U.S. Apologizes for Baghdad Mosque Incident
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 14 — The United States military apologized today for an incident that deeply angered Iraqi religious leaders on Wednesday when soldiers in a helicopter forced down a flag near a mosque in an overwhelmingly Shiite district of Baghdad. A large protest followed, leading to the death of one Iraqi and the wounding of four others by American troops.
The flag episode outraged residents of Sadr City, a poor but fervent Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad. They poured out in droves on Wednesday to demonstrate against what they considered the desecration of an important religious symbol.
At least 3,000 Iraqis joined the protest, said American officials, who added that the troops opened fire during the demonstration after being attacked by small-arms fire and a rocket-propelled grenade. The Iraqi who was killed had been operating the grenade-launcher, the officials said.
American officials also said today that they were changing the way they set up temporary checkpoints on roads and streets to make them more visible and apparent to Iraqi drivers, after the deaths of at least nine Iraqis in the past several weeks who were gunned down at checkpoints by American soldiers.
One such attack killed two Iraqi policemen who were responding to an emergency call but were killed when they approached what the top American commander described today as a "hasty traffic control point" — a temporary checkpoint typically set up in a matter of minutes.
Violence continued against occupation troops today as a British soldier was killed and two were wounded near Basra after the ambulance in which they were traveling was attacked by a command-detonated explosive.
"It was a marked ambulance," said Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, a military spokesman in Baghdad. "Someone saw the red cross and decided to pull the trigger anyway."
Basra, a large city in southern Iraq dominated by Shiites, had been relatively peaceful until the past week, when a dire shortage of gasoline and electricity led to riots. The unrest subsided after British troops, who oversee that part of Iraq, dispensed fuel from their own reserves.
After the protest on Wednesday in Sadr City, Shiites warned that violence could result if American troops did not adopt a less aggressive presence. Wednesday's bloodshed is expected to be a major topic in Shiite mosques on Friday, the Muslim holy day.
"Any American soldier who comes to Sadr City, we will kill him," said Saleh Obeid, 50, a fireman who works at the fire station near the mosque.
Accounts differed about what happened to prompt the demonstration: Shiites in Sadr City said soldiers in the helicopter appeared to remove the flag intentionally from a tower near the mosque. But American officials said downward rotor wash from the hovering helicopter stripped the flag from the tower, something they described as apparently unintentional, but very regrettable.
"Apparently, the helicopter did either blow down the flag, or somehow, that flag was taken down," Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of ground troops in Iraq, said during a news conference today.
"We are taking steps to ensure that that doesn't happen again," General Sanchez said. "There is no policy on our part to fly helicopters up to communications towers to take down flags. And my understanding at this point is that, in fact, there has been an apology issued by the commander on the ground because of this incident that blew down that flag."
News agencies reported that an American commander in the area had distributed a letter today vowing to punish the soldiers responsible as well as to reduce the presence of American troops in the area. However, a military spokesman said he could not confirm the authenticity of the letter.
General Sanchez also said today that military forces would improve the visibility of traffic checkpoints so that "we have enough standoff so that people that are getting close to it will know that it's there and can slow down and comply with the hasty checkpoint."
The new procedures, he said, are an effort to ensure that "what you don't have is a vehicle that's coming up to the checkpoint has no idea that it's there, and the first time it knows that the checkpoint is there is when it starts getting warning shots." |
