Time Magazine Interviews Abu Deraa the Shitte Zarqawi

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It was one of the most audacious operations, although not a single shot was fired. About 150 men were marched outside, bundled into the pickup trucks and driven away. The whole operation took just 15 minutes.

When word of the kidnappings reached the control room of the Ministry of the Interior, an officer on duty there suspected immediately that the perps were acting on the orders of a fearsome Shi'ite militia warlord whose deeds the officer had been tracking for three years. "A ministry of mainly Sunni staff, 150 people taken captive--it can only be one thing," he says. "It had to be the work of Abu Deraa."

His appetite for mayhem is so vast that Iraqis call him the "Shi'ite Zarqawi"; and like the al-Qaeda-in-Iraq leader, who was killed by a U.S. air strike last June. He says he is "honored" by comparisons to al-Zarqawi and claimed, implausibly, to have no ill will toward ordinary Sunnis. One of his signature techniques is running a drill into the skull of his live victim.

Falah Shansal, a member of parliament from the al-Sadr bloc, told TIME last week that Abu Deraa was still "a fighter in the Mahdi Army." As long as Abu Deraa enjoys al-Sadr's tacit protection, he won't be easy to run down. U.S. forces believed they had him surrounded in Sadr City last month, but the militia leader narrowly escaped. A U.S. air strike is believed to have killed several of his closest fighters and severed an arm of one of his sons. "This is an honor for him, me and the family," Abu Deraa told TIME. The victims of Abu Deraa's brutality can only hope there are more such honors in store.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562970-1,00.html