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No Answers Yet on Disputed Iraq Raid
By Borzou Daragahi
The Los Angeles Times
Sunday 16 April 2006
Officials say they freed a hostage and killed 16 gunmen at a Baghdad site, but locals say it was a mosque and those slain unarmed worshipers.
Baghdad - When U.S. and Iraqi officials received a tip late March that a hostage was going to be killed that night at a criminal hide-out in northern Baghdad they had under surveillance, they decided they had to act.
When the raid was over, the United States thought it had scored an unqualified triumph, backing a special unit of Iraqi soldiers who freed the hostage and killed 16 gunmen.
But minutes after the March 26 incident, Iraq's state-controlled television broadcast a vastly different account: U.S. and Iraqi forces had raided a Shiite Muslim house of worship and brutally killed and wounded innocent people gathered for prayer.
The incident became a public relations disaster for the U.S. and further soured the increasingly strained relations between Americans and Iraq's majority sect.
The parties involved - the gunmen, victims, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers - have proved hard to trace, and efforts to uncover what really happened at the Mustafa hussainiya often raise more questions than answers.
For instance, after monitoring the site for weeks, how could U.S. and Iraqi officials have not known that at least part of the building served as a hussainiya, a Shiite house of worship considered slightly less formal than a mosque? Who, exactly, were the Iraqi Special Forces who carried out the raid? And were the kidnappers using worshipers as cover for their criminal activities?
Iraqi and U.S. forces say their intelligence led them to understand that the single-story building was being used by Shiite Muslim militias or one of the leading Shiite parties.
"According to what we know, they were doing kidnappings to innocent people for ransom," said the Iraqi army unit commander who led the raid, according to a full transcript of a CBS News and Time magazine interview. "If money [was] brought, the person would be free. If no money, the person would be killed."
In addition to the hostage freed March 26, at least one other person has emerged who says he was kidnapped and taken to the Mustafa hussainiya and other locations by gunmen who tortured him.
In a videotaped account recorded by his relatives, a bedridden Raed Mohammed Mashadani, a Sunni Arab, said men in police uniforms kidnapped him in mid-March and demanded $50,000 in ransom.
When relatives came to pay the ransom, Mashadani said, they were kidnapped too.
He said they were taken to a garbage dump, lined up and shot by men wearing police uniforms who left them for dead. His relatives were killed, but despite four bullets to his torso, he said, he managed to crawl for help.
He said he was sure his kidnappers took him to the Mustafa compound.
"I saw it was the Mustafa hussainiya with my own eyes," he says in the videotape. "I've been living in this neighborhood, and I know it well."
The hostage freed during the March 26 raid, a Health Ministry dental technician in his 30s, finished his work at a clinic in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood that morning and was heading home when he was abducted by several people claiming to belong to the Interior Ministry's intelligence branch, according to a transcript of an interview he gave Western media.
The men covered his head and handcuffed him before putting him into a car.
Once at the Mustafa compound, they began beating him, he said. They menaced him with a saw and a drill, pressing the tools to his flesh. He said they asked him, "Do you know what this is?"
They demanded $20,000, and finding a picture of his daughter in his wallet, they vowed that he'd never see her again unless he came up with the money.
Sunni political groups have said that many kidnappings by Shiite militiamen with ties to security forces have been traced to the area around Mustafa, but no one has been able to pinpoint their headquarters.
According to classified materials that U.S. military officials showed to the Los Angeles Times, in addition to the report of a hostage being held, they had surveillance reports of gunmen on nearby rooftops getting into offensive postures when a U.S. patrol would pass and then standing down when it left.
"This is the most deliberate process that you could imagine," said a senior U.S. military official with knowledge of operations throughout the capital. "This isn't a haphazard deal. This particular site was not on any restricted target list, or do-not-touch list."
But despite the intelligence, the U.S. and Iraqi forces failed to learn what every resident in the area knows. The building, once a grammar school before it was turned into a Baath Party office, had become a Shiite house of worship after the 2003 invasion.
Anatomy of a Raid
When they learned a hostage's life was in danger, two battalions of the 1st Iraqi Special Operations Forces Brigade, along with about 25 U.S. advisors, swung into action, pulling into the area about 6:30 p.m.
As soon as they reached the target, the troops said, they came under fire from different directions, from inside the building as well as a nearby structure, the commander said. A gun battle raged. "The bad guys fired first," the commander said.
"We definitely caught them by surprise," said a U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They thought it was a standard patrol at first." Helicopters hovered overhead and troops encircled the area as the unit shot its way through the brown gate of the compound.
