River: 'American heroes...'

[Lani]

I've been reading River's blog off and on for months. This one left me in tears, again.

"River: 'American heroes...'
Date: Saturday, November 20 @ 10:19:11 EST
Topic: Occupied Iraq

By River, Baghdad Burning
riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#110063119588554403

I'm feeling sick- literally. I can't get the video Al-Jazeera played out of my head:

The mosque strewn with bodies of Iraqis- not still with prayer or meditation, but prostrate with death- Some seemingly bloated... an old man with a younger one leaning upon him... legs, feet, hands, blood everywhere... The dusty sun filtering in through the windows... the stillness of the horrid place. Then the stillness is broken- in walk some marines, guns pointed at the bodies... the mosque resonates with harsh American voices arguing over a body- was he dead, was he alive? I watched, tense, wondering what they would do- I expected the usual Marines treatment- that a heavy, booted foot would kick the man perhaps to see if he groaned. But it didn't work that way- the crack of gunfire suddenly explodes in the mosque as the Marine fires at the seemingly dead man and then come the words, "He's dead now."

"He's dead now." He said it calmly, matter-of-factly, in a sort of sing-song voice that made my blood run cold... and the Marines around him didn't care. They just roamed around the mosque and began to drag around the corpses because, apparently, this was nothing to them. This was probably a commonplace incident.

We sat, horrified, stunned with the horror of the scene that unfolded in front of our eyes. It's the third day of Eid and we were finally able to gather as a family- a cousin, his wife and their two daughters, two aunts, and an elderly uncle. E. and my cousin had been standing in line for two days to get fuel so we could go visit the elderly uncle on the final day of a very desolate Eid. The room was silent at the end of the scene, with only the voice of the news anchor and the sobs of my aunt. My little cousin flinched and dropped her sthingy, face frozen with shock, eyes wide with disbelief, glued to the television screen, "Is he dead? Did they kill him?" I swallowed hard, trying to gulp away the lump lodged in my throat and watched as my cousin buried his face in his hands, ashamed to look at his daughter.

"What was I supposed to tell them?" He asked, an hour later, after we had sent his two daughters to help their grandmother in the kitchen. "What am I supposed to tell them- 'Yes darling, they killed him- the Americans killed a wounded man; they are occupying our country, killing people and we are sitting here eating, drinking and watching tv'?" He shook his head, "How much more do they have to see? What is left for them to see?"

They killed a wounded man. It's hard to believe. They killed a man who was completely helpless- like he was some sort of diseased animal. I had read the articles and heard the stories of this happening before- wounded civilians being thrown on the side of the road or shot in cold blood- but to see it happening on television is something else- it makes me crazy with anger.

And what will happen now? A criminal investigation against a single Marine who did the shooting? Just like what happened with the Abu Ghraib atrocities? A couple of people will be blamed and the whole thing will be buried under the rubble of idiotic military psychologists, defense analysts, Pentagon officials and spokespeople and it will be forgotten. In the end, all anyone will remember is that a single Marine shot and killed a single Iraqi 'insurgent' and it won't matter anymore.

It's typical American technique- every single atrocity is lost and covered up by blaming a specific person and getting it over with. What people don't understand is that the whole military is infested with these psychopaths. In this last year we've seen murderers, torturers and xenophobes running around in tanks and guns. I don't care what does it: I don't care if it's the tension, the fear, the 'enemy'... it's murder. We are occupied by murderers. We're under the same pressure, as Iraqis, except that we weren't trained for this situation, and yet we're all expected to be benevolent and understanding and, above all, grateful. I'm feeling sick, depressed and frightened. I don't know what to say anymore... they aren't humans and they don't deserve any compassion.

So why is the world so obsessed with beheadings? How is this so very different? The difference is that the people who are doing the beheadings are extremists... the people slaughtering Iraqis- torturing in prisons and shooting wounded prisoners- are "American Heroes". Congratulations, you must be so proud of yourselves today.

Mykeru.com has pictures.
www.mykeru.com/weekly/2004_1114_1120.html#111604

Excuse me please, I'm going to go be sick for a little while.

