The death of two innocent Iraqis was thought so unremarkable the US military did not even report it, but Peter Beaumont says it reflects an increasingly callous disregard of civilian lives in coalition operations
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
Farah Fadhil was only 18 when she was killed. An American soldier threw a grenade through the window of her apartment. Her death, early last Monday, was slow and agonising. Her legs had been shredded, her hands burnt and punctured by splinters of metal, suggesting that the bright high-school student had covered her face to shield it from the explosion.
She had been walking to the window to try to calm an escalating situation; to use her smattering of English to plead with the soldiers who were spraying her apartment building with bullets.
But then a grenade was thrown and Farah died. So did Marwan Hassan who, according to neighbours, was caught in the crossfire as he went looking for his brother when the shooting began.
What is perhaps most shocking about their deaths is that the coalition troops who killed them did not even bother to record details of the raid with the coalition military press office. The killings were that unremarkable. What happened in Mahmudiya last week should not be forgotten, for the story of this raid is also the story of the dark side of the US-led occupation of Iraq, of the violent and sometimes lethal raids carried out apparently beyond any accountability.
For while the media are encouraged to count each US death, the Iraqi civilians who have died at American hands since the fall of Saddam's regime have been as uncounted as their names have been unacknowledged.
Mahmudiya is typical of the satellite towns that ring Baghdad, and the apartment block where Farah died was typical of the blocks to be found there - five storeys or so high, set among dusty paths lined with palms and stunted trees. In Saddam's time, the people who lived here were reasonably well-off - junior technicians for the nearby factories run by the Ministry of Military Industrialisation. These are not the poorest, but they are by no stretch of the imagination well-off.
When the Americans arrived, say neighbours, the residents of this cluster of blocks liked the young GIs. They say there were no problems and that their children played with the troops, while residents would give them food as the patrols passed by.
But all that came to a sudden bloody end at 12.30am last Monday, when soldiers arrived outside the apartment block where Farah and her family lived. What happened in a few minutes, and in the chaos of the hours that followed, is written across its walls. The bullet marks that pock the walls are spread in arcs right across the front of the apartment house, so widely spaced in places that the only conclusion you can draw is that a line of men stood here and sprayed the building wildly.
I stood inside and looked to where the men must have been standing, towards the apartment houses the other way. I could not find impacts on the concrete paths or on the facing walls that would suggest that there was a two-way firefight here. Whatever happened here was one-sided, a wall of fire unleashed at a building packed with sleeping families. Further examination shows powder burns where door locks had been shot off and splintered wood where the doors had been kicked in. All the evidence was that this was a raid that - like so many before it - went horribly wrong.
This is what the residents, and local police, told us had happened. Inside the apartment with Farah were her mother and a brother, Haroon, 13. As the soldiers started smashing doors, they began to kick in Farah's door with no warning. Panicking, and thinking that thieves were breaki police Graffiti |
