Perspective: After Iraqi troops do dirty work, 3 detainees talk

A 'detainee' arrested in Ghazaliya on March 26.

BAGHDAD: Out here in what the soldiers call Baghdad's wild west, sometimes the choices are all bad.

In one of the new joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations in the capital this month, in Ghazaliya, a volatile neighborhood, Captain Darren Fowler was heaping praise on his Iraqi counterparts for helping capture three people who had provided information on roadside bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

"The detainee gave us names from the highest to the lowest," Fowler told the Iraqi soldiers. "He showed us their safe houses, where they store weapons and IEDs and where they keep kidnap victims, how they get weapons, where weapons come from, how they place IEDs, attack us and go away. Because you detained this guy, this is the first intelligence linking everything together. Good job. Very good job."

The Iraqi officers beamed. What the Americans did not know and what the Iraqis had not told them was that before handing over the detainees, the Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of them in front of the other two.

Read the rest at the International Herald Tribune