Allawi: Iraq abuses as bad as under Saddam (AP) Updated: 2005-11-28 08:37
Iraq's former interim prime minister complained Sunday that human rights
abuses by some in the new government are as bad now as they were under Saddam
Hussein.
Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite Muslim, told the London newspaper The Observer
that fellow Shiites are responsible for death squads and secret torture centers
and said brutality by elements of Iraqi security forces rivals that of Saddam's
secret police.
"People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons
that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing," the newspaper
quoted Allawi as saying.
In Canada, meanwhile, a Parliament official said four aid workers, including
two Canadians, had been kidnapped in Iraq but refused to name their group or say
where they were seized. Britain's Foreign Office identified one of the four as
Norman Kember, a Briton, but provided no further details.
Elizabeth Colton, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, said the United States was
investigating whether an American also was among the missing.
Most international organizations fled Iraq last year following a wave of
kidnappings and beheadings of foreign and Iraqi hostages. Many of them were
carried out by al-Qaida in Iraq, led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The U.S. military reported that a Marine assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft
Wing was killed Saturday when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb near Camp
Taqaddum, 45 miles west of Baghdad. At least 2,106 U.S. military personnel have
died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press
count.
A woman shouts as she holds the pictures of
her sons and a poster reading: Where are my sons?, during a protest in
front of Iraq's Human Rights Ministry, in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Nov. 27,
2005. [AP] | Allawi's allegation of widespread
human rights abuses follows the discovery this month of up to 173 detainees,
some malnourished and showing signs of torture, in a Shiite-led Interior
Ministry building in Baghdad.
"People are doing the same as Saddam's time and worse," he said. "It is an
appropriate comparison."
His remarks appeared aimed at winning favor among the Sunni Arab minority as
well as secular Shiites ahead of the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections. Allawi is
running on a secular ticket that includes several prominent Sunnis.
During his tenure as prime minister, Allawi lost the
support of many Shiites because he brought back former members of Saddam's
Sunni-dominated regime back into the security services to bolster the fight
against insurgents.
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