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| Staff Lieutenant General Mahdi Al Gharawi. (Photo by US Army) |
ISIS’s success in Mosul could have something to do with the Iraqi government putting a general accused of carrying out systematic torture in charge of the city’s security.
The top Iraqi officer in Mosul, whose forces fled with hardly a fight as ISIS militants and their allies took over Iraq’s second-largest city, is an accused torturer who was once targeted by the U.S. military and the Iraqi criminal justice system.
That fact may help explain why the Iraqi security forces abandoned the city despite their superior arms and numbers and why large elements of Mosul’s Sunni population seemed to welcome a group as notoriously brutal as ISIS. Most importantly, it explains much of the hostility and distrust Iraq’s Sunni population feels toward the government in Baghdad, and why, at this stage, the reunification of Iraq will be so difficult to achieve.
Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri Al Maliki fired Staff Lieutenant General Mahdi Al Gharawi, relieving him of command of Nineveh province, the area where Mosul is located that is now largely under ISIS control. The prime minister also ordered that the general and his immediate subordinates face criminal charges for abandoning their posts. It’s a strange turn, because it was Maliki who decided to appoint Al Gharawi to the position in the first place over the strenuous objections of U.S. advisers and the Iraqi justice system.
After being investigated for years, Al Gharawi was charged by an Iraqi court in 2008, accused of running secret prisons and systematically torturing detainees when he was commander of the 2nd National Police Division in Baghdad. According to testimony collected from Al Gharawi’s victims and from officers who had served under him, “he ordered savage beatings and watched as interrogators brutalized detainees.” As Time Magazine reported in 2008, “some witnesses told the task force that Al Gharawi personally took part in torture in other instances.”
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