Who Is Iyad Allawi?

Iyad Allawi was born in the fashionable area of Karada in Baghdad in 1944, an address to which his family had moved from Hilla in southern Iraq near the turn of the 20th century.

The family originally hailed from Western Lauristan in Iran, a province from where many shia Kurdish families emigrated to Iraq for religious, ethnic and economic reasons. Still other families came with invading Iranian armies and stayed on. They had the best of both worlds as their Iranian citizenship shielded them from any oppressive policies of the Ottoman state and exempted them from service in the Ottoman army, according to a treaty between the Sublime Porte and the Saffavid state. But in early 1930, not too long after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the dean of the Allawi family, Ja'far, approached the newly British-installed King Faisal I of the newly British-created state of Iraq with a plea: in return for Iraqi citizenship, he would pledge total allegiance to the Hashemite court of Faisal I (and so, indirectly, service to the interests of the British Empire). For an unpopular monarch with little in or no local constituency and heavily dependant on British forces for his rule, such offers were easy to accept.

Thus the Allawi family integrated into the social fabric of Iraqi society, straight into the Sa'idi party that dominated political life in Iraq and worked closely with the Royal Palace and British colonial interests.

Allawi's uncle, a medical doctor, AbdelAmir Allawi, was virtually permanent minister of health during the era of the monarchy. (AbdelAmir's son and Iyad's cousin, Ali Allawi, was appointed as minister for both defence and trade and industry by Paul Bremmer during his recent US-installed administration.)

Strong ties link the families of Iyad Allawi, Ahmed Chalabi and Kanaan Makiya, an Iraqi author resident in the US who strongly supported the invasion and was advisor to the US government on the matter. The links extend from the colonial age to modern day banking and corporate dealings.

At the age of seven Iyad entered junior school and from there graduated to Baghdad College, a school for both intermediate and senior levels then run by American Jesuits. Setting up this college was one of the conditions the Iraq government had to accept as part of the treaty to end British dependence and gain nominal independence in 1932. (By the same treaty the US also insisted on 23.75% of Iraqi oil production being channelled through American oil companies. The rest went to Anglo-Dutch Shell.) This neo-colonial era had a profound impact on the youth of the time, polarising and conditioning them in myriad ways.

In 1958 the ancient regime came to a sordid end in a pool of royal blood in the forecourt of the Royal Palace and Iraq was violently thrust into the teeming world of modern Arab politics.

In 1961 Iyad joined the College of Medicine at the University of Baghdad, the same year he joined the Ba'th party. At university Iyad maintained the same level he had at school - a mediocre student who yet displayed acute social ambition with a personal aggressive style. He brought these qualities to his political life, brooking no opposition and showing little patience or tolerance of the old debate that had existed in the party.

Toward the end of 1962 the Ba'th party led a famous politically motivated student strike in Iraq, which it soon after emerged was a premeditated prelude to a military coup. The party had organised the strike in collusion with other political powers and relying on Ba'thist factions in the armed forces. Iyad Allawi, then an undergraduate student at the Baghdad University College of Medicine, was among the Ba'th party enforcers in the strike and broke his leg in one round of confrontations with the political police of Iraq's then ruler, AbdelKarim Qasem.

Iyad was also an active member of the secret organisation known as the National Guard of the Ba'th party, which was entrusted with special missions such as assassinations of key figures in the Qasem regime or senior military officers, paving the way for the upcoming coup. (Saddam Hussein himself, it is remembered, was in the same division of the party and was wounded in a failed assassination attempt on Qasem.)

Dr. Haifa'a Azawi, in an article published in the Los Angeles Times in January 2004 recalls when she too was a student at the Baghdad University College of Medicine in the 1960s and remembers Allawi. She remembers him as someone who had a reputation as a poor student and a thug who used to threaten other students with a handgun he habitually carried. He was also known for sexually harassing girl students. Dr. Azawi claims she herself has specific recollections of experiences of his behaviour that back up Allawi's reputation among the student body at the time.

The Ba'thist supported coup of 8 February 1963 was a success. The party leader, General Ahmed Hassan AlBakr became prime minister and 19-year-old Allawi thereafter appeared on campus in military uniform as one of the leaders of the Ba'th party National Guard, and was in charge of night duty at many of the National Guard's important security posts. Eventually he was in charge at the central security office at the presidential palace where a special interrogations bureau was located, that investigated political forces accused of being opposed to the Ba'thist coup, such as the Iraqi Communist Party, pro-Qasem political organisations and Democratic and Nationalist (pro-Nasser) parties and other smaller political groupings.

