The Great War for Civilisation (206 page)

“The truck belonged to the Ministry of Oil, it was a tanker without a trailer, registration number 5002, and we found this in what was left of the cab.” He gives me a golden sticker with “Allah” written in Arabic on one side and “Mohamed” on the other. God and his Prophet withstood the blast. Nothing else did. A dozen men have clustered ghoulishly around the nearest car and there is a mass of glistening bones beneath the blackened steering shaft, femurs and bits of a backbone. The Mercedes minibus had come from the province of Dyala, east of Baghdad, ten men and women and a driver who must have woken before dawn for a routine journey to the capital. But surely the bomber was en route to another target. Premature explosion. Was there a police station near here? Sergeant Henshon gives a Baghdad reply. “There was,” he says with a beautiful Alabama twang in this grim dawn. “But it's already
been
bombed.” Then a shopkeeper says he saw an American convoy driving down the road and the truck trying to catch up with it and colliding with one of the cars beside the minibus. Was this the target? A few hours later, the occupation powers announce that the bombing was a traffic accident, a petrol tanker that exploded when it collided with a bus. It is a lie. What about the grenade in the road? The chopped-up engine block? The missing trailer? But we must now live on lies. Anything to keep another suicide bombing out of the papers.

Believe we are winning. Believe that we always kill insurgents. I am in Samara again, December 2003, and schoolboy Issam Naim Hamid is the latest of America's famous “insurgents.” He was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself and his parents in his home in the Al-Jeheriya district of the ancient Abbasid city. It was three in the morning, according to his mother, Manal, when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division came to the house, firing bullets through the gate. One of the rounds pierced the door, punched through a window and entered his back, speeding on through an outer wall. His father was hit in the ankle and was taken to Tikrit hospital in serious condition. Issam cries in pain in the emergency hospital ward, a drip-tube sticking into his stomach through a wad of bloody bandages.

Then there is the case of thirty-one-year-old farmer Maouloud Hussein, who was trying to push his five young daughters and son into the back room of his two-room slum home a few hours earlier when yet another bullet came whizzing through the gate and the outer wall of the house, and smashed into Maouloud's back. His son, Mustafa, bleary-eyed with tears beside his father's bed, and his four daughters, Bushra, Hoda, Issra and Hassa, were untouched. But the bullet tore into Maouloud's body and exited through his chest. Doctors had just removed his spleen. His forty-one-year-old brother, Hamed, winces as he sees Maouloud cringing in agony—the wounded man tries to wave a hand at me but lapses into unconsciousness—and says that twenty-three bullets hit the house in their Al-Muthanna quarter of the city. Like Issam Hamid, he lay bleeding for several hours before help came. Issam's mother, Manal, tells a terrible story. “The Americans had an Iraqi interpreter and he told us to stay in our home,” she says. “But we had no telephone, we couldn't call an ambulance and both my husband and son were bleeding. The interpreter for the Americans just told us we were not allowed to leave the house.”

Hamed Hussein stands by his brother's bed in a state of suppressed fury. “You said you would bring us freedom and democracy but what are we supposed to think?” he asks. “My neighbour, the Americans took him in front of his wife and two children and tied his hands behind his back and then, a few hours later, after all this humiliation, they came and said his wife should take all her most expensive things and they put explosives in their house and blew it up. He is a farmer. He is innocent. What have we done to deserve this?”

What will people do when you treat them like this? I ask myself. If we can shoot down the innocent like this, how soon before we torture them as well? Soon, soon. Now the city of Samara has become, like Fallujah, a centre of resistance to the American 4th Infantry Division. “We wanted the Americans to help us,” another man said to me in a street of American-vandalised homes. “This was Saddam's Sunni area, but many of us disliked Saddam. But the Americans are doing this to humiliate us, to take their revenge on the attacks against them by the resistance.” Three times, I am taken into broken houses where young men tell me that they intend to join the
muqawama
—the resistance—after the humiliation and shame visited upon their homes. “We are a tribal people and I am from the al-Said family,” one says to me. “I have a university degree and I am a peaceful man, so why are the Americans attacking my home and filling my wife and children with fear?”

