Iraqi troops torture and execute civilians in secret videos - ABC News
▻http://abcnews.go.com/International/deepdive/brian-ross-investigates-the-torture-tapes-47429895
Officers of an elite Iraqi special forces unit, praised by U.S. military commanders earlier this year for its role in fighting ISIS, directed the torture and execution of civilians in Mosul in at least six distinct incidents caught on tape.
“That’s a murder,” retired Green Beret Lt. Col. Scott Mann told ABC News after reviewing the graphic footage. “There should be punishment for anyone doing it. It’s reprehensible and it shouldn’t be allowed on any modern battlefield."
The alarming footage was smuggled out of Iraq by a prize-winning Iraqi photojournalist, Ali Arkady, who spent months embedded in combat with the elite Iraqi troops leading the fight against ISIS late last year. Since turning over his cache of photos and videos to ABC News, he says he has received death threats from the soldiers he once considered friends and has now fled Iraq to seek asylum in Europe.
“This is happening all the time,” Arkady said of the war crimes he documented, which he recounted in an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Brian Ross to be broadcast tonight on ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir and Nightline.
Iraqi officials are now launching an investigation into Arkady’s allegations.
“Arkady, 34, is an Iraqi Kurd and Sunni Muslim working with VII, a news agency that specializes in coverage of conflict. Based in Iraq, his work has focused on war orphans and Iraqi soldiers disabled by the ongoing violence that has engulfed his home country since the 2003 U.S. invasion.
Last year, he followed Iraqi soldiers as they swept through Fallujah, liberating the city from ISIS control. The E.R.D. special forces unit impressed him, he said, not only because they were “strong” but also because its leaders — Capt. Omar Nazar, a Sunni, and Cpl. Haider Ali, a Shi’a — worked together despite the religious divide that had torn Iraq apart.
From these first embeds with Nazar and Ali’s detachment, Arkady produced a different type of story, one he later described as a mix between journalism and art, as an attempt to show a softer side of a place he felt was too often defined by more than a decade of grim headlines. “Happy Baghdad” would garner nearly 100,000 views on Facebook, and it featured Nazar and Ali drawing clear distinctions between themselves and the ISIS enemy.
“We are liberators not destroyers,” Capt. Omar Nazar said. “All of ISIS are criminals and psychopaths. Don’t expect us to be cruel to you. We are one of you and more merciful than those strangers and intruders.”
“We came to free you and to save you from ISIS,” Cpl. Haider Ali added. “Be happy. Have fun. Go out. Study. Love. Get married. We are here for you.”
For Nazar and Ali, the film gave them folk hero status in Iraq, and for Arkady, it opened the door to more combat embeds with the E.R.D. men as they joined the fight last fall to liberate Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul. They hoped, Arkady said, that he would make another film, like “Happy Baghdad,” which would show them in a new light.
Arkady’s effort to film an upbeat documentary about the two soldiers putting aside sectarian differences to defeat ISIS together took a dark detour last fall when the soldiers conducted a night raid on Nov. 22, pulling a man out of the bed where he slept with his family in the village of Qabr Al-Abed.”