At the palace Allawi was known as the "palace doctor" in addition to other, more ominous nicknames. He personally exercised all manner of violence against hundreds of detainees at the many National Guard centres, especially the palace. In particular he targeted his colleagues at the college of medicine.

Specifically, Allawi stands accused of having personally tortured to death
three politically active figures of the time: Mohammed AlWardi, Faisal AlHajaj and Sabah AlMirza, a girl student at the time in the college of medicine. All three were then trade union and political leaders in the Iraqi Communist Party. In addition to their political allegiances, the three were also highly educated, respected individuals from well to do families of some repute. During the few hours when Allawi showed up at the college of medicine, where he was still enrolled, his behaviour, in uniform and with pistol, was tantamount to a renegade police officer in pursuit of any other student who differed with him, either politically or personally. Eventually this was too much even for the Ba'th party and Allawi himself was arrested, at which point he tried to commit suicide.

He was later released as a result of a special personal plea made through family and political channels to AlBakr. Ever since, Allawi's fate has been intimately tied up with AlBakr and his entourage, especially Saddam Hussein, and when the later formed the special "Hanin" security bureau for assassinations and intimidations, Allawi was appointed as one of its key personnel. He went on to faithfully carry out his many missions for Hanin on the Baghdad University campus and in the streets and alleyways of the city.

Toward the end of 1966, and after the then president of Iraq, AbdelSalam Aref, died in an infamous air crash, Allawi and his colleagues in Hanin embarked on a major destabilisation campaign in Iraq, aimed at preventing any kind of unified political leadership from emerging. They pursued non-Ba'thist political activists around the streets of Baghdad and even into their homes. When their victims tried to hit back, Allawi and his Hanin members would take refuge in police stations and claim victimisation.

Finally, on July 17th 1968 Allawi and his colleagues in Hanin had their day when they were instrumental in bringing about the total success of a Ba'thist coup that saw all other political forces in Iraq excluded from power. AlBakr became president and so close was Allawi's relationship with him that he was granted an office in the presidential palace. AlBakr then leant on the then minister of health, Dr. Ezzat Mustafa, to accelerate and approve Allawi's "graduation" from the college of medicine. So "Dr." Allawi came to be.

However, the conflict, or, rather, competition, between Iyad Allawi and Saddam Hussein, who was also a close confidant of AlBakr, now came to the fore. Saddam, who was effectively AlBakr's number two, became seriously suspicious of people like Allawi whom he considered as upstarts trying to run before they could walk and scaling the ladder within the party too quickly.

The solution was to promote Allawi sideways by sending him abroad; specifically to London where he was dispatched nominally as a postgraduate student in medicine, his undergraduate graduation from Baghdad having been rubber-stamped. His real mission was to oversee political and intelligence activities within the Iraqi student and migr community in London and he was given full facilities to do so, including a substantial budget.

So in the 1970s Allawi played spy in London and lived the high life on his lavish allowance. He was escorted by his wife, Dr. Ottoor Dwaishah who was also ostensibly in the UK as a postgraduate student in medicine. But life seemed to be too good in London and Allawi strayed, acting as playboy and tycoon more than spy and researcher. Reports about his behaviour were reaching Baghdad and eventually he was recalled. Knowing he had not exactly fulfilled his mission with glory, he decided instead to switch sides and was recruited by MI6. Orders then went out from Baghdad and in 1978 an attempt was made to assassinate him at his luxurious South Kensington residence. Badly wounded, MI6 shipped him out to a British military hospital in Northern Ireland, where he recuperated for several months under tight security.

Just as his earlier trauma yielded his allegiance to AlBakr, it would appear that this incident sealed Allawi's strong relationship with British intelligence, and after that with American intelligence. But some sources tell a different story, saying his relationship with the Americans in particular predated all this to at least the time when he was an undergraduate at Baghdad University's College of Medicine in the early 1960s. Then and there, it is said, a Jesuit priest from his old school recruited him for the CIA.