I go back and forth through my notes. It was in May 2003, only a month after the Americans entered Baghdad, that I first asked in
The Independent
: Isn't it time we called this a resistance war? I predicted the insurgency when U.S. forces first entered Baghdad; but the speed with which the Americans found themselves fighting off a growing army of fighters was astonishing. In five, six months, a guerrilla war might have started. But one month? Two Americans shot dead and another nine wounded by unidentified gunmen in Fallujah, two U.S. military policemen badly wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade at a north Baghdad police station, a grenade thrown at American soldiers near Abu Ghraib. That was the little toll of violence for just one day after the “liberation,” 27 May 2003—not counting the Muslim woman who approached U.S. troops with a hand grenade in each hand, was shot down before she could throw one of them and then, as she tried to hurl her second grenade from the ground, was finally killed by the Americans.

Even then, most people in Baghdad were receiving only two hours' electricity a day. The petrol queues—in a country whose oilfields had already been corralled by the U.S. military, along with the lucrative clean-up and reconstruction contracts for American companies—stretch for up to 2 miles. Children are being withdrawn from newly opened schools after widespread child kidnapping and rape. The police stations now guarded by U.S. troops have been turned into blockhouses, surrounded by armour and guards with heavy machine guns, in lookout posts draped in camouflage netting and surrounded by concrete walls. Baghdad is becoming a city of walls, 20 feet high, running for miles along highways and shopping streets. We Westerners are on the run. Caged inside the marble halls of Saddam's finest palace, thousands of American officers and civil servants—utterly cut off from the 5 million Iraqis in Baghdad around them—are now battling over their laptops to create the neo-conservative “democracy” dreamed up by Messrs. Rumsfeld, Perle and the rest. When they venture outside, they do so in flak jackets, perched inside armoured vehicles with escorts of heavily-armed troops.

Already, U.S. forces were driving through Baghdad much as the Israelis once did in southern Lebanon, ordering motorists to stay away from their vehicles, threatening them with death. “Stay 50 yards away from this vehicle or deadly force will be used” was the printed warning in Arabic on the back of the American Humvees. Bremer banned a small-circulation Shiite magazine—run by Muqtada Sadr's equally small party—for provoking sectarian tension and for comparing him to Saddam Hussein. So Sadr's militia rose up against the Americans. Najaf was besieged, just as the British had besieged it more than eighty years earlier. Apache gunships fired into the Baghdad Shia slums of Shuala. Iraq's cities were now hunting grounds for thieves and rapists. Its even older cities—the great archaeological treasures of Sumeria—were left unguarded, so an army of robbers had moved in to smash their way through their buried treasures to 3,000-year-old pots, turning the ancient sites into a land of craters, as if a B-52 had carpet-bombed the desert. After an international outcry following the theft of treasures from the Baghdad Museum, Washington sent an FBI–CIA team to investigate the robberies.
²⁰⁶
But the postwar tearing apart of the Sumerian cities is on an infinitely greater scale. Historians may one day conclude that this mass destruction of mankind's inheritance is among the most lasting tragedies of the Anglo–American “liberation” of Iraq.

Watching America's awesome control over this part of the world, its massive firepower, its bases and personnel across Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, Doha, Oman, Yemen, Israel of course, and now Iraq, you can see how the Iraqis thought it through. A generation of teenagers, crucified in the eight-year war with Iran, had grown up knowing nothing but suffering and death. What did their lives count for now? And if the Sunnis among that generation should ever become allied with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, what destruction might they sow among the Americans and any who chose to help them? A reborn Iraqi army of the shadows, forged in the greatest of all Middle East wars, and an army of suicide bombers; this would be an enemy to challenge any superpower.

Yet still the fantasy had to continue. Faced with ever greater armed resistance to their occupation, the Americans, it transpired, were admitting only a fraction of the attacks against their forces. Although the U.S. occupation authorities acknowledged ambushes in which their troops died, they were failing to report a mass of attacks and assaults against their patrols and bases in and around Baghdad. Yet the reality—largely unreported by the media—was that the Americans were no longer safe anywhere in Iraq: not at Baghdad airport, which they captured with so much fanfare in early April 2003, not at their military bases nor in the streets of central Baghdad nor in their vulnerable helicopters nor on the country roads. Helicopters were shot down over Fallujah, C-130s blasted out of the sky by missiles.

