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shootings by u.s. troops fuels resistance
The foundering of the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been highlighted in recent weeks by multiplying “friendly fire” incidents perpetrated by jittery troops with orders to be ruthless.
The worst was the slaughter on Sept. 12 of 10 members of the Iraqi police forces. These are precisely the forces that the occupation is trying to build up to relieve it from the police work that it has proven notably incompetent to carry out.
The policemen were blown away by American soldiers as they were chasing bandits near the city of Falluja, a center of opposition to the invaders.
The new Iraqi police force has been the target of much hatred and many attacks from the people, who regard them as pawns of the occupiers. But the murder of the policemen by the armed forces of their overlords produced an even broader and more violent hatred of the occupiers, since it demonstrated their contempt even for the Iraqis that serve them.
The funeral of the slain police on Sept. 12 was the occasion of a furious anti-U.S. demonstration of hundreds of local residents, many of them armed and vowing revenge on the U.S. forces. Local government workers staged a one-day general strike in protest against the killings.
Robert Fisk, a reporter for the British Independent, reported in a Sept. 19 dispatch that five days earlier occupation soldiers had killed a woman and her son at a wedding party in Baghdad, after some of the guests fired the traditional volley of shots in the air to celebrate the event.
On Sept. 17, there was another such incident. U.S. troops killed a 14 yr. old boy and wounded six other guests as they shot up a wedding party in Falluja, where celebrants also fired up in the air.
On Sept. 18, soldiers fired on a car on the road between Tikrit and Mosul that was carrying an Italian official who was trying to locate antiquities looted during the period of anarchy that followed the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime. He escaped injury, but his Iraqi translator was killed.
On the same day, near Khaldiya, after a military convoy was hit by a roadside bomb, a U.S. tank fired on two cars carrying Associated Press reporters. Stephen R. Hurst reported in a Sept. 19 AP dispatch: “The photographer, Karin Kadim, and his driver jumped from the car and ran for cover after they saw that a tank had them in its sights. They were fired on as they ran and the car was badly damaged in subsequent shooting. Neither man was hurt.
In the same incident, AP correspondent Tarek al-Issawi was shot at by soldiers using their tank’s 50 caliber machine gun. Al-Issawi also escaped injury.”
AP was forced to lodge a strong protest with the American military. In mid-August, U.S. soldiers killed a Reuters reporter outside the Abu Ghraid prison.
In his Sept. 19 article, translated in the Mexico City daily La Jornada, Fisk surmised from recent contradictory reports about U.S. casualties that the occupation commanders were now fudging the figures on American deaths.
Thus, on Sept. 17, the U.S. army reported that 3 soldiers had been killed and 2 wounded in an ambush 150 miles west of Baghdad. But Iraqi witnesses reported that at least 8 U.S. soldiers had been killed.
U.S. army officials claimed later, however, that only 2 men had been wounded, and none killed.
Within the U.S. Defense Department also, according to the New York Times, many officials are becoming worried by the gap between the reality in Iraq and the picture presented by the top officials, such as Donald Rumsfeld.
As things continue to unravel, now more than ever we need to mobilize broad opposition to this occupation to prevent any further bloodshed.
The article was written by Gerry Foley, and is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in the Oct. 2003 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
