80-year-old father kidnapped and dragged, brothers beaten till collapsed, his 40 police officers killed and beheaded! Is this future of Iraq?
Sonia Parker, Special Correspondent
August 18, 2004

Iraqi Police Chief in Najaf according to Reuters has gone through the worst nightmare and the mental torture still continues! The following narrative may show what in there for the future of Iraq! Is this any better than Saddam? Is this what we as a world have created in Iraq? Are they not going to haunt us for years to come?

Militants had just kidnapped and dragged his ailing 80-year-old father through the streets. They also beat his brothers until they collapsed. Forty of his men were killed and several were beheaded.  It's tough being the police chief of Najaf, the Iraqi city that is sacred to millions of Shiites around the world and a battleground between Shiite militia, US Marines and Iraqi police and National Guard.  “They told me that I could go in the place of my father,” said Ghalib Al Jezairy, a move that would have had dire consequences for a man high on the militant hit list. As the police chief spoke his father was still being held. 

The stress and exhaustion shows on the face of the man who is trying to keep morale high in a police force facing thousands of supporters of firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Many are holed up inside the sacred Imam Ali shrine in anticipation of a major US offensive. 

But they still have time to roam the streets; some hoping to fire AK-47 assault rifles or rocket-propelled grenades at Iraqi police officers, who say they are in dire need of more flak jackets and heavier weapons.

“What they did to my father was inhuman. He is a dying old man. They beat my brothers until they fainted,” he told reporters late on Monday night, as the sound of mortars being fired could be heard in a nearby cemetery turned battle zone.

They beheaded one of his relatives and Sadr's Mehdi Army militants have gouged out the eyes of some of his officers and boiled them in hot water, he said.

“Do Iraqi police behead people?,” he asked. This is barbaric. They enter people's homes and they kill the relatives of policemen.” 
“Thirty minutes ago someone else was slaughtered,” he said at the bland, cement Najaf police station where a fresh batch of detained men were being processed. The police lot was occupied by impounded buses used by the Mehdi Army, a militia bent on removing US forces from Najaf and the rest of Iraq and ousting their Iraqi allies. High barricades of earth-filled bags attached to wire mesh are used to try and keep the Mehdi Army and suicide bombers out of the station. The smell of cordite was still fresh in the air hours after a nearby attack. Hundreds from the police force have been killed across Iraq in bombings, shootings and beheadings. The police force has been struggling with security along with other Iraqis forces since the Americans handed sovereignty to Iraq on June 28.

Few police cars are seen far away from the station. 

“Many police have been beheaded and burned,” he said of a force that is on the receiving end of every size of mortar bomb and Armour-piercing grenades, as well as machinegun fire.