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News :: International Relations |
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Family Shot Dead By Panicking US Troops |
Current rating: 2 |
by Justin Huggler
(No verified email address) |
10 Aug 2003
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Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car |
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Anwaar Kawaz, 36, weeps as her daughter Hadeel, 13, stands next to her at their home in Baghdad, Iraq on Sunday Aug. 10, 2003. On Aug. 8, Anwaar's husband and three of her children were killed by U.S. forces when soldiers opened fire on the family's car as they were trying to get back home before curfew. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwaar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Doctors said the father and his two daughters would have survived if they had received treatment quicker. Instead, they were left to bleed to death because the Americans refused to allow anyone to take them to hospital.
It happened at 9.30 at night, an hour after sunset, but long before the start of the curfew at 11pm. The Americans had set up roadblocks in the Tunisia quarter of Baghdad, where the abd al-Kerims live. The family pulled up to the roadblock sensibly, slowly and carefully, so as not to alarm the Americans.
But then pandemonium broke out. American soldiers were shooting in every direction. They just turned on the abd al-Kerims' car and sprayed it with bullets. You can see the holes in the front passenger window and in the rear window. You can see the blood of the dead all over the gray, imitation velvet seat covers.
A terrible misunderstanding took place. The Americans thought they were under attack from Iraqi resistance forces, according to several Iraqi witnesses. These are the circumstances of most killings of Iraqi civilians: a US patrol comes under rocket-propelled grenade attack and the soldiers panic and fire randomly.
This time there was no attack. Another car, driven by an Iraqi youth, Sa'ad al-Azawi, drove too fast up to another checkpoint further up the street. Al-Azawi and his two passengers did not hear an order to stop, as their stereo was turned up too loud. The US soldiers, thinking they were under attack, panicked and opened fire.
In the darkness of one of Baghdad's frequent power cuts, other US soldiers on the street heard gunfire and thought they were under attack. They, too, reacted by opening fire, though they could not see what was going on. Soldiers manning look-out posts on a nearby building joined in, firing down the street in the dark.
It was then that the abd al-Kerims drew up to the checkpoint. The panicking US soldiers turned on their car and shot the family to pieces.
"It was anarchy," said Ali al-Issawi, who lives on the street and witnessed the whole thing. "The Americans were firing at each other."
There was plenty of evidence lying in the street under the hot sun. Empty bullet casings lay everywhere. Bullet holes marked the walls and gates of nearby houses. Several parked cars were riddled with bullet-holes, their windows smashed and tires shredded. From the spread of the bullet holes all over the street, it was clear the soldiers had fired in every direction.
Sa'ad al-Azawi, the driver of the other car, was killed. The Americans dragged his two passengers out and beat them, still thinking they were resistance, Mr al-Issawi said. Watching from his house nearby, Mr al-Issawi did not know that al-Azawi was dead, and when the car burst into flames, he tried to rush over to help the young man.
"The Americans did not let me," he said. "A soldier came over and told me 'Inside'. He pushed me, even though my eight-year-old daughter was with me. They didn't let us get the young guy's body out of the car until he looked like he had been cooked."
Further down the street, Anwar abd al-Kerim, who was heavily pregnant and had somehow managed to escape injury in the car as bullets rained all around her, got out of the car, holding her wounded eight-year-old daughter Mervet, and sought help from her brother, who lived down the road.
She had to leave in the car her injured daughters, 16-year-old Ia and 13-year-old Haded, along with her husband, Adel, who was bleeding badly and groaning. Her 18-year-old son, Haider, was already dead. A bullet went between his eyes.
"I saw my sister running towards me with her daughter in her arms and blood pouring from her," said Ms abd al-Kerim's brother, Tha'er Jawad. "She was crying out to me 'Help, help, go and help Adel'." I put them in my car and tried to drive to the car but the American soldiers pointed their guns at me and the people shouted out to me 'Stop! Stop! They will shoot!'
"We could see the other girls and their brother lying on the back seat of the car. They would not let us go to the hospital." Ia was not as badly injured as the others. "After a while they released her and let her come to us," Mr Jawad said. "But when they finally let us go to the hospital, Mervet died. The doctors checked her injuries and told us she would have lived if we had brought her sooner.
"At 10.45 we heard the Americans had taken Adel and his other girl to another hospital. We went there at six the next morning, when the curfew was lifted, and they told us they both died in the hospital.
"The doctors said they might have lived if they got there sooner: the main cause of death was bleeding. The Americans left them to bleed in the street for hours."
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
http://www.independent.co.uk/ |
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What Language Is U.S. Speaking In Iraq? |
by Haroon Siddiqui
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
10 Aug 2003
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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.
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
http://www.thestar.com/ |
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