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Pastimes : NNBM - SI Branch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lost1 who wrote (25042)	3/29/2003 2:33:36 PM
From: abuelita	Respond to of 104155

lostie- here's a story you might like to read: Soldiers: 'We just want to go home' He had four days of training and a rusty Kalashnikov. Desperate for food and safety, he surrenders to The Globe's Geoffrey York By GEOFFREY YORK UPDATED AT 2:31 PM EST Saturday, Mar. 29, 2003 UMM QASR, IRAQ -- When the two Iraqis walked toward me, their hands above their heads in a classic surrender pose, my first reaction was to be apprehensive. The latest Iraqi guerrilla tactic is the faked surrender that turns into a deadly ambush. It had already killed several U.S. troops. But this time it was the real thing. After eight days of hunger and fear, the two Iraqi soldiers were ready to go to prison. They decided to surrender to the first troops they found, and they thought our media jeep was a military vehicle. We had stopped to take photographs of a propaganda portrait of Saddam Hussein brandishing a rifle in front of a gold-domed mosque. The soldiers emerged from a row of abandoned buildings. One of them waved his jacket above his head. The other clasped his hands behind his head in surrender fashion. We frisked them for weapons and put them into our jeep. They looked miserable and terrified. One of them was only 17. Both were skinny and sad-eyed. They were conscripts, ordinary workers from a rural province near Baghdad who had been handcuffed and press-ganged into the Iraqi army a week before the war. They had been given two rusty old Kalashnikovs, rifles that tended to jam after a couple of shots, and after four days of basic training on how to march and how to handle their guns, they were driven to the port city of Umm Qasr with their battalion on the eve of the war. There they were dumped onto the front line and ordered to defend their country. Within a few hours of the first bombardment of Umm Qasr by U.S. and British forces last Friday, the two threw down their weapons and ran away. Most of the soldiers in their battalion were dead or captured or had fled. For eight days they hid in abandoned buildings in Umm Qasr. They got rid of their military uniforms and begged for food and clothing from the local people. They hid their identification cards in their socks. "We were really scared; we didn't know what to do," one of them said. "We didn't fight at all; we just ran away. We're really fed up. We just want to go home." The two soldiers were Fadi Wais, 17, and his 20-year-old brother Ali. Before the war they toiled in the workshop of a locksmith and gun-cleaner in the Diyala region, east of Baghdad, about a nine-hour drive from Umm Qasr. After deserting, the young fugitives survived on brackish water, dried bread, and packages of biscuits British soldiers threw down from their tanks. Tired of living in fear, they thought about surrendering, but were not sure how to do it. "We're lucky we found these clothes," they said, pointing to their cheap shirts and pants. "We're hungry, but thank God some people gave us food, some watery soup or salty water we could hardly drink." Finally, an old man told them that the Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered in the 1991 Persian Gulf war had been well treated by the American soldiers. "We were scared that if we stayed in hiding, we would be hit by a stray bullet or a wolf would eat us." They said they had a statement to make to us. "We want to say that Saddam Hussein's rule is totally wrong. What kind of regime takes small kids and puts them in the army? God doesn't accept this -- taking people by force and giving them guns and forcing them to fight. It's all because of Saddam Hussein. We don't want him." They were still under the impression that we were soldiers. When we explained that we were journalists, they were stunned. Finally they gave us their home telephone number in Diyala and asked us to telephone their parents to tell them that their sons are alive. Then they changed their mind and asked us not to call. Their father had asked them to fight bravely. They didn't want to disappoint him. They wanted us to take them to a U.S. or British military base. They asked us how many years they would have to serve in jail. We drove to the old port of Umm Qasr, where I offered them to a pair of U.S. special forces men who were guarding the port. But the Americans didn't want them. In fact, they were irate that I had offered them the prisoners. "Don't do that any more," one of them shouted at me. So we drove the brothers to a prisoner-of-war camp on the outskirts of Umm Qasr, where British soldiers agreed to take them in. A soldier put his hands on their shoulders and pushed them toward the gate of the PoW camp, a sprawling fenced compound of white tents and buses. "Come on, fellows," he told the Iraqis. The British troops promised they would not be mistreated. Sergeant-Major Nick Wilson of the Duke of Wellington Regiment refused to say how many Iraqi prisoners were held in his camp, but did say the number is increasing daily. "They're coming from all directions. It's a steady flow," he said. "But this is the first time the press has brought them." globeandmail.ca