TWO MURDEROUS ATTACKS IN 48 HOURS: U.S. TROOPS KILL MORE UNARMED PROTESTERS

TWO MURDEROUS ATTACKS IN 48 HOURS: U.S. TROOPS KILL MORE UNARMED PROTESTERS

By Fred Goldstein

May 4, 2003--On April 30, at about the same moment that a taped message from U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was telling the people that "Iraq belongs to you," U.S. troops were opening fire on unarmed demonstrators in the Iraqi city of Fallujah for the second time in 48 hours. They killed two and wounded 14, according to the mayor, himself a former exile.

The shootings by the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division were intended to suppress a demonstration of about 1,000 people marching downtown in front of a battalion headquarters. And why were they there, risking their lives? To protest a massacre of unarmed demonstrators in the same town two days earlier, when up to 15 Iraqis were killed and 75 wounded by the U.S. forces.

When they came out the second time in even greater numbers, they were fired on again.

On April 28, a unit of the 82nd Airborne had opened fire on a crowd estimated between 100 and 200. It had poured out of the mosques after services, about 9 p.m., demanding that U.S. troops get out of the al- Qaed school they had been occupying, so that the school could be opened for the local students.

Contrary to the unanimous accounts of residents and the physical evidence, Lt. Col. Eric Nantz of the 82nd Airborne, 1st Battalion, told reporters that the troops were fired on from the ground and rooftops. Nantz claimed his troops had recovered eight weapons and spent shell casings from AK-47s. "They declined to show the weapons or the shell casings," noted the Los Angeles Times of April 29.

Nantz told a Times reporter that soldiers returned fire, aiming only at those who had weapons. Speaking in the language of his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, Nantz said, "The engagement was sharp, precise, then it was complete."

EYEWITNESSES CONTRADICT U.S. FORCES

However, eyewitnesses told the Times a different story. The article reported that "When the Americans rolled into town three days ago, they angered the community when they set up camp in a school, making it impossible for the children to resume classes. Residents became even more upset when the soldiers took school desks and piled them in the street as roadblocks.

"The school is right across the street from a row of houses," continued the Times. "A 9-year-old boy, Baha Mohammed, was in his front yard and was shot in the shoulder. On Tuesday, he rested on a cot in Fallujah Hospital, passing in and out of consciousness while his father fanned him with a towel.

"'The Americans did this, and for what reason?' said the boy's father, Mohammed Rabee, 34.

"The Salah family lived across the street too. According to witness accounts, when the bullets started to fly, panicked protesters tried to get into the Salahs' courtyard. Muthana Salah, 41, went to open the gate. A bullet hit him in the foot, and he collapsed.

"His brother Walid, 40, rushed out to help and he slumped over, dead.

"His other brother, Osama, 36, tried to push a car into the road to block Muthana so he could pull him away-and Osama went down, shot in the stomach.

"His wife, Abtisam, 38, ran out to drag her husband to safety, and she went down too. When it was all over, Muthana lost his right foot. Walid was dead. Osama was in critical condition in intensive care. Abtisam was treated and released."

'NO WARNING AT ALL'

Ahmed Hatim, 21, told how after the last day of prayer, a group of people gathered outside the mosque "and began to talk about the indignities the soldiers were heaping on their community," continued the Times. "He said the crowd marched through town and at one point the soldiers fired over their heads but they would not be stopped. He said when they reached the school, there was no warning at all... 'When we reached the school, they opened fire in an indiscriminate way...'"

Hatim was shot in the thigh and was interviewed in his hospital bed. When asked why the crowd continued to march after the warning shots, he said "It was a provocation. We could not stand idle. We have dignity and honor."

The Washington Post reported on April 29 that "Iraqis interviewed at the hospital insisted it was a peaceful demonstration and that no one was armed or throwing rocks. One wounded 18-year-old man, Aqil Khaleil, said U.S. soldiers opened fire without warning.

" 'They waited until we came very close, and then they started shooting,' he said."

Edtesam Shamsudein said, "We were sitting in our house. When the shooting started, my husband tried to close the door to keep the children in, and he was shot." Her brother was killed. "Americans are criminals," she said.

Dr. Ahmed Ghanim al-Ali, director of Fallujah General Hospital, said there were 13 dead, including three boys no older than 10. "He said medical crews were shot at when they went to retrieve the injured, which numbered 75 people," reported the Post.

Numerous sources, including the Los Angeles Times, International Television News, the London Guardian and the Independent, reported that while bullet holes riddled the walls of the row houses across the street from the school, there were no bullet holes at all in the school itself, which the U.S. claimed was under attack. The exception was the New York Times, whose reporter was the only one able to report bullet holes in his dispatch of April 29.

The Los Angeles Times observed that "the school's walls did not appear to have any bullet marks. ... Across the street, the houses were pockmarked by gunfire. Huge holes were blown into the concrete."