Murder...

People in Falloojeh are being murdered. The stories coming back are horrifying. People being shot in cold blood in the streets and being buried under tons of concrete and iron... where is the world? Bury Arafat and hurry up and pay attention to what's happening in Iraq.

They say the people have nothing to eat. No produce is going into the city and the water has been cut off for days and days. Do you know what it's like to have no clean water??? People are drinking contaminated water and coming down with diarrhoea and other diseases. There are corpses in the street because no one can risk leaving their home to bury people. Families are burying children and parents in the gardens of their homes. WHERE IS EVERYONE???

Furthermore, where is Sistani? Why isn't he saying anything about the situation? When the South was being attacked, Sunni clerics everywhere decried the attacks. Where is Sistani now, when people are looking to him for some reaction? The silence is deafening.

We're not leaving the house lately. There was a total of 8 hours of electricity today and we've been using the generator sparingly because there is a mysterious fuel shortage... several explosions were heard in different places.

Things are deteriorating swiftly.

More on Falloojeh crisis:
Aid agencies say Falluja "big disaster"...
www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=620124§ion=news

Eyewitness: Smoke and Corpses...
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4004873.stm

Iraqis will never forgive this- never. It's outrageous- it's genocide and America, with the help and support of Allawi, is responsible. May whoever contributes to this see the sorrow, terror and misery of the people suffering in Falloojeh.

One of Those Weeks...

These last few days have been explosive- literally.

The sounds seem to be coming from everywhere. I've gotten tired of running upstairs and out on to the roof to find out where it's coming from. It feels like the first days of the war sometimes- planes, explosions, bullets, smoke... roads cut off.

We haven't attempted to leave the house but an uncle who was supposed to visit called to say he wouldn't be able to come because so many roads were blocked. Many people were told not to go to work and students stopped going to college yesterday. It's one of those weeks. Some areas in Baghdad seem to be cut off by armed gangs.

Eid is in a couple of days and that means there's Eid cleaning to do. The water was cut off all day today and the electricity was gone too. This seems to be happening all over Baghdad- we heard about the same situation in several areas. Can someone say 'collective punishment'?! WE didn't kidnap your relatives Allawi... it was Zarqawi, remember?!

Falloojeh is still being destroyed and the stories we hear are mixed. It's difficult to tell what's true and what isn't. All we know is that there are dozens of civilians being killed. They also say 18 Americans have died and over a hundred are wounded.

Mosul is also a mess. They are saying there isn't a tank or patrol car in sight in that city.

Read more about the situation at Juan Cole
juancole.com/
- would love to say more but the generator is going to be turned off in a couple of minutes."

Reprinted from Baghdad Burning:
riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#110063119588554403

[Moses]

In answer to the question, where is Sistani? -- It would appear that he is complicit in what is becoming a targeted squelching ot the Sunni minority.

This would appear to be due to a number of reasons. First, Sistani has always wanted the elections to occur-- was dismayed when they were not going to occur, and was the one to insist that they be scheduled. So he would not be in favor of revolts which threaten to delay the elections. Second, the reason Sistani is in favor of elections, it is thought, is that Shi'a are the majority, and will likely be assurred of power, if the elections are held. Third, there is pent-up hostility, or residual hostility, toward Sunni due to their previous power, among Shi'a. Fourth, many of the victims of Sunni violence have been Shi'a working for the US, because the US barred "Baathists" from participation initially, and of course Shi'a are in the majority. In addition, there is the presence of foreign fighters within the Sunni uprising, which dilutes the nationalist/Iraqi pretensions of the Sunni uprising.

