This particular detainee was already stripped down to his underwear, hands behind his back and a sandbag on his head. I never saw this man’s face. My job was to take a metal folding chair and smash it against the wall next to his head—he was faced against the wall with his nose touching it—while a fellow soldier screamed the same question over and over again. No matter what his answer, my job was to slam the chair against the wall. We did this until we got tired.
I was told to make sure he kept standing up, but something was wrong with his leg. He was injured, and he kept falling to the ground. The sergeant in charge would come and tell me to get him up on his feet, so I’d have to pick him up and put him against the wall. He kept going down. I kept pulling him up and putting him against the wall. My sergeant was upset with me for not making him continue to stand. He picked him up and slammed him against the wall several times. Then he left. When the man went down on the ground again, I noticed blood pouring down from under the sandbag. I let him sit, and when I noticed my sergeant coming again, I would tell him quickly to stand up.
Instead of guarding my unit from this detainee, I realized I was guarding the detainee from my unit.
I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame. Racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation. These are human beings. I’ve since been plagued by guilt. I feel guilt anytime I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn’t walk who we rolled onto a stretcher and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt anytime I see a mother with her children, like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt anytime I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street.
We were told we were fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. Without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.
I threw families onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country, in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. Our enemies are not five thousand miles away, they are right here at home, and if we organize and fight, we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world.
Civilian Testimony: The Cost of War in Iraq
Introduction
Over the past five years, U.S. military raids, patrols, and bombings have taken a terrible toll on the Iraqi people. Already straining before the war under dual weights of international sanctions and Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship, Iraqi society now finds itself in nearly complete collapse.
The cycle of violence that began with the U.S. invasion now permeates every aspect of society. “The humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world,” the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in March 2008. “Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. … Civilians continue to be killed in the hostilities. The injured often do not receive adequate medical care. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers.”1 More than five million Iraqis—20 percent of the country’s entire population—have fled their homes since the U.S. invasion in 2003. One and a half million Iraqis now live in Syria, while over a million refugees have gone to Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Gulf States.2
The daily reality of living in U.S.-occupied Iraq is so grim it’s beyond the comprehension of most Americans. Imagine for a moment that you are the parent of an Iraqi child. Imagine every day when you send your daughter off to school you worry that she could be killed by a car bomb, kidnapped for ransom by a criminal gang, accidentally shot by U.S. troops or neighborhood militias, or simply run over by an American convoy that had been ordered not to stop for “bumps in the road.”
Now imagine further that when your daughter gets to school, the school is only half full. Some of your daughter’s classmates have been killed and the parents of some of her other classmates pulled them out of school to make sure they don’t meet the same fate. In addition, many of the teachers have abandoned their jobs, fleeing the city for the perceived safety of their ancestral farm or the security of a neighboring country. You think every day about following suit—about ditching everything you have and leaving the country—but after five years of war, Syria and Jordan have closed their borders to all but the wealthiest Iraqis. So you continue the only way you know how, dropping your daughter off at school, hoping she’ll come home safe, and praying to God that the situation changes.
On television, George Bush, John McCain, David Petraeus, and other prominent Americans talk about “progress” brought on by a “surge” in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, but this “progress” is not apparent to most Iraqis. A March 2008 ABC/BBC News poll showed—by a more than two-to-one margin—that Iraqis believe the “presence of U.S. forces in Iraq” has made the security situation worse rather than better. The same poll showed 72 percent of Iraqis oppose the continued presence of coalition forces in their country. A majority believes the recent troop “surge” has worsened conditions rather than improving them.3
More American troops in Iraq has also brought more raids and sent a record number of Iraqis to prison—so many that Saddam Hussein’s old lockups cannot hold all those America has incarcerated. The U.S. military has responded by building new prison camps, the largest of which, Camp Bucca, will soon be able to hold thirty thousand detainees. By May 2008 the United States held more than twenty-four thousand “security detainees” in Iraq—prisoners who are held indefinitely without an arrest warrant, without charge, and with no opportunity for those held to defend themselves in a trial.4
Iraqis, like the veterans who spoke at Winter Soldier, clearly see American soldiers as the center of the violence rather than the solution. Wherever the Americans go they are attacked and when they are attacked they return fire. After a while, it hardly matters whether the stray bullet that killed your brother came from an American, an Iraqi, or an al-Qaeda in Iraq fighter. The point is that if the Americans had never driven their Humvees down your street, your brother would still be alive today.
A Note on the Testimony to Follow:
Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War wanted to bring a full panel of Iraqi civilians to Silver Spring, Maryland to testify at Winter Soldier. However, the Bush administration has largely refused to grant Iraqis visas to come to the United States. As a result, only two Iraqis civilians were able to speak in person at Winter Soldier, one of whose testimony is represented here. So the veterans worked with a team of independent filmmakers who gathered first-person testimony from Iraqis living in Baghdad and Basra as well as from Iraqi refugees who had fled to Jordan and Syria and presented them on giant video screens during Winter Soldier at the National Labor College. Most of the testimony that follows comes from translated excerpts from those videos.
Huda Jabbar Mohammed Ali
Born in 1968
Resident of al-Nidhal District, Baghdad
My husband Amr Abd al-Wahab Abd al-Fatah was killed by the occupation forces. He was forty years old. I have five children. It happened on al-Sa’adoon Street in the al-Nidhal area. On August 8, 2006, at 11 a.m.
My husband was a security guard at a school. When he was killed he was on an official assignment to see the principal’s assistant. He was in a car with my brother’s wife, my brother, and my brother’s wife’s uncle who was driving. While he was on the way to our neighborhood, the occupation forces were leaving the area. They were driving fast and firing randomly and my husband got shot in the head. My brother was injured.
