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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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July 26th,
2008 - Incident on Baghdad’s Airport Road |
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Incident on Baghdad’s
Airport Road By Abigail Hauslohner Time Magazine July 26, 2008 Known affectionately to his
friends and family as Abu Ziad (father of Ziad), Hafedh Aboud Mehdi, 58, woke
up on the morning of June 25, packed a lunch for himself and his son as he
often does, and left his home in Baghdad's central Karrada district at 7:30
a.m. He was driving his 1996 maroon Opel Vita on route to Baghdad
International Airport, where he has worked at the airport bank for the past
13 years. That morning Mehdi ran into
his 21-year-old son Mohammed, who works as a driver shuttling bank employees
to and from work. His son had been stopped in traffic at a checkpoint on the
way to the airport with six people stuffed in his car. Having a VIP pass that
allows him to proceed through checkpoints without waiting in the usual lines,
Mehdi volunteered to take a couple of female passengers off his son's hands.
Maha Adnan Youssef, 31, and Suroor Shahid Ahmed, 32, decided to switch cars. What happened next is now
being fiercely debated. When Mohammed arrived at the office, he was surprised
to see that his father still hadn't shown up. When a co-worker popped his
head in to tell Mohammed his father's car had broken down, he got back on the
road to see what the problem was. Not far from the airport, Mohammed
discovered his father's vehicle consumed by flames, with an American military
convoy preventing him from getting any closer. "I was in agony trying to
do something," he told TIME a week later. "Seeing my father burning
in the vehicle, I fainted." According to a U.S. military
press release issued the same day, a car carrying "three criminals"
opened fire on a convoy of U.S. troops stopped on the roadside on the way to
Baghdad International Airport at 8:40 a.m. "The Soldiers [from the 4th
Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division] returned fire, which resulted in
the vehicle running off the road and striking a wall. The vehicle then
exploded," read the release. The military statement also said "a
weapon was recovered from the wreckage," and "two MND-B convoy
vehicles received bullet hole damage from the small arms fire." But the
Iraqi police report, which was obtained by TIME, had a different account:
"Twenty-seven bullet holes [were found] on the right-hand side of
[Mehdi's] car. [We] found two bullets of caliber 50 mm inside the car... We
did not see or find any weapons or empty cartridges inside the car." The Iraqi police report
identified the three "charred" bodies inside the car as Hafedh
Abboud Mehdi, Maha Adnan Youssef, and Surour Shahid Ahmed. If the military
report is correct, it would be the first time ever that an Iraqi has gotten a
weapon through all the checkpoints to try to carry out an attack on that
stretch of road, according to a senior interior ministry official. But if
it's an attempt to cover-up the wrongful deaths of three civilians, it joins
a list of notorious incidents involving U.S. military personnel, including
the 2005 events in Haditha. The airport road deaths have
proven especially infuriating to Iraqis at a time when their government is
engaged in talks to establish the long-term legal status of U.S. troops and
contractors operating in their country. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
was so outraged by the shooting that last month he ordered a formal court
inquiry into the incident. Should the Iraqi judge assigned to the case decide
to summon the American soldiers involved as witnesses, he will pose a direct
challenge to the current legal status of actions carried out by U.S. troops
in the country. But perhaps even more critical at this stage of the
negotiations is how the U.S. military chooses to deal with the information on
the deaths now being brought to light by the firm contracted to secure
airport road checkpoints, relatives of the dead, witnesses and the Iraqi
police. The day after Mehdi,
Youssef, and Ahmed burned to death in Mehdi's car, the U.S. military
reiterated its initial report. U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Steven Stover
responded to questions posed by TIME through E-mail, saying: "We standby
the information we sent in the press release... There are photos of the two
U.S. Military vehicles with bullet holes." Reports and interviews
collected by TIME appear to indicate otherwise. For the past year, the road
to Baghdad's airport, where Mehdi's car burned that morning, has been one of
the most heavily secured roads in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has
contracted a private British security firm, Global Strategies Group, to
control a series of checkpoints leading up to the airport, which include
multiple ID checks and a car X-ray scan for explosives. At one checkpoint,
passengers are asked to exit the car completely, leaving all doors open,
including the trunk and hood, while Global security guards lead sniffer dogs
around each car, checking inside and outside again for explosives. "It's impossible for
anyone to get through here with a weapon. Even Ali al-Dabbagh [Iraq's
government spokesman] can't get a weapon in," a security guard at the
second Global checkpoint told TIME a week after the incident. He said Mehdi
had to have been "driving fast." Says another Global official who
was on the road the day of the shooting, "I know they were unarmed... It
was the U.S. military shooting three civilians. This is public
knowledge." An Iraqi witness to the
incident, who also drives the airport road each day for work, said he had
been approaching Mehdi's Opel from a distance when the Americans fired.