This massacre is similar to the one that took place in Mosul a week earlier, when U.S. Marines killed 12 Iraqis demonstrating against the occupation.

PANIC OR DELIBERATE ORDERS?

Some reports attribute the shooting to panic by the U.S. troops, who are not used to being an occupying force and feared they were under attack. But the fact is that the unit in question, according to the Post, had been "trained extensively in crowd control. About half the company involved at the school served in Kosovo," according to 2nd Lt. Devin Woods.

The Los Angeles Times reporter said a soldier told him that "when he climbed up on the roof to help, he could not find a position because so many soldiers were lined up along the roughly 200-foot edge."

It is important to note that this massacre took place on the day that the new viceroy of Iraq, retired Gen. Jay Garner--a war contractor, friend of the Ariel Sharon regime in Israel, and close buddy of Donald Rumsfeld--was meeting with a hundred or so would-be puppets and quislings in Baghdad. He was trying to patch together some kind of figleaf transitional regime to cover for the U.S. takeover of Iraq.

It is highly unlikely that any commander in the field would, on his own, permit or take responsibility for creating such a massacre, which could be viewed as a major potential political embarrassment, at the very moment that Garner was trying to convince the public that the U.S. was there to help the Iraqis.

And it is even more unlikely that the military command in Fallujah would shoot at unarmed demonstrators twice in 48 hours just when Rumsfeld was making his grand entry into Baghdad--unless orders had been given.

If anything, the repression was timed for Rumsfeld's visit.

Two major capitalist newspapers have revealed, for all who care to read, that the initial massacre was a veritable ambush. Furious fire was unleashed indiscriminately on the people with absolutely no warning whatsoever, at close range. This act must show that similar demonstrations and acts of hostility and resistance are occurring throughout the country, but are going unreported.

The massacre at Fallujah was a bloody message from Rumsfeld, Gen. Tommy Franks and company that they will be ruthless in trying to crush the resistance.

In other words, there is no embarrassment at the Pentagon or in Garner's headquarters in Baghdad. This was not bumbling. This was not panic. This was a planned massacre, just like the one in Mosul. The U.S. high command sought this massacre. This is a continuation of the war against the Iraqi people. It is pure military terrorism. As such, it is a symbol of the occupation.

SIGN OF POLITICAL BANKRUPTCY

But the massacre is also a symbol of political bankruptcy. The U.S. occupation can only rule by force. But force alone will be insufficient in the long run to hold back the struggle. The masses of people are opposed to the occupation. They have fought in the past against British colonial occupation. They will inevitably fight against the U.S. occupation. The anti-colonial hatred is burning underneath and will result in resistance.

The U.S. military has destroyed the independent state of Iraq. Ever since the 1958 revolution that overthrew the monarchy and ousted imperialism, all successive regimes-regardless of their reactionary policies, and there were many--have survived only because they fought to keep the country from falling back into the hands of imperialism and tried to develop Iraq into a modern society, raising the living standards and social conditions of the masses far above what they had experienced under colonial rule.

Now U.S. imperialism has destroyed that independent state. Robert Fisk, reporter from the London-based Independent, pointed out in an April 22 interview on Amy Goodman's Pacifica program, "Democracy Now!," that 158 Iraqi government buildings were destroyed in the recent assault. These government buildings and all the technical and intellectual property in them were the product of decades of modernization and enlightenment necessary to build a developed society.

George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the entire right-wing cabal have shown that, contrary to all the propaganda, they want a weakened, dependent Iraq, bereft of its culture and history, and without any means to function as a state independent of imperialism. They want to reverse the historical process of the past 45 years at the expense of 24 million people. But they have to first construct a colonial apparatus and seize control of the oil and other resources of Iraq.

Their prospects are dim. Reporter Phil Reeves wrote from Fallujah in the London Independent of April 30, "The language of the American forces is beginning to sound grimly familiar. They complain of having to shoot stone-throwers because the Iraqi youths might-and did on one occasion in Ramadi three days ago, they allege--throw grenades as well as stones.

"They describe people firing at them from within crowds of civilian demonstrators. They live in dread of car bombs and suicide attackers. They say that the majority of Iraqis like them but add that there is a small element lodged in the fabric of Iraqi society that is determined to make trouble.

"This has all been said before, by their allies, the Israelis, several hundred miles to the west. And no one has yet found a solution. Leaving the scene of this mayhem yesterday, one person's words were unforgettable. They came, not from a protester or a gunman, but from the headmaster of the school where this bloodshed happened. Many of his students were among the protesters.

"When he heard of the shootings, he rushed to the hospital to give blood. He is a quietly spoken man, but cloudy-eyed with anger and grief. Now, he said calmly, he is willing to die as a 'martyr' to take his revenge against the Americans."