Haditha is the tip of the iceberg - Iraq atrocities continue

Associated Press

The accounts are brutal: An Iraqi man dragged from his home, executed and made to look as if he were an insurgent. Three prisoners killed by their Army captors. A team of revenge-seeking Marines going home to home, shooting down unarmed Iraqi men, women, children.

The recent flurry of accusations against U.S. servicemen has stunned military analysts and experts. Many see a critical new point in the war — though few agree whether it shows the toll of combat stress, commanders resolved to stamp out war crimes, or, as some claim, an overzealous second-guessing of the troops.


List of alleged incidents -
So far, none of the troops accused in the latest cases has even been tried:

• On Friday, a Pennsylvania National Guard spokesman said two Guardsmen were being investigated in connection with the shooting death of an Iraqi earlier this year.
  
  
• On Wednesday, seven Marines and one Navy corpsman were charged in the April shooting death of an Iraqi man in the town of Hamdania. Charging documents claim the man was taken from his home, forced into a hole, shot and left with a stolen AK-47 near him to make it look as if he fought the troops.
  
  
• On Monday and Wednesday, three soldiers and a noncommissioned officer were charged in the May deaths of three unarmed Iraqis in military custody in Salahuddin province. A Pentagon official told The Associated Press that the detainees were shot while trying to flee.

None of the troops wanted to talk, but even a short stay with the men of the 3rd Bn 1st Marine Division in their camp located in Haditha Dam on the town's outskirts, made clear it was a place where institutional discipline had frayed and was even approaching breakdown.

Haditha was .... a feral place where the marines hardly washed; a number had abandoned the official living quarters to set up separate encampments with signs ordering outsiders to keep out; and a daily routine punctured by the emergency alarm of the dam itself with its antiquated and crumbling machinery.

The day before my arrival one soldier had shot himself in the head with his M16. No one would discuss why.

......

The washing facilities were at the top and the main lavatories at the base. With about 800 steps between them, many did not bother to use the official facilities.

Instead, a number had moved into small encampments around the dam's entrances that resembled something from Lord of the Flies. Entering one, a marine was pulling apart planks of wood with his dirt-encrusted hands to feed a fire.

A skull and crossbones symbol had been etched on the entrance to the shack.

I was never allowed to interview a senior officer properly, unlike during every other stint with American forces.

He described one video in which American soldiers massacre a group of people playing soccer.
“Three U.S. armed vehicles, eight soldiers in each, are driving through a village, passing candy out to kids,” he began. “Suddenly the first vehicle explodes, and there are soldiers screaming. Sixteen soldiers come out of the other vehicles, and they do what they’re told to do, which is look for running people.”
“Never mind that the bomb was detonated by remote control,” Hersh continued. “[The soldiers] open up fire; [the] cameras show it was a soccer game.”
“About ten minutes later, [the soldiers] begin dragging bodies together, and they drop weapons there. It was reported as 20 or 30 insurgents killed that day,” he said.
If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.
“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”

“We are making great progress to our end state here inside Iraq,” General Lynch said. He switched slides to a satellite image of Ur and Shaab showing the Mustafa Husseiniya. It was labeled “Tgt Complex.” Several blocks away was a building described, falsely, as the Ibrahim al Khalil Mosque, and even farther away was a building described, again falsely, as the Al Mustafa Mosque.

“Last Sunday,” he said, “Iraqi special-operations forces had indications that a kidnapping cell was working out of this target complex. . . . This was led, planned, and executed by the Iraqi special-operations forces, based on detailed intelligence that a kidnapping cell was occupying this complex. The operation consisted of about 50 members of Iraqi special operations forces and about 25 U.S. advisers. But the U.S. advisers were there purely in an advisory role. They did none of the fighting; there wasn’t a shot fired from a U.S. service member during the conduct of this operation. They surveyed the battlefield in advance, looking for sensitive areas, and they said, Okay, there are mosques in the area, but the nearest mosque is about six blocks from the target-point complex, so a decision was made to do the operation. . . .

