Index: "New" Iraq

Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell, and Iraqi men and women are no longer carried to torture chambers and rape rooms ...

-- Bush, 2004

The promise of a new Iraq free from human rights abuse was hard to argue with, even for those of us who opposed the invasion. Unfortunately, this promise to the Iraqi people has been broken. Now the Ministry of Interior and its paramilitary police commandos like the Wolf Brigade regularly abduct, torture, and murder Iraqis. The old patterns are reestablishing themselves.

The American public were given an opporunity to avert this crisis during the Abu Ghraib scandal. But instead of taking a firm stand against torture, they chose to disregard it as "a few bad apples" and "hazing". Because of their negligence, the problem has spread. Initially the Ministry under Allawi worked in concert with the US military, or while US forces looked on in approval. Now the structure has grown its own connections with militias, feeding and feeding off the sectarian violence, increasing the threat of full-blown civil war.

• 03-2006: 3/4 Baghdad morgue deliveries executions, often tortured first
• 02-2006: Grievances fuelling insurgency
• 02-2006: Torture strengthens insurgency
• 11-2005: Allawi: "same as Saddam's time"
• 11-2005: 173 prisoners found tortured by Iraqi Interior Ministry
• 11-2005: Photos from Haj Ali
• 09-2005: UN raises concerns over killings, torture by Iraqi govt
• 09-2005: Fallujah protests arrest of woman alleged to be Zarqawi's daughter
• 09-2005: International human rights removed from Iraqi constitution
• 08-2005: Video of 20 men tortured by Iraqi Interior Ministry
• 07-2005: Iraqis protest torture by new govt, poor reporting
• 07-2005: Iraqi police using torture
• 07-2005: Sunni official alleges firing because of opposition to torture
• 07-2005: Iraq's govt admits security forces use torture
• 07-2005: New Iraqi govt using torture
• 06-2005: Detainment of Arabs and Turkmen by Kurdish political parties
• 06-2005: 10,000 Iraqi prisoners
• 05-2005: Incident: Ministry of Interior tortures Ali with electricity, collective punishment
• 03-2005: 10,000 Iraqis in detention
• 01-2005: HRW: Torture and ill-treatment of Iraqi detainees
• 08-2004: Media: Minister of Interior proudly announces large numbers of individuals captured
• 08-2004: Incident: Group of 4 Iraqi men arrested, beaten, tortured
• 08-2004: Incident: Shahid detained by police at al-Najaf, interrogated, beaten
• 07-2004: Incident: Group of 5 Iraqi men arrested, beaten, tortured