Upon returning to Washington his spiritual father, and handler, handed him over to a high level CIA station in Baghdad. According to this version of events, Allawi then naturally established contact with CIA handlers in London when he was sent there and was able to pursue that relationship more openly than he could in Baghdad. But his higher-ranking position in the Ba'th party, which then formed the government in Iraq, now led western intelligence to seek a tighter hold on him. So he was entrapped in some form of financial (or sexual) impropriety in London; the price of his extraction being his total allegiance to CIA/MI6. It was when his superiors in Baghdad heard of this that they ordered his immediate recall. And when he resisted, they ordered his liquidation. Either way, by 1978 Iyad Allawi emerged as a fully-fledged MI6/CIA agent.

(The Arabic word "Ba'th" means renaissance and the party was originally formed by some urbane intellectuals, Michel Aflaq and Salah AlBitar in 1941 as a pan-Arab vehicle for the unity and modernisation of the Arab world. Filling a political near vacuum, it became a victim of its own success, being slowly but surely corrupted as ambitious, ruthless officers and other unruly elements signed on. By the 1960s it was already a parody of its own founding principles and had turned into a vehicle for the personal political ambitions of various individuals. Inevitably the party split on personal lines that were poorly dressed up as ideological. These rivalries also led the party into ill-advised competition with other political movements such as Communism and the pro-Nasser nationalism that was sweeping the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s. Both anti-communism and anti-Nasserism became useful party policies for the US government to exploit. It is no secret that the Americans were keen backers of the Ba'thist coups in Iraq in the 1960s, fearing that else Iraq would come under the sway of Nasser. CIA contacts with the Ba'thists at the time are now well documented. Allawi himself was ruthless, even overzealous, in his pursuit of Communists after the Ba'thist takeover. So an early relationship between him and the CIA is logical or, at least not contradicted by historical logic. One of the first steps the Ba'th party government took upon coming to power in 1968 was closing down Allawi's alma mater, Baghdad College and expelling its American Jesuits. The school had become a colonial holdover viewed as a nest of spies.)

By the time he had recovered from his injuries Allawi had lost both his wife, who had left him, and his contacts with his political party and homeland, who now spurned him as a traitor. Yet thanks to the social circle he had formed in London, where he was allowed to stay courtesy of MI6, he was able to reinvent himself as a businessman. On the side he also started, with extreme caution, a political career.

Iyad Allawi's mother is Lebanese from the reputed Osseyran family. His aunt on his mother's side was a well-known Beirut socialite. She had married a businessman with leftwing leanings, Farouk AlTa'ie who was a personal friend of many prominent Iraqi political figures, both in and out of government. He also had strong relationships with leading figures in politics and media in Beirut, London and Baghdad. The Osseyran family and Mr. AlTa'ie had an open political salon in Baghdad, especially in the Halcyon days of the political alliance between the ruling Ba'th Party and the Iraqi Communist Party from 1972 to 1978. A general flight from Baghdad followed the bitter divorce that ended that alliance with many figures taking refuge in London. Thus this replenished reservoir of family contacts presented a new, further impetus to the then embryonic political activities of Iyad Allawi and his personal ambition; in particular his virulent private vendetta against Saddam Hussein, who had pushed aside AlBakr to become president in 1979.

But Allawi was unable to build a political career for himself in the 1980s because his friends and allies (the UK, US and Arab oil sheikhs) were supporting Saddam Hussein in his desperate war with Iran. Yet that did not stop Allawi from profiting personally from this war, as did other ostensibly anti-Saddam Iraqi exiles like him at the time (Hani Fakiki, Salah Takriti and Ahmed Chalabi). In pursuit of his business he travelled regularly between London, Amman and the oil sheikhdoms, always with special British security protection.

The true nature of some of his activities at the time have recently been exposed when a Yemeni engineer, Abdullah Jash'an filed a $3 million suit for overdue payments against Allawi accusing him of fraud and opening a trading office under false pretences. The suit chronicles that Allawi opened this office in Sana'a purporting to represent the unoriginally named, UK-based, Smith Overseas General Contracting Company, and hired and appointed Jash'an as representative for the US Chevron Oil. The suit alleges the real purpose of the office was intelligence gathering in Yemen. His partner in that venture was his brother, Sabah Allawi, who is currently nominated as Iraqi ambassador to the USA. Latest reports are that the Iraqi embassy in Yemen has approached Jash'an with an offer of payment in return for dropping the suit. Meanwhile Sabah Allawi is now associated with a regional UN development agency and has forged some distinctive relationships with oil states, especially Saudi Arabia. In fact Sabah was the original conduit of communications between his brother Iyad on the one hand, and Jordan and Saudi Arabia on the other.

