US Troops Covering Their Tracks in Samarra

by Karen Button

In Samarra, where US troops have been accused of shooting two women--one pregnant--while on their way to the hospital, and trying to cover up the wrong-doing, another incident reveals a disturbing trend.

According to surviving family members, US troops killed three unarmed civilians, one a mentally disabled man, in their home on the evening of 4 May and then attempted to cover their tracks.

Around 5pm an IED exploded on Al-Burahman Street. Afterwards, US forces blocked the area and closed the streets. When a sniper shot at troops from a location close the Khalis family home, soldiers stormed the house. Fifteen people were crammed into one room, huddled together for safety. According to witnesses, troops broke down the door to the house when as they raided it, and began “shooting everywhere”.

The “Americans were yelling, ‘fuck you, shut up,’” says one of the survivors, 36 year-old Shireen, whose mother, brother and sister were killed in the incident. There were mostly women and children in the room, she says.

Shireen’s mentally disabled brother, 40 year-old Khalid Zaidan Khalif, put his arms around his 66 year-old father, Zaidan Khalif Habib trying to protect him. Troops shot Khalid and then pushed the father onto the floor, says Shireen.

It all happened so fast she says that, “I couldn’t see anything, I just heard the shooting.” Her sister, 20 year-old Emam Zaidan, was holding Shireen’s 18 month-old son in her arms when the shooting began.

“After the terrible shooting was a terrible silence. I thought they killed my father. I tried to talk to my sister. She was in her last year at school, studying for her final exams. I asked her, ‘is my son ok or he is dead?’ She didn’t respond. She was slumped against the wall. I tried to touch her shoulder and my son’s clothes were filled by blood. Then I realized she was dying.”

“I tried to talk to my mother, ‘why are you laying down like this?’ I asked her. When I tried to make her sit up I saw something white hanging from her eyes. It was one of her eyes.” Sixty year-old Khairiya N’sses Jasim had also been shot, her “other eye was stuck to the wall”.

Her sister didn’t die immediately. Shireen says in her last moments Emam begged the soldiers in English to help her. They left, she says, and brought back a military doctor, but Emam died almost immediately.

After the three were killed, Shireen says, the troops apologised, saying they killed the wrong people.

According to Reuters, a spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division (which controls the area) claimed that soldiers from its 3rd Brigade Combat Team had “killed two unnamed men and a woman in a house who had ‘planned to attack the soldiers’".

Yet, according to Iraqi police who said they witnessed the event, the civilians were unarmed. "They were not armed and there were no gunmen in the house," said an officer from the Joint Coordination Center, which acts as liaison between Iraqi and US security forces.

In a statement of what appears to be sheer fabrication, Master Sergeant Terry Webster of the 101st Airborne told Reuters that an injured woman who was taken from the scene "confessed that the three people killed had planned to attack the soldiers as they drove by the house.”

Instead, according to survivors, troops attempted to cover up their wrong doing by methods becoming disturbingly more common. Shireen says before leaving, soldiers dragged her brother out into the corridor, shot him in the chest three more times, placed a gun next to his legs to make it appear he was armed, and then took pictures.

US troops were also accused of planting an AK-47 on a disabled man they shot to death in Hamdaniyah on 26 April. It’s another case of wildly differing accounts that indicate a cover-up by Marines who executed an unarmed civilian.

Marines say they found 52 year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad al-Zobaie digging a hole to plant a bomb and killed him in a gun battle. Relatives of the dead man say he was taken from his home at 2am by Marines and that they later heard shots. Too afraid to investigate until morning, they eventually found Hashim with gunshots to his face. A next door neighbor says Marines had taken a shovel and AK-47 from his house the night before.

In another event, Iraqi police and witnesses told reporters of eleven people rounded up and killed by US troops in Ishaqi in March, most of them women and children. Though troops were cleared, according to witnesses soldiers attempted to cover up the massacre by blowing up the house afterwards.

Significantly, in both the Ishaqi and Samarra incidents, Iraqi police stepped forward to contradict US military accounts.

In response to these, and other civilian killings by US troops, even the new puppet-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has said enough is enough. In unprecedented criticisms against the US occupation, al-Maliki said violence against civilians is a "daily phenomenon” by many US troops who “do not respect the Iraqi people”.

