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Iraq's Allawi connected to CIA
As Mother Jones reported last week, the political future of Iraq didn't get any clearer with the results of its early-March parliamentary elections. One surprise, though, was the strong showing of ex-prime minister Ayad Allawi, a former strongman for Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party who had forged an alliance of secular Sunnis and Shiites. Allawi's Iraqi National Accord gained 91 seats, a "thin plurality" that was two seats better than the current prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and his Shiite coalition. As regional expert Juan Cole noted today, it's unlikely Allawi has an easy path to resuming his old position, but he's clearly become"once again"a heavy player in Iraqi politics.
All of which makes it worth asking: Is Ayad Allawi a stone cold killer?
Joshua Holland over at AlterNet seems to think so. He cites a 2004 report by Australia's Sydney Morning Herald that alleges Allawi personally shot six insurgents in the head, against a Baghdad wall, with a pistol"just days before the US-led coalition officially handed power over to his government. At the time, US and Iraqi officials laughed off the Herald's account, and the story died out with next to no coverage in the Western media. Still, the Herald's account was meticulously reported, based on the accounts of two eyewitnesses who led reporter Paul McGeough to the site of the alleged execution. They maintain that there were roughly 30 witnesses to the event, including the then-interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, whose home in Samarra, Iraq, had been hit by insurgents not long before the incident.
One of the witnesses told McGeough: "The prisoners were against the wall and we were standing in the courtyard when the Interior Minister said that he would like to kill them all on the spot. Allawi said that they deserved worse than death"but then he pulled the pistol from his belt and started shooting them."
The Herald report went on to list the supposed names of three victims: Two appeared to be Syrian, consistent with the likelihood that they were foreign "jihadist" fighters; the third had a name that indicated he was from Samarra, where the attack on Naqib's house had claimed the lives of four bodyguards.