Insurgent Confessions Broadcast in Iraq
In the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, intelligence officials are broadcasting confessions of captured insurgents on television. In some cases, the programs are accompanied by graphic footage shot by the insurgents of the actual crimes. New York Times reporter James Glanz discusses the broadcasts. (Advisory: Interview contains some graphic accounts.)
JENNIFER LUDDEN, host:
In Iraq today, at least 22 people died in attacks by suicide bombers, and the death toll from yesterday's attack near a gas station south of Baghdad now tops 90. This makes it the second deadliest bombing since Saddam Hussein's fall in April 2003. Amidst the mayhem, Iraqis have been glued to their TV sets this year watching confessions of captured insurgents. The government-produced segments are meant as a deterrent. They show violent acts, then bring in victims to confront and often humiliate the suspected insurgent.
This past week a new confession program started airing in Iraq's Kurdish north. New York Times reporter James Glanz has watched the premiere episode and joined us earlier from Amman, Jordan. We want to warn listeners that some of what he describes is very graphic. Glanz says the new Kurdish program differs from Iraq's other televised confession shows.
Mr. JAMES GLANZ (The New York Times): It's, in a sense, a bit of one-upmanship, if you want to call it that, in a sort of dark way relative to those earlier programs, in the Arabic language programs. This has the confessions of terrorists who've committed acts, but it's got two new elements. One is that it includes video of some of the crimes--terrible, horrible crimes--that has been taken by the alleged criminals themselves, showing them actually beheading people and dismembering people and actually raping people. It's hard to watch. I mean, it's really something that, as one person I talked to, a Kurd--can literally keep you up at night.
LUDDEN: So the other element--what else do they have?
Mr. GLANZ: Well, in the Arabic-language telecasts, there were often elements of the confessions, points of the confessions where these accused terrorists would say that they were gay. And it was thought that that might have been something that was required of them to, you know, deliberately humiliate them in this conservative Islamic culture, but there was never really any evidence for that. Here, that's one of the things that has been captured in these videos. It shows the band led by a local Irbil man named Sheik Zana(ph), who was well-known in town, having sex with his younger followers--all male. And there may have been a purpose behind that. There's a thought that they were used for blackmail.
LUDDEN: Oh.
Mr. GLANZ: They get them in there, they have sex with them, and then they threaten to show this to their, you know, family and friends if they don't join the terrorist group.
LUDDEN: Can you tell me more about the actual confession? I mean, what does Sheik Zana, for example, say he did?
Mr. GLANZ: Well, it's a bit of a disconnected tale because there is no narrative overlay. There's just a series of confessions. But it begins with Sheik Zana sort of cowering in fear in this echoey room, beginning his confession about what he did. And then it looks like a later confession, when he's grown a beard--he didn't have a beard in that first segment--and when he's become much more brazen, then he begins to spin out the whole tale. And, basically, if you try to put it all together, it begins when they decide that they want to create the toughest, meanest intelligence and terror cell in Kurdistan. And they say that their first mission was to get a bunch of hardened people, people willing to commit crimes. And then they planned to go on to the real terror act.
So they began by kidnapping, they say, a child who was selling sunflowers in a train station, taking the child back and just gratuitously beheading the child solely for the purpose, they say, of kind of callousing themselves. So it ends up being a tale of people who say they were starting out with the jihadi purpose but then just, really, wreaking generalized mayhem that really makes no sense.
LUDDEN: I guess this all raises the question: Is any valuable information coming out of this in terms of trying to stop the wider insurgency?
Mr. GLANZ: Well, as far as this one group goes, that's debatable. Now it's part of--I think it's important to point out this is part of a much wider investigation and series of arrests that the intelligence services in Kurdistan are carrying out. They told me in an interview that they've cracked six separate terrorist rings. Some of the confessions will go after Sheik Zana's. He's one of the six. So, yeah, I think that as far as they see it, at least, it is providing information that's valuable to them in keeping the peace in Kurdistan, where, you know, there have been a few car bombings lately in cities that had previously been pretty peaceful, And Irbil is actually one of them. Irbil is where all this mayhem was based.
LUDDEN: James Glanz is a reporter with The New York Times. His article appears in the paper tomorrow.
James, thank you very much.
Mr. GLANZ: Thanks very much. Nice to talk with you.
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