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Disavowed by Mahdi Army, Shadowy 'Butcher' Still Targets Sadr's Foes
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Three men who claim to be former bodyguards of Abu Diri reject that photo, however, and vouch for a different image of him: a short, stocky man, almost clownish, shown in a video distributed on cellphones and DVDs around Baghdad. The image shows a smiling man pouring a soft drink from a bottle into the gulping mouth of a camel.
Abu Diri meant the video to be a warning to Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, according to the bodyguards, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He aspires to capture and behead the Sunni politician and will sacrifice the camel to celebrate the day he does, they said.
Abu Diri's hideouts long included a far northeastern corner of Sadr City known as "the Lost 70s," after the area's street numbers and isolation, U.S. military officers say. Many mornings, after Baghdad's nightly curfew, U.S. troops find corpses dumped along the streets of the Lost 70s, a junkyard of rusted car hulks and trash, with rats that gallop along the sidewalks in daylight.
Iraqi and U.S. forces raided a house belonging to Abu Diri in Sadr City on July 9, marking the beginning of stepped-up joint operations against alleged criminals in areas under Sadr's control. Iraqi officials said the raid killed nine people. Abu Diri escaped and is believed to have fled Sadr City.
In interviews in Baghdad, the three men claiming to be former bodyguards of his said he carried out killings largely as a free agent, rather than under orders from Sadr's organization. Abu Diri used the fact that he had a brother with a high position in the Mahdi Army to play up his alleged connections with the militia, and had associates in the heavily Shiite Interior Ministry police forces, including its intelligence services, the men alleged.
Interior Ministry officials independently gave some of the same details regarding Abu Diri; some of the other details from the purported bodyguards could not be separately confirmed.
Asked why the Mahdi Army does not shut down Abu Diri's activities, Nouri said, "Like everyone, he has his own gangsters protecting him."
In Najaf, another senior Sadr official, Aus al-Kafaji, said, "We are looking for him ourselves."
Other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.
