So much love going around in Iraq:
nytimes.com
THE OCCUPIERS
How and Why Did Iraqi Die? 2 Tales of Anger and Denial
By JOHN TIERNEY
After he was killed by G.I.'s on Aug. 11, Ali Muhsin was found in a truck in Baghdad.
AGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 26 — Any of Ali Muhsin's neighbors can describe the scene after he was shot by the Americans.
First he stumbled around the corner, dripping blood, and collapsed near the front door of his home. His neighbors hailed a taxi to take him to the hospital, but then a Humvee roared down the street and blocked the way.
An American soldier leaped out and ran up to Ali, firing a shot in the air to scatter the crowd, then aiming his rifle at the boy. The boy's mother, Rajaa Yousif Matti, implored the soldier not to kill him. She wept and wailed. She pleaded in Arabic that he had done nothing wrong and begged to put him in the taxi. She kissed the soldier's boots. But she could not get through to the American.
"If they had let us take him to the hospital, my son would still be alive," she said two days later, at Ali's funeral, weeping once again as she accused the soldiers of killing her son by letting him bleed on the pavement for hours. "It does not matter if you are a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew. How could anyone treat a human being this way?"
The soldiers' answer is that they could not and did not. In their version of the scene, they feared for their own lives when they entered that narrow, crowded street in a tough neighborhood, yet they still did their best to save a young man who had just tried to kill them with a grenade. But, just like Ali's mother, they could not make themselves understood.
It was never easy for American soldiers and Iraqis to understand each other, and the gulf is widening now that the soldiers are responding to an average of a dozen attacks daily, and confusion becomes more common.
Stories about murderous civilians and brutal soldiers are becoming endemic. The truth is generally impossible to ascertain because many incidents are not even formally reported, much less investigated.
The death of Ali Muhsin, 17, two weeks ago made no news outside the neighborhood, but the scene was recorded by a passing photographer, and subsequently more than a dozen participants and witnesses were tracked down in an effort to reconcile the two versions of events.
Did the soldiers shoot a grenade-thrower or an innocent teenager? Did they then try to save his life or let him die?
The soldiers' story begins on the Port Said thoroughfare several blocks from Ali Muhsin's house on the scorching afternoon of Aug. 11. A Humvee full of soldiers was escorting another Humvee carrying their boss, Maj. Will Delgado, the executive officer of the First Battalion, 36th Infantry, First Armored Division.
Major Delgado and the soldiers described in interviews what happened:
As the lead Humvee descended to a short tunnel beneath Nidhal Street, Staff Sgt. Ray Vejar looked up at the potentially dangerous sidewalk overhead. "Up on the right side I saw a guy in white standing with a guy in green," Sergeant Vejar recalled. "The guy in white moved toward the railing." Then the Humvee entered the tunnel, cutting off his view.
As the second Humvee approached the tunnel, Major Delgado's view of the sidewalk overhead was obstructed, but he noticed something descending from the right side.
Major Delgado recalled: "I saw this object coming down, and I thought, `Is that a piece of trash, or is that something else?' Then I heard the explosion."
A second explosion followed. The attack sprayed the left side of the major's Humvee with shrapnel.
Major Delgado promptly radioed other units: "Two grenades, no casualties. We're going after them."
The soldiers drove up to the crowded overpass. Two figures in white and green started running when they saw the soldiers, and Sergeant Vejar got a good look at the man in green.
"He looked right at me, and I positively ID'd him as the guy who was at the railing," the sergeant said. When the man dashed into a warren of narrow streets, Major Delgado and Sergeant Vejar ran down one street and sent soldiers in a Humvee down another one, where they spotted a man in a green shirt walking along. They ordered him to approach the Humvee.
The young man, Ali Muhsin, fled, according to both the soldiers and Hazim Karim, a boy from the neighborhood who saw the encounter.
A Humvee gunner, Specialist John Rogers, fired a warning shot, and Ali stopped. As another soldier, Pfc. Christopher Crayton, got out of the Humvee and approached him, Ali ran again. Specialist Rogers fired several shots, hitting Ali before he turned toward his home on Al Urfalia Street, two blocks away.
By the time the soldiers found him outside his home, Sergeant Vejar had rejoined them in a Humvee. He was the one who jumped out and ran toward Ali. "I pushed back the people and got on the ground and positively ID'd the guy," he recalled. "I know he was at the railing."
