militias devastated many police units leading to
collapses
in several cities in 2004. That led to a push to a militarized police to help
fight the anti-government elements. Interior Minister Falah Hassan al-Naqib and
his uncle General Adnan Thabit went on to create the special police
commandos to fulfill that role. The new units were mostly former Sunni
soldiers, but included some Shiites and minorities. The commandos, the police,
and the Interior Ministry in general were a mess and besieged from all sides.
That led the Interior Minister to take matters into his own hands and create ad
hoc units like the commandos, which were welcomed by the Americans at the time,
because they too needed all the help they could get to restore security to
Iraq.

Members of the Wolf Brigade in Baghdad 2007 (IraqSlogger)

This chaos continued into 2005and into this void stepped
the Shiite militias. In May 2005 a new government took office and the Islamic
Supreme Council of Iraq’s (ISCI) Bayan Jabr was named Interior Minister. He brought
in his party’s Badr Brigade into commando units like the Volcano and Wolf
Brigades. These units were accused of mass arrests, running death squads and
secret prisons. Twice in 2005 the Wolf Brigade entered Diyala and arrested over 1,000
people all of which were Sunnis. By the summer, the first stories emerged
of secret detention facilities being run within the Interior Ministry. (1) In
July the 759th U.S. Military Police Battalion found 170 prisoners at
one such prison at the Ministry in Baghdad. The next month the Volcano Brigade
took away 36 Sunnis from their homes in Baghdad, tortured, killed them, and
dumped their bodies near the