Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

By Vivienne Walt, Globe Correspondent, 8/4/2003

BAGHDAD -- It was 10:30 on a sweltering night when 12-year-old Mohammed al-Kubaisi climbed the concrete steps leading to his family's rooftop. The boy held two blankets so that he and his twin brother, Moustafa, could curl up together on the roof for the night, one of their favorite summer habits.

Mohammed had just reached the top when he turned to watch the military maneuvers on the street below: American soldiers were patrolling with rifles. One soldier looked up in the darkness and saw a figure on the roof, watching him.

A single bullet exploded into the air.

Mohammed's mother recalled dragging her son inside and screaming as she held him, his blood pouring onto the floor. She said Mohammed was struggling to breathe when a group of US soldiers slammed through the front door and pushed her aside as they searched the house.

"There were two patrols walking from different directions," Wafa Abdul Latif, 44, said in her living room, clutching a large, framed portrait of Mohammed. "One patrol group thought the shot had come from inside the house."

The second group had burst in after hearing the shot aimed at Mohammed, figuring a weapon had been fired from the home.

The death of one boy on June 26 is an almost-forgotten story as US forces continue to face deadly attacks by armed insurgents. But Iraqis say the regularity of deaths among their own has hardened people's feelings regarding the American occupation.

In numerous interviews, Iraqis said that more than factors like unemployment, fuel shortages, or electricity blackouts, civilian casualties since the war's end have raised the level of bitterness against US soldiers and could prolong or widen armed resistance.

"It has increased our hate against Americans," said Ali Hatem, 23, a computer science student at the University of Baghdad. "It also increases the violence against them. In Iraq, we are tribal people. When someone loses their son, they want revenge."

Neither Iraqis nor American forces keep statistics for dead civilians like Mohammed, whose shooting the US military calls a tragic accident. At least three Iraqis were killed in western Baghdad's elegant Mansour district on July 27, when US soldiers from Task Force 20 opened fire on cars that overshot a military cordon. The drivers apparently had missed the cordon when they turned into the area from an unblocked side street.

In late April, soldiers from the 82d Airborne Division shot dead 13 Iraqis when they opened fire on protesters in the town of Fallujah, about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Soldiers fired on another demonstration on June 18 at the gates of the Republican Palace in Baghdad, killing at least two people. In both those cases, US forces said they believed they were being fired upon by armed insurgents hidden in the crowd.

US officials have expressed regret that innocent people have been caught in the crossfire of the ongoing conflict.

"I'm working very hard to ensure that with our tactics we aren't alienating the Iraqi people," Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US forces in Iraq, said Thursday. When asked whether officers had apologized to the families of five Iraqis killed during a botched raid in Mansour on July 27, Sanchez said, "Apologies are not something that we have as a normal procedure in the military processes."

The US military generally refuses to provide compensation to survivors of Iraqis killed in the crossfire or through misunderstandings, whether at military checkpoints or during patrols. Such cases are regarded as occurring during combat and thus are ineligible for compensation under US military laws enacted during World War II.

"Our soldiers are conducting combat operations," said Colonel Marc Warren, the senior US military lawyer in Iraq. "We are still engaged in combat operations."

But the military has launched an internal investigation into Mohammed's death "because it involved a 12-year-old boy," Warren said yesterday.

Some of those mourning their relatives say they feel pained that US soldiers have not offered compensation or apologies. Compensation, usually in the form of money, is an Iraqi tradition when a killing occurs. Among several Iraqi tribes, a retaliatory killing is expected.

"No Americans have visited us to speak about what happened," said Moustafa Ahmed, 28, who says his 24-year-old brother, Uday Ahmed, was shot by a soldier from the 82d Airborne Division. "And we don't feel we can go speak to them." His brother was killed July 9.

Uday had been fixing a neighbor's car to earn money. He walked a few blocks from his house in the southwest Baghdad district of Saidiya to an auto repair yard to look for a spare part. Walking across the yard, he held the car's ignition distributor, a metal object about the size and shape of a hand grenade.

He was clearly visible from the roof of the Dorah Police Station that abuts the repair yard. There, 82d Airborne soldiers are posted behind sandbags, rifles at the ready.

From atop the roof, a soldier spotted Uday Ahmed and fired. Details of what happened came from several witnesses in the yard who were interviewed Thursday.

"I heard the bang of a rifle shot and swung around," said Ali Hassan, 40, who runs an outdoor falafel stand about 20 feet from where Uday stood. "This man was holding a car part. He doubled over bleeding and then glanced up.

"At that moment, a second shot came from the roof of the police station," he said. "It hit him, and he dropped. There was blood everywhere."

The soldiers posted at the Dorah Police Station would not comment on Uday Ahmed's death and referred a reporter to the division's base two blocks away. Commanders there declined to discuss the case. In the case of 12-year-old Mohammed, soldiers visited the family to apologize.

"They asked us what compensation we wanted," Latif, his mother, said. "My husband was incensed. He said he wanted 10 of their men to die in exchange."

The couple say the visitors told them a soldier had been arrested for their son's death. A military spokesman, Colonel Guy Shields, denied that. Colonel Warren said the soldier who shot Mohammed was from the 82d Airborne.

Family members insist the boy's death was not an accident. They say Mohammed could have been saved that night, if it had not been for the unyielding soldiers at a checkpoint in the Hay al-Jihad district in south Baghdad. "I tried to rush him to the hospital in my car," said a neighbor, 17-year-old Yaser Ala'. "They stopped us at the checkpoint because it was nearly curfew time."

