At Reuters AlertNet, an unnamed Reuters reporter interviews an Iraqi “warlord” who says he’s fighting for all Iraqis. To free them from the occupation.

And he’s doing this by torturing Iraqis. With power tools.

BAGHDAD, Nov 16 (Reuters) - They call him the “Shi’ite Zarqawi”, a torturer with a passion for power tools, a sectarian warlord bent on driving Sunnis from Baghdad, a man whose shadowy legend has grown with recent narrow escapes from U.S. forces.

But the elusive militia commander known as Abu Deraa says he has just been misunderstood, turned by the media into a bogeyman when in fact he loves Sunnis as his brothers in Islam and wants only to protect his city’s poor and drive Americans from Iraq.

“I find those allegations really odd,” he said in interview this week with an Iraqi journalist working for Reuters.

“As for using electric drills, I would never mutilate a human being because Islam prohibits mutilation, even for dogs.

“Sunnis are as much my brothers as Shi’ites. My only enemies are the occupiers,” he said during the encounter in Sadr City, the sprawling Baghdad slum where U.S. and Iraqi forces have been hunting him as, effectively, Public Enemy No. 1 for months.

Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has accused Abu Deraa of running sectarian death squads and told Reuters he narrowly evaded capture in a major raid on Sadr City last month by troops hunting kidnapped Iraqi-born U.S. soldier Ahmed al-Taei.

Familiar to many of the three million residents of Sadr City, he now moves discreetly, unable regularly to see his family, but said he did not hold a grudge against Maliki: “Maliki doesn’t know me personally,” he said. “The man is relying on reports given to him by the occupation forces.”

Maliki, anxious not to alienate fellow Shi’ites, criticised the U.S. raid as heavy-handed. Taie is still missing. Though reluctant to say his name, U.S. and Iraqi leaders hold Abu Deraa responsible for many of thousands of kidnaps and killings this year, and victims found with skulls and bodies drilled through.