After the end of the Iraq-Iran war in August 1988 the alliance between the West and Saddam Hussein lost its raison d'tre and in 1989 MI6 re-activated Allawi, instructing him to restart his political activity and establish an overt political organisation opposed to the Baghdad regime, and so the Iraqi National Accord was born.

And Allawi got down to business, contacting some of his former Ba'thist colleagues who had also since fallen out of favour. Chief among them: Salah Omar Takriti, former member of the Revolutionary Command Council and former Minister of Information, Ismail Ghollam, member of the Syrian Ba'th Party Command, Tahseen Mo'ela, a veteran leading Ba'thist, Salah Sheikhly, former governor of the Central Bank of Iraq and Selim Imami, a former Ba'thist military commander.

At about the same time events took a dramatic turn when Iraq invaded Kuwait and Allawi stepped up his activities establishing new contacts with Saudi, Jordan, Turkey, the oil sheikhdoms and Egypt. On January 10th 1991 Iyad Allawi and Salah Takriti secretly visited Cairo and met with Egyptian Foreign Secretary Amru Mousa (currently head of the Arab league). At a series of meetings the basis for a relationship between the Egyptian government and the INA was laid out. All parties agreed at the time they believed the upcoming war on 17th January 1991 would spell the end of the Iraqi regime but the Egyptians could not give Allawi what he wanted, and so he preferred an alliance with the Saudis, who were able to bring on board the Kurdish and Islamic opposition. The deal was sealed at a conference in Beirut in March 1991.

The conference was an abject failure. All its decisions and plans were miscalculated and doomed as Saddam Hussein survived the consequences of defeat. The Kurds then left the alliance and went to Baghdad to do a separate deal with Saddam while Allawi and his INA went to Washington seeking material and logistical support. The dealmaker here was Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi and Allawi have extended family relations. The physician and monarchist minister of health Dr. AbdelAmir Allawi (Iyad's uncle) is married to Chalabi's elder sister; Chalabi himself is married to a lady from the Osseyran family, Allawi's mother's family. In addition both are shia Muslims. Yet the extensive family, religious and business relationships between the two men have created a notorious love-hate relationship. For the tremendous personal ambition they each harbour and the ego of each character effectively preclude any calm balanced cooperation between them. Chalabi considers the Allawis a socially and politically marginal family.

Furthermore, Chalabi has created a political image for himself as an anti-Ba'thist and seems to harbour a genuine personal contempt of all Ba'thists, making it difficult if not impossible for him to forget or forgive Iyad Allawi's career with the party. As far as Chalabi is concerned, Iyad Allawi is a Ba'thist.

However, circumstances, and a common cause made it possible for them to forge a marriage of convenience to overlook their rivalries and personal quirks in their daily activities, for a while. So when Chalabi got together with the Washington neo-cons to create the Iraqi National Congress in July 1992, Allawi had an important role to play.

Allawi had further enhanced his own personal standing in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. After the defeat of the uprising against Saddam Hussein hundreds of people, many Ba'thists who had rebelled, fled and for them, for political and religious purposes, London-based Allawi, a shia Muslim and former Ba'thist, was a natural destination for sanctuary. Notable among these from the military: Faris Haj Hussein, Tawfeeq Yassari, Sa'd Obeidy, Najeeb AlSalhy, Mahdy AlDulaimy, Wafeeq AlSamara'ei and Abdullah Shahwany. From the civilian political side: Arshad Tawfeeq, Hamed Jabouri and Hisham AlShawi. All of these cooperated either with Allawi's INA or Chalabi's INC. But this cooperation soured 1993. In particular Allawi and Takriti fell out after the Americans refused to deal further with Takriti. They were convinced he was among those who supervised public executions of Jews in Baghdad in 1969. (Saudi intelligence, however, continued to deal with Takriti.) So Allawi's INA fractured with Takriti and other members going their own way; founding the Iraqi Democratic Accord.

Allawi continued to work with the CIA throughout the 1990s and escalated his activities. With the help of the Americans he opened an office in northern Iraq and was able to send several car bombs into Baghdad. Among his targets were a school bus, a cinema and a school playground.

