Kerry’s quizzical choice of targets

The South African trainers came under scrutiny on January 28, when Erinys trainer Francois Strydom was killed and his colleague Deon Gouws seriously injured as a bomb exploded in their hotel in Baghdad. The two men, in addition to being Erinys, trainers turned out to be members of South Africa’s secret police in the 1980s under the Apartheid regime.

Erinys $80-million contract, awarded by the occupation authorities last summer to provide security for Iraq’s vital oil infrastructure, has become a controversial lightning rod within the Iraqi Provisional Government and the security industry, according to Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Knut Royce of New York Newsday.

Soon after this security contract was issued, the company started recruiting many of its guards from the ranks of Ahmed Chalabi’s former militia, the Free Iraqi Forces, raising allegations from other Iraqi officials that he was creating a private army.

Chalabi, 59, scion of one of Iraq’s most politically powerful and wealthy families until the monarchy was toppled in 1958, had been living in exile in London when the U.S. invaded Iraq. The chief architect of the umbrella organization for the resistance, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), Chalabi is viewed by many Iraqis as America’s hand-picked choice to rule Iraq.

The security contract technically was awarded to Erinys Iraq, a security company also newly formed after the invasion, but bankrolled at its inception by Nour USA, which was incorporated in the United States last May, according to David Braus, the company’s managing director. Nour’s founder was a Chalabi friend and business associate, Abul Huda Farouki. Within days of the award last August, Nour became a joint venture partner with Erinys and the contract was amended to include Nour.

An industry source familiar with some of the internal affairs of both companies said Chalabi received a $2-million fee for helping arrange the contract. Chalabi, in a brief interview with Newsday, denied that claim, as did a top company official. Chalabi also denied that he has had anything to do with the security firm.

Yet the INC is deeply connected to Erinys. For example founding partner and director of Erinys Iraq is Faisal Daghistani, the son of Tamara Daghistani, for years one of Chalabi’s most trusted confidants. She was a key player in the creation of the INC which received millions of dollars in U.S. funds to help destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime before the U.S. invasion last year.

And Farouki’s businesses received at least $12 million in the 1980s from a Chalabi-controlled bank in Washington, D.C. The Jordanian government says that bank was part of a massive embezzlement scheme perpetrated by Chalabi on the Petra bank he owned in Amman. When the bank collapsed in 1989, it cost the Jordanian government $200 million to reimburse depositors and avert a collapse of the country’s entire banking system.

Jordanian authorities have complained that much of the funds they claim were siphoned off the Amman bank ended up at Petra International. By May 1989, three months before Jordan seized Petra Bank, the bankrupt Farouki companies owed Petra International more than $12 million, court records show.

A separate contract for $327 million with Nour was cancelled for the appearance of conflict of interest.

The Erinys or Furiae also called Dirae, Eumenides, or Semnae – that is, the “revered” goddesses – were, in Greek mythology, daughters of Night, or, according to another myth, of the Earth and Darkness, while a third account calls them offspring of Cronus and Eurynome. They were attendants of Hades and Persephone, and lived at the entrance to the lower world. Their first duty was to see to the punishment of those of the departed who, having been guilty of some crime on earth, had come down to the shades without obtaining atonement from the gods. At the command of the higher gods, sometimes of Nemesis, they appeared on earth pursuing criminals. Nothing escaped their sharp eyes as they followed the evil-doer with speed and fury, permitting him no rest.