I have not found any mention of the Badr Brigade when reading news coverage on the Zarqawi letter.
Hundreds of academics have been assassinated during the war, although just as with other violence the number of academics killed was not high in 2003 relative to later years. The victims have not been predominantly from one sect or group.
While the document was leaked to Dexter Filkins by the military partly in order to convince everyone that Zarqawi (seen to be a stand-in for Al-Qaeda) was the major problem (instead of Baathists or de-Baathification), it was clearly written by a high-level insurgent given that what the author planned has in fact occurred. The Arabic was considered to be "sophisticated", and Zarqawi was reportedly not that intelligent, so someone must have written it for him. An Iraqi presumably also told him about the Badr Brigade.
Zarqawi may have wanted to kill Shia regardless of what the Badr Brigade did, but if the Army or Baath members were still employed it's not clear that he would have been able to even get explosives. The pace of the killings in '03-'04 was large enough to be significant, yet small relative to what it had grown to three years in, when more Shia and Sunnis were drawn into sectarian conflict. This suggests that if the Iran-backed, exiled Badr Brigade was disrupted, the Shia masses who had been there the previous twenty years would not have killed enough Sunnis to provoke a sectarian civil war. The fact that the foreign jihadists had the same key grievance as the ex-Baathists meant that stopping Zarqawi's sectarian suicide bombings or any other attacks would be impossible without removing the grievance, which itself would have been the right thing to do anyway.
IBC civilian deaths, attacks on the coalition and its partners, and US troop deaths spiked in March/April and started a long-term growth trend (or in the case of troop death, stayed high) until mid 2007.
It stands to reason that the people who started the campaign to focus attention on Zarqawi wanted to decrease violence in Iraq, even though they might have also wanted to help the administration by shifting attention away from de-Baathification. I do not believe that they were "inflating" his importance. I think that it was reasonable to suspect the authenticity of the letter when it was released, though.
Shiite Baathists and pilots from the Iran-Iraq war were being assassinated. The war was barely sectarian before Zarqawi made it sectarian. Zawahiri (deputy to Bin Laden) argued against bombings targeting ordinary Shia in a letter to Zarqawi ("And why kill ordinary Shia considering that they are forgiven because of their ignorance?"). Maqdisi, Zarqawi's mentor, also argued against the same thing on television.
Because Zarqawi was claimed by the administration to be one of the links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda even before this campaign, it is not plausible that anyone involved in high-level military planning did not read this letter. In a 2006 article on the "propaganda" campaign Thomas E Ricks reported on Rumsfeld's view "that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. 'It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of some disagreements within al-Qaeda,' he said." So Rumsfeld was certainly interested in the relationship and had to have been aware of the letter.
Did Derek Harvey want us to recall this letter? I think probably not. He must have thought what I have heard others say - that what he talked about was "the Salvador option" method of counterinsurgency.
In mid-2005 Zarqawi released an audiotape claiming that he would set up the "Omar Brigade" to target the Badr Brigade.
Even before the elections there was a Badr-linked sectarian special police force working for the provisional government known as the "Wolf Brigade". The CFR called the Wolf Brigade "one of Badr's recent offshoots" in June 2005. The page continues: "Formed last October by a former three-star Shiite general and SCIRI member who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Walid, the Wolf Brigade is composed of roughly 2,000 fighters, mostly young, poor Shiites from Sadr City". This group operated at the same time as Thabit's commandos. Many news organizations have reported that the group participated in an Iraqi TV show "Terrorism in the Grip of Justice", where intimidated suspects who appeared as though they might have been tortured would confess to a variety of crimes.
The Chelsea Manning leaks to WikiLeaks on Iraq were reported to have implicated Americans in threatening to hand detainees over to the Wolf Brigade and actually doing so, knowing that they would be tortured. They include accounts of torture and reveal that there was a fragmentary order (Frago 242) that said that soldiers should only report cases of abuse by Iraqis against Iraqis to their higher-ups, rather than intervene or investigate it themselves. The Guardian documentary has a humorous exchange between Rumsfeld and his fellow officer during a press conference over whether that is legal.
In the January 2005 elections SCIRI and the Dawah party dominated. Dawah is similar to SCIRI in that its leaders were exiled, and some of them had histories in Iran (e.g., Jaafari and Maliki), but unlike SCIRI they did not believe that that clerics should dictate a government. Dawah doesn't believe that Ayatollah Khamenei should be considered the supreme religious authority. While SCIRI was probably loyal to Khamenei, a Manning-leaked cable notes that SCIRI campaigned by "associating itself as a religious party affiliated with Sistani whenever possible". Sunnis largely boycotted the elections.
Bayan Jabr, a Badr commander, was placed at the head of the Interior Ministry in May 2005. The Badr Brigade placed units in the national "special police commandos" who would go through checkpoints and kill Baathists systematically. The commandos were not all Badr; when Bayan Jabr took over many of the existing commandos had been chosen and led by a Sunni commander, Adnan Thabit, who had remained until 2006.
Police Adviser Jerry Burke's StatementIn the Guardian's James Steele documentary (30 minutes in), the American "Chief Policy Advisor" to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, Jerry Burke, said that everybody knew that the police commandos had Badr Brigade members because Interior Ministry officials would talk openly about it. One gets a similar story from PBS Frontline's interview with Brig. Gen. Horst.
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