the detainees".

At the Brazilian conference, the Rev. John Thomas, president of United Church of Christ, was quoted as saying: "An emerging theme in conversation with our partners around the world is that the U.S. is being perceived as a dangerous nation."

He called the Assembly "a unique opportunity to make this statement to all our colleagues" in the ecumenical movement. The statement says, "We come to you seeking to be partners in the search for unity and justice."

Thomas acknowledged that not all church members would agree with the thrust of the statement, but said it was their responsibility as leaders to "speak a prophetic and pastoral word as we believe God is offering it to us".

The final WCC event featured a candlelit march for peace through downtown Porto Alegre with up to 2,000 people -- including two Nobel Prize-winners -- taking part.

Organised by local churches as part of the World Council of Churches' Decade to Overcome Violence, it was accompanied by Latin American music from Xico Esvael and Victor Heredia. Young people carried banners highlighting peace and justice issues. One, depicting the world held in God's hand, read "Let God change you first, then you will transform the world."

WCC president Powell-Jackson urged the crowd to commit themselves to overcoming violence. Prawate Khid-arn of the Christian Conference of Asia told them, "If we do not take the risk of peace, we will have to take the risk of war."

Israel Batista of the Latin American Council of Churches spoke of poverty, injustice and abuse of women and children and asked, "How are we to speak of peace?" Still, he said, "In spite of violence, we will persist in the struggle for peace."

After an address by Julia Qusibert, a Bolivian indigenous Christian, the marchers sang the Samba of the Struggle for Peace and the Taizé chant Ubi Caritas, among other songs. The march paused while Nobel prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel improvised a poem and addressed the crowd at the Esquina Democrática or Democratic Corner.

The evening was brought to a climax with an address by the second Nobel Prize-winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He began his impassioned speech by saying, "We have an extraordinary God. God is a mighty God, but this God needs you. When someone is hungry, bread doesn't come down from heaven. When God wants to feed the hungry, you and I must feed the hungry. And now God wants peace in the world."

The WCC is the largest Christian ecumenical organisation, comprised of 340 Christian denominations and churches in 120 countries, and said to represent 550 million Christians throughout the world. The U.S. Conference of the World Council of Churches alone represents 34 Christian churches, including Orthodox, Evangelical, Lutheran and Anglican churches, and four million members throughout the country.

The Roman Catholic Church is not a member of the WCC but has worked closely with the Council in the past. Since its origins in 1948, the WCC gathers in an Assembly every seven years with each member church sending a delegate.