Fisk: US killing many "Syrian terrorists" and "freedom fighters" on Iraq streets

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

World: One, Two, Three .... What Are They Fighting For? (excerpt)

I was in the police station in the town of Fallujah when I realized
the extent of the schizophrenia. Capt. Christopher Cirino of the 82nd
Airborne was trying to explain to me the nature of the attacks so
regularly carried out against American forces in the Sunni Muslim
Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential rest home
down the road ? ?Dreamland?, the Americans call it ? but this was not
the extent of his soldiers? disorientation. ?The men we are being
attacked by,? he said, ?are Syrian-trained terrorists and local
freedom fighters.? Come again? ?Freedom fighters.? But that?s what
Capt. Cirino called them ? and rightly so.

Here?s the reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe ?
indeed have to believe, along with their president and his Defense
Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld ? that Osama Bin Laden?s ?Al-Qaeda?
guerrillas, pouring over Iraq?s borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia
(note how those close allies and neighbors of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey
are always left out of the equation), are assaulting United States
forces as part of the ?war on terror?. Special Forces soldiers are now
being told by their officers that the ?war on terror? has been
transferred from America to Iraq, as if in some miraculous way, Sept.
11, 2001, is now Iraq 2003. Note too how the Americans always leave
the Iraqis out of the culpability bracket ? unless they can be
described as ?Baath party remnants?, ?diehards? or ?dead-enders? by
the US proconsul, Paul Bremer.

Capt. Cirino?s problem, of course, is that he knows part of the truth.

Ordinary Iraqis ? many of them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein ?
are attacking the American occupation army 35 times a day in the
Baghdad area alone. And Capt. Cirino works in Fallujah?s local police
station, where America?s newly hired Iraqi policemen are the brothers
and uncles and ? no doubt ? fathers of some of those now waging
guerrilla war against American soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I
suspect, are indeed themselves the ?terrorists?. So if he calls the
bad guys ?terrorists?, the local cops ? his first line of defense ?
would be very angry indeed.

No wonder morale is low. No wonder the American soldiers I meet on the
streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities don?t mince their words
about their own government. US troops have been given orders not to
bad-mouth their president or secretary of defense in front of Iraqis
or reporters (who have about the same status in the eyes of the
occupation authorities). But when I suggested to a group of US
military police near Abu Ghurayb they would be voting Republican at
the next election, they fell about laughing. ?We shouldn?t be here and
we should never have been sent here,? one of them told me with
astonishing candor. ?And maybe you can tell me: Why were we sent
 here??

Little wonder, then, that Stars and Stripes, the American military?s
own newspaper, reported this month that one third of the soldiers in
Iraq suffered from low morale. And is it any wonder, that being the
case, that US forces in Iraq are shooting down the innocent, kicking
and brutalizing prisoners, trashing homes and ? eyewitness testimony
is coming from hundreds of Iraqis ? stealing money from houses they
are raiding? No, this is not Vietnam ? where the Americans sometimes
lost 3,000 men in a month ? nor is the US Army in Iraq turning into a
rabble. Not yet. And they remain light years away from the butchery of
Saddam?s henchmen. But human rights monitors, civilian occupation
officials and journalists ? not to mention Iraqis themselves ? are
increasingly appalled at the behavior of the American military
occupiers.

Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints, who overtake convoys
under attack ? or who merely pass the scene of an American raid ? are
being gunned down with abandon. US official ?inquiries? into these
killings routinely result in either silence or claims that the
soldiers ?obeyed their rules of engagement? ? rules that the Americans
will not disclose to the public.

The rot comes from the top. Even during the Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq, US forces declined to take responsibility for the innocents they
killed. ?We do not do body counts,? Gen. Tommy Franks announced. So
there was no apology for the 16 civilians killed at Mansur when the
?Allies? ? note how we Brits get caught up in this misleading title ?
bombed a residential suburb in the vain hope of killing Saddam. When
US Special Forces raided a house in the very same area four months
later ? hunting for the very same Iraqi leader ? they killed six
civilians, including a 14-year-old boy and a middle-aged woman, and
only announced, four days later, that they would hold an ?inquiry?.
Not an investigation, you understand, nothing that would suggest there
was anything wrong in gunning down six Iraqi civilians; and in due
course the ?inquiry? was forgotten ? as it was no doubt meant to be ?
and nothing has been heard of it again.