In June 2004 the New York Times reported former CIA operative Robert Baer saying that Allawi was inept in these operations, and in addition that he was financially greedy. Baer also doubts the special relationship Allawi claimed to have with Iraqi intelligence. Kenneth Pollack, political analyst and member of the American Foreign Relations Committee is of the opinion that American intelligence maintained contacts with Allawi in their pursuit to overthrow Saddam Hussein following the axiom "send a thief to catch a thief". Samuel Berger, National Security adviser to Bill Clinton, thinks Allawi is neither as active nor as important as Chalabi, and that certain special conditions have pushed Chalabi to the background at present. His opinion is mostly based on the fact that Allawi failed in all missions he was given by the CIA in 1992 - 1995 (but so did Chalabi), despite Allawi's claims that he enjoys widespread contacts within the Shia community as well as the military and civilian infrastructure of Iraq. Berger believes the CIA was not comfortable with Chalabi because of his extreme and overt ambition and they would rather deal with a lesser, more controllable quantity such as Allawi who can never argue or pose a threat.

Allawi's nadir was in 1995 when he failed to bring about a military coup he had been entrusted to organise by the CIA. So spectacular was the fiasco that Iraqi intelligence officers in Amman contacted their American counterparts to boast how comprehensively they had quashed the plot. After this catastrophe Allawi did not pursue further plans inside Iraq and limited his activities to setting up an anti-Saddam radio station in Amman, with the support of King Hussein. This was the most he could do within Jordanian law.

AbdulKarim Kabariti, the former Jordanian prime minister, believes that Allawi's abject failure may have alerted him that his own organisation was penetrated by Iraqi intelligence. But, according to intelligence expert Peter Symonds, a main reason why British and American intelligence clung on to Allawi was that he had convinced them that, through contacts he maintained, he could, as a future Ba'thist head of state, steer an Iraqi Ba'th party government back to a pro-western policy if Saddam was to be kidnapped or assassinated.

After the 1995 fiasco Allawi worked hard to score points and redeem himself in the eyes of his employers at the CIA and MI6. He convinced his cousin, consul at the Iraqi embassy in Moscow, to defect and bring with him a small trove of government documents. At the same time, Chalabi also suffered a serious defeat at the hands of Saddam at the famous battle of Erbil in 1996 when Iraqi forces routed the Chalabi militia and executed many of his field commanders. So the field appeared level between Chalabi and Allawi.

Since 1998, and since the US Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act and approved its accompanying budget, Allawi has been leaking, alleged, manufactured, "secret" documents about, firstly, Iraq's weapons programmes and secondly, ties between the Iraqi regime and AlQaeda and other fundamentalist organisations. Investigative journalist Mark Hosenball recently exposed the documents as fakes. It was Allawi who made the notorious 45-minute claim that caused Blair (and Bush) so much embarrassment.

The Americans appointed Allawi, as they did Chalabi, to the Governing Council they set up on 13th July 2003 as part of the Shia quota and both were then elected (by the other, American appointed council members) to the nine-member presidential committee that operated on rotation. But Allawi also became head of the security subcommittee of the governing council and, working with American proconsul Paul Bremmer, set about building up a new Iraqi intelligence and security apparatus.

(It is instructive to know that the Americans originally had "Advisory Council" in mind. It was the UN mission of the late Sergio de Mello who advised them that "governing" had a better sound than "advisory". His office was also critical in convincing Ayatollah Sistani and the Shia majority to join instead of boycotting this body. His subsequent violent death in the bombing of Baghdad UN headquarters was an acute loss to the USA. Sergio de Mello first came to prominence when the Americans insisted he become UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to replace Mary Robinson, who was causing them no number of headaches by seeking to apply the same norms to everyone. Especially Israel. He was there for less than a year when the issue of the new post-war Baghdad UN mission came up and the Americans again insisted De Mello head that office, against the desire of Secretary General Kofi Anan. It is probable that Washington was grooming De Mello as a future UN Secretary General.)

Both Robert Dreyfus and Seymour Hersh affirm that Allawi, working with then CIA chief George Tenet, started building up a secret death squad division similar to those operated by the Americans in Vietnam in 1968 as part of the notorious Operation Phoenix. (By a happy coincidence, Allawi himself was similarly employed in 1968 in the Ba'th party death squads in Iraq!)