"They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion….There is a limit to the acceptable excuses,” he stated. “Those who kill intentionally or through negligence should be tried.”

He’s right. And there are the laws to do such. Yet, with a US administration that thinks the Geneva Conventions are “archaic,” it’s not surprising that individual soldiers are committing crimes condoned at the highest levels.

Clearly, some troops are out of control and they know it. Otherwise they wouldn’t be covering their tracks. But who is giving the orders that this is ok? This is where the focus of Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and all other investigations of abuse, murder, and torture ought to be. And where an inquiry into the destruction of Fallujah and the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians should begin.

“Every moment in Iraq is like this!”

by Karen Button

My Iraqi colleague and friend Aishya is on the phone detailing names, ages and method of death for each of the victims of Haditha’s massacre by US troops last November. She tells me that from her interviews with survivors, there are certain details being incorrectly reported and she wants to correct them. She double-checked, she says, on a recent trip when she was bringing medical supplies to Haditha.

As I scribble down the information, she pauses. “You know,” she says, “this happens every day, of course. And what about the wedding party in Mukaradeeb near Al-Qaim in the west] the US murdered in 2004?” At least 45 people were killed by US troops in the attack near Al-Qaim in western Iraq. Pentagon officials denied a wedding was in procession, claiming instead that party-goers were “anti-coalition forces.”

“We need to get this information out,” Aishya continues, “but let me tell you something that happened just the other day.”

Aishya was staying in Haditha with the Al-Hadithi family at the end of May. In the morning 41-year old Hanan woke her, looking very sad. When Aishya asked what was wrong, Hanan told her she was extremely worried about her 18-month old boy, Hakam. He’d been having severe diarrhea and stomach pains.

Looking at the little boy, Aishya became worried too. Having seen many similar cases, she was concerned for the boy’s life. “There is no doctor in Haditha who can treat cases like this and I told Hanan and her husband they should bring the little boy to Baghdad. I invited them to come with me, but they were too afraid. I offered to go to Ramadi with them, but they were also too afraid.”

In the west of Iraq, where heavy US and Iraqi military operations have been underway for close for over a year, tens of thousands of Iraqis are homeless, either from fleeing or from having their homes reduced to rubble in air attacks. Resistance in the area has grown in response to the US-led attacks.

Finally, Hanan and her husband, Jawad, agreed to load Hakam into the car with Aishya and go to nearby Baghdadi. “But, the doctor was away,” says Aishya. This is often the case as doctors try to attend to outlying villages. “The little boy was getting worse, vomiting the whole way.

“We began driving to Hit, but on the way there was a roadblock by the Americans. They now have a new technique. They block the road and stay the same distance away as a car bomb would explode. But how do the people get through? I decided to walk that distance to them. With my hands up, I began waving. I was calling to the Americans to tell them who we are.

“Instead of coming to meet me, one of the soldiers used this sign of his hand across his neck, like he would kill me. The other one put his M16 on the side of his tank and pointed it at me. Then they began moving a humvee and a tank toward me, stopping to completely block the road.”

Jawad Al-Hadithi wanted to get out of the car to help Aishya, but would likely have been shot as males between the ages of 15 and 55 are automatically considered potential “insurgents.”

“Can you imagine? They said nothing. No one came to talk to me. They didn’t even come closer, except with their tanks. This is they way of treatment of the people.”

Earlier in the day, the small group was worried only for the life of the child. Now, trying to find a doctor, they were worried for lives of them all. Aishya says Hanan was begging her husband that they must all leave or be killed.

“I felt so powerless. Useless. Imagine you can’t do anything for the person who is the closest to you.

“I had put my hands on my head. I was speaking to them in English, but they don’t care. They didn’t give a shit. Maybe they think I am a suicide bomber. But this little boy is very sick.

“We had to turn back. We had not choice. We drove to another village and here, fortunately, we could find a doctor. It is extremely hot now. We are in the summer. But we had to stop at a bridge because it was blocked by a concrete wall. We carried the boy by our arms, but we got him to the doctor.

“Imagine you have a little boy in a similar [health] situation and it is impossible to take your child to the doctor? What if your child might die because of this kind of treatment?

“This is the everyday story in Iraq. Every moment in Iraq is like this!”