Again, during the invasion, the Americans dropped hundreds of cluster
bombs on villages outside the town of Hillah. They left behind a
butcher?s shop of chopped-up corpses. Film of babies cut in half
during the raid was not even transmitted by the Reuters crew in
Baghdad. The Pentagon then said there were ?no indications? cluster
bombs had been dropped at Hillah ? even though Sky TV found some
unexploded and brought them back to Baghdad.

I first came across this absence of remorse ? or rather absence of
responsibility ? in a slum suburb of Baghdad called Hayy Al-Gailani.
Two men had run a new American checkpoint ? a roll of barbed wire
tossed across a road before dawn one morning in July ? and US troops
had opened fire at the car. Indeed, they fired so many bullets that
the vehicle burst into flames. And while the dead or dying men were
burned inside, the Americans who had set up the checkpoint simply
boarded their armored vehicles and left the scene. They never even
bothered to visit the hospital mortuary to find out the identities of
the men they killed ? an obvious step if they believed they had killed
?terrorists? ? and inform their relatives.

Scenes like this are being repeated across Iraq daily. Which is why
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and other humanitarian organizations
are protesting ever more vigorously about the failure of the US Army
even to count the numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account for their
own role in killing civilians. ?It is a tragedy that US soldiers have
killed so many civilians in Baghdad,? Human Rights Watch?s Joe Stork
said. ?But it is really incredible that the US military does not even
count these deaths.?

Human Rights Watch has counted 94 Iraqi civilians killed by Americans
in the capital. The organisation also criticized American forces for
humiliating prisoners, not least by their habit of placing their feet
on the heads of prisoners. Some American soldiers are now being
trained in Jordan ? by Jordanians ? in the ?respect? that should be
accorded to Iraqi civilians and about the culture of Islam. About
time.

But on the ground in Iraq, Americans have a license to kill. Not a
single soldier has been disciplined for shooting civilians ? even when
the fatality involves an Iraqi working for the occupation authorities.
No action has been taken, for instance, over the soldier who fired a
single shot through the window of an Italian diplomat?s car, killing
his translator, in northern Iraq. Nor against the soldiers of the 82nd
Airborne who gunned down 14 Sunni Muslim protesters in Fallujah in
April. (Capt. Cirino was not involved.) Nor against the troops who
shot dead 11 more protesters in Mosul. Sometimes, the evidence of low
morale mounts over a long period. In one Iraqi city, for example, the
?Coalition Provisional Authority? ? which is what the occupation
authorities call themselves ? have instructed local money changers not
to give dollars for Iraqi dinars to occupation soldiers: Too many
Iraqi dinars had been stolen by troops during house raids. Repeatedly,
in Baghdad, Hillah, Tikrit, Mosul and Fallujah Iraqis have told me
that they were robbed by American troops during raids and at
checkpoints. Unless there is a monumental conspiracy on a nationwide
scale by Iraqis, some of these reports must bear the stamp of truth.

Then there was the case of the Bengal tiger. A group of US troops
entered the Baghdad zoo one evening for partying. During the party,
one of the soldiers decided to pet the tiger who ? being a Bengal
tiger ? sank his teeth into the soldier. The Americans then shot the
tiger dead. The Americans promised an ?inquiry? ? of which nothing has
been heard since. Ironically, the one incident where US forces faced
disciplinary action followed an incident in which a US helicopter crew
took a black religious flag from a communications tower in Sadr City
in Baghdad. The violence that followed cost the life of an Iraqi
civilian. Suicides among US troops in Iraq have risen in recent
months ? up to three times the usual rate among American servicemen.
At least 23 soldiers are believed to have taken their lives since the
Anglo-American invasion and others have been wounded in attempting
suicide. As usual, the US Army only revealed this statistic following
constant questioning.

The daily attacks on Americans outside Baghdad ? up to 50 in a night ?
go, like the civilian Iraqi dead, unrecorded. Traveling back from
Fallujah to Baghdad after dark last month, I saw mortar explosions and
tracer fire around 13 American bases ? not a word of which was later
revealed by the occupation authorities. At Baghdad airport last month,
five mortar shells fell near the runway as a Jordanian airliner was
boarding passengers for Amman. I saw this attack with my own eyes.
That same afternoon, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in
Iraq, claimed he knew nothing about the attack, which ? unless his
junior officers are slovenly ? he must have been well aware of.

Source: via Mike Whitney, (Robert Fisk, Arab News)


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