The Mustafa hussainiya consists of a large rectangular courtyard surrounded by a series of rooms, each with doors to the courtyard. U.S. and Iraqi forces said gunmen emerged, firing at them.
The troops found the hostage in one of the rooms. "I started shouting, 'I'm the kidnapped! I'm the kidnapped employee!' " the hostage recalled.
But residents of Mustafa and its neighbors give a starkly different account of the raid. Only one man in the compound was armed, said Adel Abdul-Hassan Zareji, the mosque's 34-year-old deputy preacher, carrying an AK-47 to protect the worshipers.
"This is the place where we pray," Zareji said. "It's a sacred place, and you can't enter with your shoes. They came in with their boots."
He said the some of the men were ritually washing themselves before prayer at a bank of sinks. He said the soldiers shot people and dragged them into piles; he pointed to bloodstains on the ground where the dead had lain.
"I heard gunshots and then U.S. soldiers and Iraqi soldiers entered the mosque and started shooting at us," said Salam Sibayi, 20, a baker recovering from wounds suffered at Mustafa shortly after the raid. "There were no weapons in here."
But the buildings around Mustafa are pocked with bullet holes, indicating at least some crossfire. The Iraqi commander denied that unarmed people were targeted.
"Our forces follow very restrictive rules," he said. "They are not allowed to open fire against any unarmed person." Once the battle subsided, U.S. and Iraqi officials said, 16 gunmen had been killed and 17 men had been detained. The hostage identified a detainee as one of his kidnappers.
U.S. military officials showed The Times classified documents with photographs of slain gunmen lying in the courtyard, some with weapons next to them, as well as arms caches.
U.S. officials scoffed at the suggestion that only one person was holding a gun in the hussainiya. They said they seized 32 AK-47s, five grenades, four rocket launchers, two heavy machine guns, 12 switches for explosives, body armor, sniper rifles and two cars containing "bomb-making materials." They also found instruments of torture: drills, saws and electrical wires. They saw posters of Shiite political leaders and clerics, badges and identification cards of members of various factions and militias, the Iraqi commander said.
Perplexing Aftermath
But instead of hailing the elimination of a dangerous criminal gang tormenting Iraqi civilians, as officials expected, Iraqi television immediately began broadcasting allegations of a massive U.S. raid on a hussainiya in which members of a governing political party were killed. A maelstrom ensued.
Almost immediately, questions arose about the building itself. Zareji, the preacher, said it was a house of worship and community center, with two of the rooms used as offices of the Islamic Dawa Party. A third room is filled with dusty religious textbooks. During a recent visit to Mustafa, a group of teenage boys, some with wispy beards, milled about the courtyard. Zareji said they were students in his Koranic classes.
"They said this was a factory" for makeshift explosives, Zareji said. "They said this place has an underground prison. We're religious people. I am a teacher of the Koran."
At first, the U.S. and Iraqi commanders denied that the Mustafa building was a house of worship, but soon acknowledged that it might have been used for that purpose. Even the freed hostage said that he heard the afternoon call to prayer.
"Even if it was a mosque, for the Special Forces its holiness would go away once weapons and ammo were found inside or hostages were found inside," the Iraqi commander said.
But the ranking U.S. military official said: "We did not know it was a hussainiya; the Iraqis did not know that. If they had told me that, then I may have said, 'OK, that's a consideration.' "
Soon, questions arose about the Iraqi Special Forces unit that conducted the raid. Many high-level government officials wondered under whose authority the unit operated.
"We will open an investigation into these forces who trained them and who gave them the authority to do all these raids and killings," said Jawad Maliki, a member of the Islamic Dawa Party and among the most powerful figures in the Shiite-led government. "We cannot allow the existence of special forces which are not under the control of the government, supported by the American troops."
Even some U.S. officials were baffled. Gen. George W. Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, and Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli discussed the matter with the Iraqi ministers of Defense and Interior. Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which oversees Baghdad, was reportedly furious.
"Nobody knows who these guys are," said a high-ranking military official who described the meeting, referring to the Iraqi Special Forces unit.
Questions also remain about the identity of the group operating out of the building. The abductions described by the hostages fit the pattern of kidnappings by Shiite militiamen with possible ties to the security forces.
In the past, members of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi militia, as well as the more mainstream cleric Abdelaziz Hakim's Badr Brigade, have been accused of engaging in such criminal activity under the cover of official security forces. Neighbors say the Mustafa compound was a regular haunt of some Al Mahdi members. But the Islamic Dawa Party, which had an office in the building, has no militia.
Despite the extensive intelligence the U.S. military and Iraqi forces gathered before the raid, officials say they are "still developing" information on these people.
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Times staff writer Solomon Moore contributed to this report.
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