Operating between the insurgent Sunni Arab suburbs of Baghdad and the Shiite militia-dominated south, Col. Salam al-Mamuri and his Scorpion commando team were a rarity among Iraqi security forces, American and Iraqi colleagues said: a police unit fighting on both sides of the country’s sectarian divide.
On Friday, a bomb blew apart al-Mamuri and an aide at the Scorpions’ headquarters in the southern city of Hillah. The attack ended the life of a respected commander who had been one of the longest-serving and longest-surviving men in a cadre of Iraqi army veterans struggling to restore law and order after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Al-Mamuri’s comparative evenhandedness enforcing the law may have earned him an enemy within his own sect, the Shiites. Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani in Baghdad called it a “possibility and a probability” that the assassination was an inside job, because the killer was able to gain access to al-Mamuri’s office to plant the bomb.
Al-Mamuri had founded the Scorpion brigade–whose members wore the emblem of a black arachnid–soon after the U.S. forces arrived and had led it ever since. It is made up of about 800 men, most of them Shiites from Hillah. The unit, which al-Bolani called “one of the most important and vital of the Ministry of Interior,” has remained relatively stable and cohesive since its early days, as other U.S. efforts to build Iraqi security forces have collapsed.
“The way I look at it, I am not here to serve Sunnis or Shiites. I am here to serve Iraq,” al-Mamuri, 35, said during a May interview in the office where he was killed Friday.
His expression of neutrality was indistinguishable from those issued up and down the ranks of Iraq’s predominantly Shiite police forces, many members of which are accused by Sunnis and Americans of a role in the country’s growing Shiite-Sunni killings. The difference, many Americans and Iraqis said, was that al-Mamuri acted as if he meant it.
“They are literally the only Iraqi unit under arms in the south that is completely independent of the political parties and the militias,” a Special Forces intelligence specialist and medic said this year. “Everyone else–the police, the army–is playing ball for somebody. They won’t.”
An American Special Forces team leader who worked with the Scorpions for months said, “We look at them as peers, we don’t look at them as below us.” As a matter of policy, Special Forces soldiers speak only on condition of anonymity.
In Hillah on Friday, the commando leader’s funeral dirge was the rattle of automatic-weapons fire, as the Scorpions shot into the air to mark al-Mamuri’s death. Many residents of the flat, sprawling market town stayed indoors, taking shelter from the gunfire and fearing the killing would spark retaliatory violence.
“Ninety percent of the people are so sad about what happened, because the colonel was a very good man with the good people, but he was an iron hand against the outlaws,” Hayder Foaud, a lawyer in Hillah, said by telephone Thursday.
Seven other officers were wounded in the deadly blast.
Capt. Muthana Ahmad, a spokesman for the provincial police force in Hillah, said the bomb may have been attached to a window in al-Mamuri’s office. Others, including Abdul Kareem al-Kinani, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said investigators suspect the bomb had been placed under the desk.
“This is correct,” Ahmad said, asked whether authorities suspected that one or more of the colonel’s aides collaborated in the killing. “As you may know, infiltration has taken place” in Iraq’s security forces.
There had been several attempts on al-Mamuri’s life, but he rejected the idea of giving up. “You can get killed in Iraq even if you sit all day in your house,” he said. “What should I do, sit around and wait to die, or try to stop the people who are killing?”