"I was about 400 meters behind the car and suddenly I saw dust coming up
because the Americans were firing. When I saw what was happening, I braked
and started to put the car in reverse," said the man who wanted to
remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. "One bullet penetrated the
dashboard on my car. I turned the car around and drove back in the wrong
direction telling other cars to stop." The U.S. military does not
normally patrol the section of road where the incident occurred, so Mehdi would
have had no way of knowing that he would encounter an American convoy there
that morning. "No, they are not usually there," says U.S. military
spokesman Mark Cheadle, referring to the convoy from the 4th Brigade Combat
Team, 10th Mountain Division, that was parked at the roadside. According to a
Global Security statement obtained by TIME, the American platoon had been on
its way to a military base near the airport, when they were forced to pull
over because one humvee was having engine trouble. It said that one of the
soldiers on the ground said he thought he heard gunfire and alerted the
others through their headsets. The gunner of the first humvee quickly rotated
in his turret to face the road and fired on a car that was speeding past the
convoy. That car turned out to be Mehdi's. Even if the 58-year-old
father of seven and his two female co-workers had planned to attack a platoon
of armored American humvees, it would have been a sure suicidal mission to
carry it out with "small arms," as the military identified their
weapons - which generally refers to rifles or handguns - on such a heavily
guarded road, with no escape path; it's surrounded by blast walls on either
side. Like the Iraqi police
report, the Global statement said that no weapons had been found at the scene
and that Mehdi's car had been searched at all of the Global checkpoints prior
to the incident. It also stated there was "no evidence" the three
people in the car had displayed any hostility towards the American convoy. Mehdi, who his oldest son
says "loved the Americans," was the sole breadwinner for his large
family of 13, which also includes the two wives of his oldest sons and three
grandchildren. The Shi'ite family lived in the predominantly Sunni
neighborhood of al-Dora in south Baghdad up until the peak of sectarian
violence in late 2006. That was when Mehdi's youngest son, Ali, then four
years old, was kidnapped by insurgents and held for ransom for over a week.
After paying to get him back, the family left all of their furniture and
belongings and fled to Karrada, a safer neighborhood in central Baghdad.
"The people who kidnapped our son were from our neighborhood," says
Mehdi's widow, Iman Kadhem, 48. "Now they have taken over our house and
they don't want to leave. They have taken everything in the house." For the past year and a
half, Mehdi's large family has been forced to crowd into two small, sparsely
furnished concrete rooms of a rented home in Karrada. "He was the only
one who supported the family," says Kadhem, sobbing. "How will we
pay the rent?" "Abu Ziad would never
have carried a gun - let alone a sponge in his pocket," says one airport
employee who was good friends with Mehdi and who expressed intense anger
following his death. Mehdi's son Mohammed also says his father never owned
any weapons. "We don't have a single bullet in our house." The U.S. military concluded
its own closed investigation into the incident two weeks ago but has yet to
release the findings. On July 19, the three families of the deceased say they
were invited to the airport police station to meet with American officers
identified by Mehdi's 21-year old son Mohammed as Brigadier General Robin
Swan, the Deputy Commanding General for Multi-National Forces in Baghdad, and
a "Lieutenant Colonel Lather." According to Mohammed, the military
offered each family $10,000, but the families refused the money, demanding a
formal letter of apology first. "The Lieutenant Colonel kept saying he
was sorry for the incident. They said it was a very big tragedy. But they
never said they were wrong or they had made a mistake," says Mohammed.
"They never gave a reason for why they were apologizing." The U.S.
military has not confirmed that this incident took place. The Iraqi police report
listed the American soldiers in the convoy who fired on Mehdi's car as
"Lt. Thanie Painter... driver Sgt. Phillips... Sgt. Sagona... Sgt.
Elliot and Sgt. Shakespeare." The military has not confirmed the names
of the soldiers involved or commented on their status. U.S. military spokesman
Lt. Col. Stover responded to a TIME request for comment with this e-mail:
"I pride myself, as does my command, on NEVER saying no comment. We have
nothing to hide. Rather I would request you respect the investigation and
review process. I would never violate a Soldier's right to privacy and unlike
you would never interfere with an ongoing investigation." Like the residents of
Haditha, the Mehdi, Youssef, and Ahmed families now want justice. "The
flames in our hearts over [Suroor's] death will not die until God orders
justice upon the people whose hands are soaked in [her] blood," Suroor
Shahid Ahmed's sister, Tahani Shahid Ahmed told TIME in a written statement
this week. "We just want to know the reason that they killed him,"
says Mehdi's widow. "He didn't belong to any party and he's not a
Baathist. He was only an employee in the bank." Asked how she would
confront the soldiers who killed her husband, she says: "I would ask
them 'why did you do this to us?' Look at our situation. We barely have
enough space to sleep." External link: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1826872,00.html |