Is this Iraq’s most prolific mass killer?

Jon Swain, Sunday Times

AS convoys of American military equipment were crossing the desert into Iraq last week and more US soldiers headed towards Baghdad to crack down on sectarian violence, a video on the internet showed one of their prime targets, the leader of a Shi’ite death squad, bottle-feeding a baby camel with Pepsi-Cola. It is one of the few images of Abu Deraa, an elusive Shi’ite whose orgy of sectarian killings in the past two years has helped to propel Iraq towards civil war. The benign video belies Deraa’s savagery. His squad is thought to be responsible for the murder of thousands of civilians, mostly Sunnis, and he is said to take personal delight in killing — sometimes with a bullet to the head, sometimes by driving a drill into the skulls of his victims. On other occasions, Iraqis say, he gives them a choice of being shot or battered to death with concrete building blocks (...) Another of Deraa’s high- profile victims is Khamis al-Obeidi, Saddam Hussein’s lawyer, who was abducted and murdered. A grim video recorded on a mobile phone shows his hands being tied behind his back by a man believed to be Deraa...

continua / continued