The budget for these "security" operations run by Allawi is a most princely $3 billion, taken from the $87 billion voted by Congress for "reconstruction". These funds are laundered to Allawi's security apparatus via the so-called American Special Air Forces in Iraq. The basic personnel of this outfit is 275 CIA officers plus a handful of former Iraqi intelligence officers who, led by a renegade officer, Ibrahim AlJanabi are now working with the Americans. The outlines of this force were laid down in January 2003 when Allawi visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It seems Allawi received further instructions at that visit for soon afterward he started writing copious articles that were duly published in the US press (Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal) and one Arabian Gulf region newspaper (Emirates based AlEtihad). The main thrust of these articles was to praise US security and intelligence organisations and support their operations in Iraq against "terrorism" - the word Allawi uses to describe virtually all armed resistance in Iraq. But he also criticised the decision to dissolve the former Iraqi army and other state structures, yet implying this was the fault of the policy advocated by Chalabi, and not a US policy originally.

Allawi has pursued an aggressive public relations effort in the US where his campaign is headed by Patrick Nikolas Theros, a retired career US diplomat and former ambassador to Qatar. According to USA Today, reporting in August 2004, Allawi has so far spent at least $350,000 in lobbying and PR, the money having been donated by a wealthy Iraqi exile. Theros, who is paid $10,000 a month for his troubles, recruited law firms Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, paying them over $300,000 as well as New York City PR firm Brown Lloyd Jones to the cause. "It was a bid for influence and it was money well spent", said Danielle Pletka, a Middle East analyst at the American Enterprises Institute, a Washington DC think tank. "Allawi has always assumed ... that he did not need a constituency in Iraq as long as he had one in Washington", she added. Indeed, as accusations mounted against Chalabi that he was a US stooge, he appeared irritated and tried, though not too convincingly, to rectify his image. But even sharper accusations against Allawi do not seem to bother that individual in the least.

An article this last June in Newsweek, by a reporter known to be close to CIA sources, described what happened in Baghdad recently as a kind of quiet coup. For the CIA had succeeded in removing their man Chalabi from the scene and supplanting him with their man Allawi. They then managed to get a motley crew of clerics and businessmen to rubber stamp Allawi as "temporary prime minister". Most importantly, they managed to upstage and out-manoeuvre the UN and their man on the ground, Lakhdar Brahimi, who was pushing for a different candidate altogether, the nuclear physicist Hussein Sitani, who is relatively well respected in Iraq and close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, but, of course not an established agent of MI6 or CIA.

Brahimi himself spoke at length about how the "Governing" Council simply rubber-stamped the American choice, Allawi, whereas the US administration had feigned surprise at the "election" of Allawi by the council. As Brahimi, said, in his opinion, the appointment of Allawi must have confirmed to the Iraqi people that the Anglo-Saxon occupation of their country was being institutionalised with the appointment of a CIA agent as prime minister, and such a step was only likely to further ignite the insurgency.

This duly happened and within three weeks of Allawi's appointment not only had the rebellion in central Iraq intensified but also the Shia, nominally Allawi's own people, now joined in.

When NBC newsman Tom Brokaw interviewed Allawi in June 2004 and asked him about the non-existent weapons that formed the public basis for the war, Allawi dismissed the issue and said the invasion was simply part of the "global war on terror" and insisted that the former regime had well-established ties to AlQaeda. When Brokaw asked him further about the internal situation in Iraq today, Allawi angrily replied that Iraq was a special case and the political norms of democracy cannot apply to "Iraqi traditions".

Perhaps the Sydney Morning Herald was inadvertently referring to these traditions when it published accounts of how Allawi had personally shot dead six men. A claim he denies and the paper just as strongly insists is true. The incident, recounted in detail in the Herald, is that Allawi went on a sudden field trip to Amiriya late last June accompanied by his Interior Minister Falah Naqeeb. Allawi had then addressed the officers at the compound and their commander, General Ra'd Abdullah, emphasising they had to use maximum force and severity in dealing with "terrorists", while his government, he promised, would do all it can to protect them. To prove his commitment, he ordered seven prisoners in a cell to be taken out and chained to a wall. He then pulled out his own pistol and proceeded to shoot each man in the head, leaving six dead and the seventh badly wounded. The account was told, in detail, to the Herald reporter by multiple sources who corroborated on the smallest of details. The sources also report how the bodies were taken and buried in the desert outside Abu Ghraib prison, in unmarked graves.

Meanwhile Iyad Allawi has started up a political party to contest any future elections. So which cynic was it who said that the war in Iraq was launched to replace an anti-American tyrant by a pro-American tyrant?

Long Live Democracy!