[A-List] Fw: Eyewitness: 'The Marines Shot Anything They Considered A Threat'

["Christopher Black" <bar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick Rozoff" <r_rozoff@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <r_rozoff@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 4:49 AM
Subject: Eyewitness: 'The Marines Shot Anything They Considered A Threat'


>
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c
=StoryFT&cid=1048313663741&p=1012571727172
>
> Financial Times
> April 10, 2003
>
> Eyewitness: "The marines shot anything they considered
> a threat"
> By Paul Eedle in Baghdad
>
>
>
> Continuing attacks on US forces in Baghdad by Iraqi
> fighters in civilian clothes produced a deadly
> response on Thursday, as nervous soldiers of the US
> 5th Marines opened fire repeatedly, hitting unarmed
> men, women and children.
>
> Three times in three hours I saw troops who had seized
> one of Saddam Hussein's small palaces open fire,
> killing five people and wounding five - among them a
> six-year-old girl who was shot in the head.
>
> Lance-Corporal Manuel Silva told me at the palace in
> Adhamiya, north of the centre, that the marines had
> heard Mr Hussein might be hiding in the area, and had
> come under sustained fire from rocket-propelled
> grenades and small-arms.
>
> An officer told us later that the marines had taken
> many casualties. "Their soldiers aren't wearing
> uniforms," Cpl Silva said. "You try to pick out where
> it is coming from and all you see is civilians."
>
> Half a mile away, we had seen a man in civilian
> clothes carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
> Around the corner, a dead fighter lay on the pavement
> by a palm tree, his face covered with a white cloth.
> He was wearing grey trousers and a dirty pink jumper.
>
> The marines shot anything that they considered
> remotely a threat. An old blue Volkswagen came up an
> alley opposite the palace gate. A marine on top of the
> stone-clad arch of the gate opened fire and the car
> crashed into a wall.
>
> We heard screaming from the alley. None of the US
> troops moved. If it had not been for Mohammed Fatnan,
> an Iraqi translator with the UK's Channel 4 News, the
> Americans would not have treated the casualties. Mr
> Fatnan crossed the road outside the palace under the
> guns of two marine armoured fighting vehicles and came
> back carrying a young girl, Zahra Abdel-Samii',
> bleeding from the head.
>
> In the alley, a man who had run on to his balcony upon
> hearing gunfire had been shot dead. Men wailing "There
> is no God but God" were hauling him into the back seat
> of a car in a blanket.
>
> Minutes later, the explosion of a rocket-propelled
> grenade thundered through the palace garden, then came
> bursts of heavy gunfire.
>
> A white Mitsubishi van roared along the main road that
> runs beside the palace wall, the driver slumped over
> the wheel, unconscious or already dead. The van veered
> off the road into a wall.
>
> Mr Fatnan and two marines ran across the road to help
> a woman injured in the arm and foot and a young man,
> her son, shot in the head.
>
> The dead driver had not understood the warning shots
> meant to tell him to stop.
>
> The marines had had enough of journalists filming. We
> walked slowly along the road outside the palace back
> to our van. Our driver met us with an account of how
> marines in a palace watchtower had shot dead three men
> walking up the pavement only 20 yards away from him.
>
>
>
>
>
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