‘All American’ blunder kills three Iraqi farmers

AL-JISR: It was night when the crack paratroopers from America’s 82nd Airborne Division arrived outside Ali Khalaf’s farmhouse in the parched fields of central Iraq.

Some of the family were asleep on mattresses in the dirt yard outside the single-storey house. Ali’s brother Ahmad lay there with his wife, Hudood, 25, and their two young sons and so they were the first to hear the soldiers as they approached the house at around 2am on Tuesday.

“We heard voices and so my husband went out to check what was happening. We thought they were thieves,” said Hudood. “My husband shouted at them and then immediately they started shooting.”

By the family’s account, the troops of the 82nd Airborne — known proudly as the “All American” — opened up a devastating barrage of gunfire lasting for at least an hour. When the shooting stopped, three farmers were dead and three others were injured, including Hudood’s two sons, Tassin, 12, and Hussein, 10.

On Tuesday a US military spokeswoman in Baghdad, Specialist Nicole Thompson, insisted that the troops came under attack from “unknown forces”. The “unknown forces” ran into a building, which was surrounded by the troops who then called in an air strike. “I can confirm at least one enemy dead,” she said.

The US military has chosen not to count the civilian casualties of the war in Iraq. But while more than 300 US soldiers have now been killed since the invasion to topple Saddam in March, thousands more Iraqis have died. The US military likes to advertise its achievements: how their patrols in the troubled town of Falluja, a few minutes drive from Ali Khalaf’s farmhouse, hand out colouring books and repaint schools and how elsewhere they repair broken water mains and sewage plants.

Most of the time it matters little.

In the heartlands of central Iraq, home to the Sunni Muslim minority, and now too in the Shia-dominated provinces of the south, there is less and less sympathy for the American military and their allies. The growing wave of frustration comes only in part from the few loyalists who still fight for Saddam Hussein and increasingly from a population affronted and humiliated by the same American tactics employed on Tuesday.

Though Sunnis, Ali Khalaf’s family can have benefited little from Saddam’s rule. Their homes are humble, with little electricity and only brackish drinking water. Five brothers share a few acres of farmland where they grow just enough wheat and cucumbers to survive.

As mourners gathered in a tent outside the farm on Tuesday, the family walked through the yard, enclosed by a brick wall and pointed out where the “enemy dead” were killed.

“There was no shooting from the house. It was the soldiers who shot at us,” said Hudood. “There was so much firing and shelling we couldn’t even get out of the farm.” Four thin mattresses still lay in the open air, close to the house and stained in blood. Just a few feet away were two large craters caused, the family explained, by missile strikes from the jet fighters called in as air support. The two young boys were injured on the mattresses and then carried bravely inside by Hudood.

Together the family tried to count the number of bullet holes in the wall of the farmhouse that bore the brunt of the attack. There were at least 90, perhaps 100. Outside in the fields lay dozens of the small 5.56mm bullet casings cast out by the US military’s M16 assault rifles.

It was probably one of these bullets which hit Ali Khalaf in the chest. He crawled inside the first room of the farmhouse apparently looking for a strip of cloth to improvise a bandage. He slumped to the floor just below the shattered glass window and next to an old wooden chest and there he died. A large pool of his blood lay caked to the floor of the room on Tuesday, chunks of plaster torn off the wall by the gunfire lay close by.

Hudood rushed her children into the second room of the farmhouse. She sat on the ground next to the bed with her children

“I covered my children in my arms and brought them close. I covered them with blankets, I thought perhaps it would help protect them,” Hudood said. “They are just small children. One of them said to me: ‘Don’t cry mummy. We have got God with us.’ ”

Next to her on the floor was her cousin Saadi Faqri, 30, who was staying in the house and ran to help her. During the shooting, a rocket or a large piece of shrapnel ripped through the wall of the bedroom, past Hudood and the children, and struck Saadi in the chest. He slumped on the floor and died. The third man to die, Salem Khalil, 40, was a neighbour who came running to help when he heard the shooting. His body was found lying on the ground outside.

Eventually the shooting stopped, the soldiers pulled back and then they called in the air strike. At least seven missiles were fired but only one hit the house, tearing through the ceiling of an unoccupied storeroom. On Tuesday morning the villagers of al-Jisr gathered to bury their dead in the large graveyard by the main road. At the same time, US military officers arrived at the farmhouse, took photographs, gathered shell casings and, through a translator, briefly apologised to the family. The words meant little.

“My brother was a polite and decent man. He was poor and we had only enough farmland to survive,” said Ali Khalaf’s brother Zaidan, who lives nearby. “None of us are interested in politics, none of us worked in Saddam’s regime. We got nothing from Saddam.

“I swear we don’t have any weapons in our homes and we don’t have any intention to fight the Americans. But the Americans have become a heavy weight on our shoulders. They don’t respect human beings, they humiliate the Iraqi people. They promised freedom and democracy. Is it freedom to kill people, make bloodshed and destroy our house? Is that what they mean by freedom?”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service