Advertisement
That would have been impossible, Ali's relatives and friends said, because at that moment Ali was working at a tire-repair shop about 100 yards from the overpass.
"I was working with him in the shop," said Omar Natiq, his best friend. "We heard the explosions and went outside. He ran ahead of me to see what happened." The owner of the shop, Agab Latif, said he himself had not been in the shop when the grenades went off, but that another employee had also said Ali was at work at that moment.
"He was a very good boy, a very polite boy," Mr. Latif said, echoing a common theme among Ali's relatives and friends. They praised him for being the sole supporter of his mother and five sisters since his father's death earlier this year, and told how he had been trying to save money for an operation for his younger brother's wounded leg.
"All Ali did was go to work and go home," said Qusay Matti, a neighbor. "He had no interest in politics. The Baath party was particularly hated in this neighborhood, at least until now. Now we are all afraid of the Americans. My wife cannot forget him lying on the street asking for water. She wakes up at night crying out, `Ali is thirsty.' "
Ali's relatives and neighbors said his only crimes were being scared of soldiers and wearing the wrong shirt at the wrong place — perhaps by arriving at the overpass shortly after the explosions. The scene afterward on their street convinced many that the soldiers were trigger-happy.
"They seemed confused and arrogant and nervous," said Ali's mother. Other neighbors complained of being threatened with rifles in their faces. They quoted English phrases they said they had heard from the soldiers: "Shut your mouth." "Not your business." "If you speak, I will kill you."
Ali's uncle, Khadim Herz, said the experience made him nostalgic for Saddam Hussein. "We were very happy with the Americans, but we are not friends anymore," he said. "We heard about Saddam's mass graves, and now we are seeing the Americans' graves."
The accounts from relatives and the alibi from the tire shop did not sway the soldiers' verdict on Ali.
"There's no doubt in my mind," Major Delgado said. "I wouldn't have spent 15 minutes chasing him in 40 pounds of gear in 125-degree heat if I wasn't sure."
Whether or not he had thrown a grenade, did the soldiers prevent him from receiving medical treatment?
Sergeant Vejar acknowledged stopping the family from sending Ali to the hospital in a taxi. "I didn't want to be heartless," he said, "but I didn't want to let a suspect get away, and he was in no condition to move. We wanted to transport him ourselves."
He and Major Delgado, who arrived on the scene a moment after the sergeant, said they bandaged Ali's leg and chest as quickly as they could with a crowd of people tugging at their arms and Ali's mother at their feet.
"I kept trying to tell the woman at my feet, `It's O.K., it's O.K.,' " Major Delgado said. "The only thing that calmed her down was when I said `Al Kindi,' the name of the hospital. We finished dressing the wounds and loaded him on the truck and left. The whole procedure didn't take more than five minutes."
Ali's family insisted he lay there for an hour, but there are reasons to doubt it. One is that some neighbors, when interviewed individually, said it was more like 15 minutes.
The other reason is that it is not easy to imagine any American soldiers willingly standing around for an hour surrounded by angry Iraqis in a narrow street flanked by two-story homes that could be presumed to contain AK-47's.
As Major Delgado and Sergeant Vejar were at Ali's side, Private Crayton was anxiously scanning the second-floor balconies and pointing his rifle at anyone who appeared. "Those were the longest four minutes of my life," he said.
As Sergeant Vejar put it: "A period of time can seem forever when you have one of your family members is on the ground bleeding. But we were there no longer than four to five minutes. The only thing on my mind was: I want to get out of here."
The soldiers drove Ali several blocks to an open spot in Tahrir Square for a rendezvous they had arranged with an ambulance, but Ali died when they arrived at the square, they said, so they left the body there with Iraqi police officers; he was never taken to Iban al-Kindi Hospital, as Ali's mother had been promised.
But no one got that message through to the family, and that one final misunderstanding sealed the verdict against the soldiers.
Ali's mother and her family searched frantically for him at Al Kindi, then at other hospitals. When they finally found his body at Tahrir Square, his mother concluded that the Americans had never intended to save him.
As her son's body was loaded into a truck, Mrs. Matti sat at the square weeping and telling passers-by how the Americans had stopped her from taking her son to the hospital.
"Why would they leave him on the pavement to die?" she asked. Flouting Muslim custom, she ripped off her head scarf and sat there with her hair exposed as she beat her chest.
"Why?" she kept asking. "Why?"
There were no soldiers left to give her an answer, not that they could have anyway. She had her story and they had theirs. |