See: Mark Levine's Iraq's Lose-Lose Scenario

[Moses]

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Election Plans Roiled
Sunni Extremist Death Threats against Sistani
Hamza Hendawi of AP reports that the Shiite vote may get split. He says that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is declining to join the mega-Shiite party list toward which Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is working. Likewise, it is not clear that Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers will join the big list, since they are dissatisfied with the offer of only 10 percent of the list's seats in parliament.
It seems to me that the Shiites needn't any longer worry too much about a split list. I can't imagine that Allawi's list is going to do all that well, since his Iraqi National Accord, consisting of ex-Baathists, isn't very popular and he is potentially a lame duck. Why would southern Shiites vote for ex-Baathists who ordered Marines into Najaf last August? Only if Allawi has enormous advantages of incumbency could his list overcome all his negatives.
President Ghazi Yawir seems to me unlikely to get many Shiite votes. Since he took former Iraqi cabinet minister and Kurdish activist Nasrin Barwari as a second wife, he might pick up some Kurdish votes. (To underline the complexities of Iraq, Barwari is something of a feminist.) The Shamar tribe, which Yawir does not head but from whose chiefly family he comes, does have a small Shiite section, but it isn't big and many Iraqi tribes are religiously split like that. I can't see how Yawir can translate that fact into any significant number of Shiite votes. My guess is that most Shiites will vote as they think Sistani wants them to.
If the Sadrists run their own list, they might not do so badly, and if they mobilize poor Shiites to vote who otherwise might stay home, they might well actually increase the proportion of the national vote that goes to the Shiites.
So I now think the Shiites will manage to get their parliamentary majority. The real danger is that the Sunni Arabs will stay home, and the Shiites get 85% of the seats. If that happens, the religious Shiite parties are likely to dominate parliament, perhaps even holding 51% of seats (138 of 275).
A rear-guard Sunni Arab (and other) effort to postpone the elections grew in force on Friday, with 17 small parties now agitating for a 6-month delay. So far, however, the leading Shiite figures and parties are insisting on going ahead in January, and both Allawi and Bush seem to be committed.
It could be argued that the elections may as well be held in January, since 1) the security situation is not actually likely to be better in six months and 2) postponement might try the patience of Sistani, who insisted on early elections and can bring hundreds of thousands of protesters into the street with a single word. A Shiite agitation for elections at a time when most Sunnis want a delay could produce communal rioting.
An argument for delay is that security is so bad in the country that elections can easily be disrupted. Already, 90 out of 540 voter registration sites are closed. The guerrillas can strike at will into the heavily fortified Green Zone. On Friday they killed four British employees and wounded at least 14 with mortar fire. The kind of mortar they used has a range of 30 miles, so all they had to do was bring it in close enough on a flatbed truck with a cover, uncover, fire, and then disappear. The point is that if a hard target like the Green Zone (government offices, US embassy) can still be struck at will, then soft targets like hundreds of polling stations are sitting ducks. January 30 could be a bloodbath. Iraqis, aware of this, are already complaining about plans to use schools as polling places, since they don't want their children bombed.
Already, Al-Zaman reports that guerrillas in Mosul targeted voter registration offices in Mosul this week, setting at least one on fire, and directing death threats at election workers.
Of course, the other problem with holding the elections on Jan. 30 is that many Sunni Arabs are angry and sullen and are likely to boycott. There is no point in holding elections that have no legitimate outcome.
Sunni radicals are aware that the Shiite grand ayatollah, Sistani, is a key obstacle to their own dreams of a Taliban state in Iraq, and some think they know what to do about that. KarbalaNews.net reports in Arabic that Salafi (Sunni fundamentalist) websites in Saudi Arabia-- which have a direct and indirect impact on the situation in Iraq-- have issued a call for the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. One Salafi cleric, writing at Muntadiyat al-Qimmah, rejected all Shiite pleas for Muslim unity because, he said, Shiites are "more deserving of being killed than the Crusaders."
KarbalaNews complains that such sites present doctored "sayings" falsely attributed to the Prophet Muhammad commanding jihad against the Shiites. (The Sunni-Shiite split did not exist at the time of Muhammad, d. 632).
Aside from the report of the content of this Salafi site, which the author says has the support of Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, this article demonstrates the great fear Iraqi Shiites have of Saudi Wahhabism, which has through the past two and a half centuries been fiercely anti-Shiite.


www.juancole.com/2004/11/election-plans-roiled-sunni-extremist.html
posted by Juan @ 11/27/2004 06:35:01 AM