And the United States responded in the way of all occupation armies. Its prison camps became places of shame. Prisoners—there were 11,300 by May 2003 in Iraq alone—were routinely beaten during interrogation. Thirty had died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2005, often after brutal interrogations. We like to think we only began to discover this when the vile photographs of Abu Ghraib were revealed to the world in 2004, but in my files I discover that my colleague Patrick Cockburn and I had been writing about torture and prison abuse in the late summer of 2003. “Sources” may be a dubious word in journalism right now, but my sources for the beatings in Iraq were impeccable. Now it was happening at U.S. military bases around Iraq. “Torture works,” an American Special Forces colonel boasted to a friend of mine.

He was wrong. Torture creates resistance. Torture creates suicide bombers. Torture ends up by destroying the torturers. I remember the village of Khan Dari, where the first American to be blown up by a roadside bomb was killed in July 2003. His blood was still across the highway and the crowd was gloating over his death. And a man walked up to me who wanted to talk politics of a very violent kind. He had, he said, been a prisoner of the Americans and savagely beaten. “This is the way we deal with occupiers,” he said. “They came and said they were liberators but when we realised they were occupiers, we had to fight. We are people of steel. The Americans and all the other occupiers will burn.” Then came something as frightening as it was terrible. “I have a one-year-old daughter,” he said. “And I would happily put a bomb in her clothes and send her to the Americans to kill them.”

Already, by late July 2003, Amnesty International's investigators had amassed a damning file of evidence that Iraq's Anglo–American occupiers were ill-treating or torturing prisoners, refusing to obey Iraqi court orders to release detainees, using excessive force on demonstrators, killing innocent civilians and passing their own laws to prevent newly constituted Iraqi courts from trying American or British soldiers for crimes committed in the country. Amnesty also discovered that large sums of money had gone missing after house raids by American troops, in one case receiving from the U.S. authorities an acceptance that an officer in the U.S. 101st Division had “removed” 3 million Iraqi dinars—$2,000—from an Iraqi family's home. In another case, Amnesty found that an Iraqi labourer and father of three children, Radi Numa, died in British custody only hours after his arrest in the south of the country. On 10 May, British soldiers delivered a written note to the family's home stating that he “suffered a heart attack while we were asking questions about his son. We took him to the military hospital, go to the hospital.” Unaware that he was dead, the Numa family went to the hospital only to be told he wasn't there. They later found him in the mortuary where his unidentified corpse had been brought by Royal Military Police two days earlier. Baha Moussa, a young Basra hotel waiter, died in British military custody, reportedly beaten to death.

On at least two occasions arrests were made in Iraq not by soldiers but by “U.S. nationals in plain clothes”—presumably CIA agents. Nasser Abdul Latif, a twenty-three-year-old physics student, for example, was shot on 12 June in a raid on his home “by armed men in plain clothes, who were apparently U.S. nationals.” Searching for a senior member of the Baath party, U.S. troops raided the home of Khreisan Aballey on 30 April and arrested him and his eighty-year-old father. His brother was shot—the family didn't know if he was alive or dead—and Aballey, who claimed not to know the whereabouts of the Baathist official, was taken for interrogation. He said he was made to stand or kneel facing a wall for seven and a half days, hooded and handcuffed tightly with plastic strips. He reported that a U.S. soldier stamped on his foot and tore off one of his toenails.
²⁰⁷

Paul Bremer's “Coalition Provisional Authority” (CPA)—a name that just reeked of apologies for its own existence—issued edicts like a Roman emperor with the Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths at the gates of the capital. The Iraqi army would be disbanded, putting tens of thousands of armed men out of work. What did Bremer now think they were going to do in their spare time? Tons of razor wire now surrounded the marble Saddamite palace from which Bremer's whiz-kids and anti-terror advisers tried to govern Iraq. The “coalition”—essentially America and its British ally during the war—seemed less and less provisional and equally less an authority as the weeks went by.