Ala' drove back to the house, where Mohammed bled to death in the car. They left the boy there until the curfew lifted at dawn, then drove to the hospital to confirm his death.

Details of Mohammed's death were cited in a report released July 23 by Amnesty International. The London-based organization said its researchers in Iraq had determined that US forces were at times trigger-happy and were ill prepared for policing Iraq.

Unable to accept the death of his identical twin, Moustafa al-Kubaisi recently moved to his aunt's house, saying he could not bear being at home. In late July, he pooled his savings of 10,000 dinars, about $8, and bought a bicycle as a tribute for his dead brother.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/216/nation/Bitterness_grows_in_Iraq_over_deaths_of_civiliansP.shtml

by Haroon Siddiqui

One cringes on hearing some Americans analyze non-Americans.

Here is Lt.-Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, chief commander in Iraq, announcing the curtailment of U.S. raids in the futile search for Saddam Hussein, Baathists and other troublemakers - raids that have alienated Iraqis because troops were often ending up at the wrong address due to faulty intelligence:

"We created in this culture some Iraqis that then had to act because of their value systems against us in terms of revenge, possibly because there were casualties on their side and also because of the impact on their dignity and respect."

Set aside the awkward lingo. The message is clear enough:

Iraqis are resisting the occupation not because innocent bystanders are getting killed or injured in ill-conceived and ill-executed American operations.

Nor because doors to people's homes are being kicked down in the middle of the night, their meagre possessions turned topsy-turvy and their cash, essential for survival in the absence of banks, seized.

Nor because men are being dragged out in pyjamas, gagged and detained in frequent cases of mistaken identity; women are having their privacy invaded by aggressive and foul-mouthed strangers; and children are being frightened and psychologically scarred.

No, none of that, said the general, but because Iraqi culture and custom dictate they act up under such circumstances!

What planet do these Americans live on? Or are they so preoccupied spinning propaganda that they have no sense of reality? Or is it that they just don't care what anyone thinks beyond their core constituency of fellow citizens and foreign fellow travellers?

So monumental has the mismanagement of post-Iraq been that essential services and law and order are still not back to pre-war levels. Looting has given way to carjacking and kidnapping.

Iraqi frustrations over rampant crime have the eerie echo of women in U.S.-controlled Afghanistan who lately have been complaining that, under the Taliban, they were at least safe from rape.

The Americans are operating in chaotic conditions under which many are getting killed. But they have contributed to the chaos by being ill-prepared for post-war Iraq, by being culturally clueless and trigger-happy.

After all, the British - in charge of Basra and other southern areas - are doing a far better job of managing the supposedly far more troublesome Shiites.

American haplessness can be seen in their guesswork on who might be attacking them: "Saddam Fedayeen, displaced Baathists, some Islamic extremists, the so-called Army of Muhammad, Wahhabis, maybe some Al Qaeda terrorists, Iranian-backed Shia - who knows?" said Maj. Scott Sossaman, a battalion leader, in a typical comment.

The bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad Thursday had the stamp of Al Qaeda terrorism. If so, the Americans have been going after the wrong people on false assumptions and weak intelligence.

The latter emanates from too much reliance on technology and on "experts," in Iraq and back in Washington, who speak no Arabic and have little or no feel for the pulse of the land or its people.

Beyond the house raids, Americans have angered Iraqis by detaining about 5,000 people, many on the flimsiest of suspicion, for weeks.

They're being held under inhumane conditions, with no opportunity to get word back to their families.

French and British media are reporting from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, once again in use, and from other detention centres.

Detainees are held under "tarps surrounded by barbed wire under blistering sun," says the Liberation of Paris Web site (http://www.libe.com).

It quotes one as saying that prisoners are punished at the slightest infraction and "made to stand for hours in the sun, arms and legs outstretched."

Others are said to be "thrown in the dirt on their stomach, with their hands tied, under the hot sun."

Amnesty International has just condemned such American abuses. Ironic, since the liberators are ostensibly there to establish democracy and the rule of law.

Then there's the callous or casual American approach to collateral damage caused in the hunt for Saddam or by measures to subdue the resistance.

Between six to a dozen bystanders were gunned down during a wild, and unprovoked, shootout by the elite Task Force 20 during a recent raid in Baghdad in pursuit of him.

Sixteen were killed in the April bombing of a restaurant where he was supposed to be.

We don't know how many died in the cruise missile attack on "a Saddam bunker" on the eve of the war.

Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine has just revealed that 80 innocent people were killed in a June 28 raid near the Syrian border on a convoy that was thought to be carrying Saddam and his entourage.

American soldiers have killed more than 30 people by firing on demonstrators in Baghdad, Falujah, Mosul and Karbala.

How many dead Iraqis, soldiers and civilians, during the war and since its end May 1?

No one knows for sure. Or cares. Not the U.S. military. As Gen. Tommy Franks said, "We don't do body counts" - of the enemy. Not the American media, either. They don't even seem to make an effort.

According to http://www.iraqbodycount.net, run by academics and peace activists, the reported civilian death count, so far, stands at "a minimum of 6,087 and a maximum of 7,798."

The estimated number of injured is 20,000.

American forces have been given the benefit of the doubt because they've been facing guerrilla attacks. But their actions and, in fact, their entire approach to the occupation raise disturbing questions, summarized in what Iraqis most often ask visitors: "How do Americans think of us, as Iraqis or as animals? Why do they treat us like cattle?"

Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus.

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