Legal Killing of Enemies in Iraq?

A guy I met who had served in the US Military in Iraq told me the following unbelievable story: in Iraq, he claimed, a person can get court permission to kill someone who has wronged them. He has to go before a judge and prove that the person in question did something severely wrong, humiliating, or unjust. If the judge agrees the offense was bad enough, he will issue that person a license to kill the other person, and he can set about trying to do that without the target having any warning.

This sounds like what I would have to call a 'military legend' (an urban legend confined to military circles).

I googled a few things but couldn't find anything. "Legal killing" gets automatically attached to Bush, etc.

Anyone know enough about Iraqi law to rule the existence of such a thing out?

This link doesn't mention anything about Iraq. Iraq has been a secular country for most of modern history, and in very recent years has been somewhat of a US puppet.

...unbelievable story: in Iraq, he claimed, a person can get court permission to kill someone ...

His story is similar to claiming a person in the West can be hanged for horse rustling.

enemy image building? Creating your own enemy: Those d..... are so vicious, they could have done it, so we can easily say they did it. They would have anyway.

There are four categories of crimes in sharia law, qisas, hudud, tazir, and siyastan. Qisas involves personal injury and has several categories: intentional murder (first-degree), quasi-intentional murder (second-degree), unintentional murder (manslaughter), intentional injury, and semi-intentional/unintentional injury. A qisas (retaliation) offense is treated as a common law tort rather than a crime against the state. If the accused party is found guilty, the victim (or in death, victim's family) determines the punishment, choosing either retribution (qisas-e-nafs), which means execution in the case of intentional murder, and in cases of intentional battery, the amputation of the limb that was lost; or they can choose to forgive the perpetrator. If they forgive the perpetrator, they can receive blood money compensation (diyya) for the loss of life/limb/injury. The sharia judge can only convict someone for a qisas crime, the victim/victim's family determines the punishment. However, if the victim's family pardons the criminal, in addition to the sharia punishment the criminal would normally receive a tazir prison sentence (such as ten to twenty years in prison) for crimes such as "intentional loss of life", "tazir assault and battery" "disturbance of the peace", and so forth. However, if the murder/injury was unpremeditated (such as during a fight or if there were mitigating factors), then the person would be released after paying the blood money, or spend a short time in prison.

I served in Iraq and had the oppritunity to work closely with several of our native translators.

They explained that local justice is by and large handled by the "clan" leadership. If you wrong a person in the same clan bad enough your leaders may grant you permission to kill them. This typically requires a warning that often consists of tossing a red rug or other marker infront of the house of the intended victim.

Disspute between different tribes or clans often involve violence and rarely warranted more then token offical police involvement.

In my experiance there are not "legal killings" in the judicial system there are simply killings that are accepted and ignored.

Very interesting! Without being exactly analogous, these "clans" then, may bear more relation to the Sicilian Mafia or Chinese Tongs than anything else.

Yes, I think that this might be the case in many communities. That is, the law and practice of justice within any particular community might differ somewhat from governmental law. I don't know, because I've never lived in a society that allows what the OP is talking about.

The important thing Oltz's post clarifies is that this isn't actually legal, just that the official police don't do anything about such killings, as embodied in the closing line of the movie: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

The whole thing makes more sense this way as opposed to the way the guy described it to me as being legal.

The police in the U.S. now don't put themselves out of their way too much to solve murders they are sure are gang related. It's too difficult to get anyone in that world to testify against anyone else.

Under both Shiite (Iran) and Sunni (Turkey and Egypt) branches of Islam an ocassional killing as in the OP's story does actually occur.

In these extremely religious groups civil law can be secondary or meaningless, just as ThomasT writes above. Religious law and social customs often govern the resolution of disputes. But someone has to do some really, really terrible and bad things (like rape or messing with another's wife) before the local mullah would sanction such a killing.