CPTnet
December 12, 2003
IRAQ: U.S. soldiers kill four of their own and three handcuffed Iraqis in Al
Jazeera village

by Bob Holmes

On December 1, our CPT delegation encountered the U.S. soldiers occupying
Ramadi and diverting traffic away from the government buildings. They
responded with smiles to our greetings and received our human rights leaflet
graciously.

Sa'ad's daughter's face blanched when she saw us come through the door.
Sa'ad, the Iraqi human rights lawyer we were visiting, explained how one
month earlier his daughter watched other foreigners come through that door
with guns, force her father to lie on the floor, handcuff him, put a bag
over his head and lead him away. He was detained in a yard with other men
from the neighbourhood for five hours while the U.S. soldiers attacked a
house a few doors away.

Sa'ad took us to Al Jazeera, a small village about ten km from Ramadi, to
the home of Ibrahim, another lawyer. The home had been destroyed by tank
and/or helicopter shelling. As we approached from the road a crowd of
villagers approached to meet us. Sa'ad relieved the obvious wariness of
both groups by explaining that we had come to witness what ordinary Iraqis
are experiencing under U.S. occupation and to report what we have witnessed
to ordinary people in the U.S. and Canada. The people of Al Jazeera were as
anxious to tell the story as we were to hear it.

Eight days earlier, on November 22, at 5 pm, Ibrahim, his brother Sabah,
and Mohammed, a guest, arrived at the house to find it surrounded by U.S.
soldiers. The soldiers stopped them, handcuffed them and sat them on the
ground. Suspecting that there were armed resisters in the house the soldiers
entered from two different sides. There was no electricity and in the dark
one group mistook the other for the enemy and opened fire. The U.S. soldiers
killed four of their own. The distraught soldiers came out of the house and
shot the three handcuffed Iraqi men dead and then ordered the house
destroyed by helicopter and tank fire.

The story was told and retold by relatives holding Mohammed's fifteen
day-old son and two-year-old daughter. Ibrahim's nine-year-old son stood
silent in our midst. Lunch was prepared and served in the home of one of
the villagers. This Iraqi hospitality was warmly extended to foreigners
whose country's soldiers had done such wrong. But they asked, "What kind of
liberation is this?"