“All told, 16 insurgents were killed, 18 were detained. We found over 32 weapons, and we found the hostage, the innocent Iraqi, who just 12 hours before was walking the streets of Baghdad. He was walking the streets of Baghdad en route to a hospital to visit his brother who had gunshot wounds. He was kidnapped and beaten in the car en route to this complex. When he got there, they emptied his pockets, they took out his wallet, and in the wallet was a picture of his daughter, and he asked for one thing: he said, ‘Please, before you kill me, allow me to kiss the picture of my daughter. That’s all I ask.’ The kidnappers told him, ‘Hey, we got you, and if we don’t get $20,000 sometime soon, you’re dead.’ And they showed him the bare electrical wires that they were going to use to torture him and then kill him. And they said, ‘We’re going to go away and do some drugs, and when we come back, we’re going to kill you.’

“He was beaten. He was tortured. He was tortured with an electrical drill. Twelve hours after he was kidnapped, he was rescued. . . . He is indeed most grateful. He is most grateful to be alive, and he is most grateful to the Iraqi special-operations forces. . . . The closest mosque was six blocks away. When they got close to the compound, they took fire, and they returned fire. When they got inside the room, a room in this compound, they realized this could have been a husseiniya, a prayer room. They saw a prayer rug. They saw a minaret. They didn’t know about that in advance, but from that room and from that compound, they were taking fire. In that room and in that compound, the enemy was holding a hostage and torturing a hostage, and in that room and in that compound, they were storing weapons, munitions, and IED explosive devices. Very, very effective operation, planned and executed by Iraqi special-operations forces.”

When asked who the enemy might have been, Lynch responded, “Extremists, terrorists, and criminals, and it’s all intertwined. We have reason to believe and evidence to support that the terrorists and foreign fighters are indeed using kidnapping as a way to finance their operations. And the story that I told about Sunday night’s kidnapping can be told many more times.”

I remembered my visit three days earlier. There had been no signs inside or outside the husseiniya of a gun battle or any fire coming from inside, no random bullet holes in the husseiniya or the buildings around it, no Kalashnikov shells (although those could have been removed). The entire affair had seemed one-sided, and General Lynch’s account of the kidnappers was pretty implausible. If the Americans had committed extrajudicial killings there, they were lying about the incident and even its location. They may have stumbled on a Shia assassination squad targeting Sunnis, but they seemed to have no idea.

He confirmed that the mosque belonged to the Sadrists. He explained that they had permitted the Dawa Party to use some of their rooms as an office. “They are old people, and they are even not capable of carrying a weapon,” he said. “They didn’t even have a guard in their office. The American forces denied that they attacked the husseiniya—they said they just attacked the Dawa office—but it was a lie. . . . The truth is they entered both the Dawa office and the Mustafa Husseiniya and they killed in a very barbaric way. . . . And nobody expected the Americans would do that, especially those who saw films about freedom in America. No one expected this.

“We were surprised at six o’clock, half an hour before the prayer, by a large number of Humvees and another armored vehicles. They surrounded the husseiniya and started firing randomly...

... Infantry soldiers came in shooting. They took the brothers to a single place and grouped them together and executed them. One of them had a black band on his forehead because he was a sayyid. He was the one who got the most bullets. You have already seen his brains. They went inside the shrine with a grenade. People were praying. They went inside the mihrab [which only the imam enters]. The mosque should be a safe place. . . . I have four children, and they were very scared. They still are not stable. I went today to visit my mother, an old woman. She was in shock and couldn’t recognize me.”

Sheikh Safaa blamed the political pressure on Jafaari for the raid. “Americans think that Jaafari is the closest man to the Sadrists, and they don’t like the Sadrists to have a friend in the prime minister’s position in Iraq. They allowed the Sadrists to participate in the elections, but the election results were not what the Americans wanted, so they are putting political pressure to prevent things from going in the direction they dislike.”

Sheikh Safaa warned of his people’s anger. Over the last few days, he said, the people of Shaab “were very upset by the presence of the occupation. Muqtada demanded that the occupation forces apologize and compensate the families of the victims. America should not kill and compensate. Just stop killing. When the occupier came to this country we lost our security, and security is one of the most important favors that God gives to us. It is true that there was a strong oppression of Iraqis by the former regime. America came to Iraq proclaiming its liberation and freedom and democracy and pluralism, but America proclaimed one thing and we saw something else. We saw freedom, but it was the freedom of tanks and the democracy of Humvees, and instead of multiple parties we saw multiple killings of people in ugly ways.”

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