I don’t understand what happened, because there was no explosion in
the area. The American forces were just shooting at everyone in front of them. They didn’t want anyone else driving on the road, so they just started shooting everyone, telling them to get out of the way. They shot everyone in front of them. So my husband got killed. Six other people were also killed.
Many members of the neighborhood witnessed this, and when they saw this accident they hurried to it and saw my brother’s wife screaming. Ambulances showed up and my husband was rushed to the hospital. Because he had been shot in the head he was completely paralyzed. They rushed him to the operating room but couldn’t save his life.
After the incident, I went to a place where the American forces are stationed behind al-Sha’ab Stadium. One of the soldiers there helped me write a letter, which I took to the Green Zone in the hopes that I would be able to get compensation for my loss. They kept sending me from one place to another and I never got any compensation. Now I am supporting my family with the help of God. I work in the school cleaning and assisting but the salary is not enough so I also sell candies in the school. I take care of my five children on my own.
Zahara Abbas
Mother
Iraqi Refugee Living in Syria
It was almost one in the morning. Zainab and I were awake. Everyone else was asleep. We heard airplanes far away, then closer. Then we heard the sounds of tanks in the street. We turned off the TV and we went to sleep.
All of the sudden, my bedroom windows broke. So we ran into the living room and the windows there broke. So we ran into the kitchen and the windows broke.
The freezer moved across the kitchen with such force. The refrigerator doors opened. The tiles fell off the wall. I went back into the living room and all of the sudden I saw American soldiers. There was chaos in the house. We didn’t know where to go.
They started shooting at the walls. They even shot the fish tank. It was a dark night for us. They started to search everything. They threw things from the cabinets, they messed up the house. They shot at the doors, the bathroom, at Ahmed’s bedroom; there are still traces of the shots.
And I want you to focus on this moment: I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. They were taking things, and my daughter Zamzam had been studying for her mid-year exams, and her books were on the floor when she went to bed. They started taking her books and putting them into a bag.
I asked my son, Ali, to ask them to leave the books, they were French lesson books. Ali asked them not to take the books, that they belonged to a student. They hit Ali on the head. They hit him so hard his neck almost broke.
There was a lot of destruction in the house. We had to spend about $8,000 to rebuild the house: the doors, the floor. It’s not so much the money as the psychological suffering that we endured and are still enduring. When I think of the raid, it was misery. It had a deep psychological effect. We always remember that night. I still remember my daughter Sarah screaming. She kept screaming and crying. It still affects her.
We took her outside while they were working on fixing our house. When she hears a noise she screams: “The Americans! The Americans are coming!” The girl gets scared.
Mohammed Amr
Resident of Adhamiya District, Baghdad
In March 2005 I witnessed the intentional mutilation of corpses by coalition forces. There were seven young men fighting U.S. forces, shooting at them with mortars. On that day the Americans prepared a trap for them because they shot at them from the same place repeatedly. So they captured and killed them.
I saw them when they received the corpses in the Adhamiya police station and they were mutilated. It was an after-death mutilation. They had been stabbed and stabbed again. Their delivery to the police station was very fast. They were killed at 11 a.m. and we received them at 1 p.m. So it’s impossible to be done by others.
Once they attacked our house to arrest my little brother. The raid started on April 4, 2007, at 2:30 a.m. and lasted until 5 a.m. They attacked us in a very stressful way. They exploded the outer door with two bombs. Our wives and children were in bed, and we too were scared. They captured me, my father, and my brother, they wrapped our hands so tight my hands turned blue. And they dislocated my shoulder. They beat my father too and he’s sixty years old. Then they started to beat us, accusing us of weapons possession, calling us terrorists, and they took away my brother and went away.
The target was my little brother. When the accuser pointed at him, they started beating him until blood came out of his face and every part of his body. They didn’t find any weapons, not even a bullet, but my mother was holding a little bag containing all our possessions, worth about $13,000. The interpreter took it and gave it to the American soldiers. They also took our cell phones, our blankets, even our clothes. They stayed for almost three hours.
My parents speak excellent English and they told the commanding officer that it was our money they were taking. He answered, “Choose between your money and your honor,” so we bought our honor with our money! We didn’t see any humanity in the American soldiers, only cruelty.
Shayma
Student, 11 years old
Resident of Adhamiya District, Baghdad
One day I was in school in the morning. We were in class. All of a sudden, American soldiers came in and asked us to leave. They spent about half of the school day. More than two hours.
They said there were weapons or terrorists in the school. So they asked us to go outside. They started searching and turned the entire school upside down. They searched the classrooms, the teachers’ rooms, the principal’s office. I was in fifth grade. We were terrified.
They said we had weapons and hid them. And that we had materials like explosives. They thought the school had them, but I haven’t seen anything like that and they didn’t find anything. When they left, they didn’t apologize to the teachers or the principal. They came quickly and left quickly. We were really scared. I was with my sister and we both closed our eyes.
They should not behave that way. We were children. They should have at least come in using another way other than coming with machine guns drawn. If they had to come in, they should have come in a normal way, maybe tell us first that this is what they need to do, maybe come after school to search it, tell us that they were concerned about our lives. And not in the middle of the school day and we were all scared from their weapons.
After the raid, we left the school quickly. We left our books and bags. We were frightened. We didn’t care about our bags. Our parents were waiting for us outside the house because they saw American soldiers and tanks. So they were waiting for us.
After that, my mother and father decided I should quit school. I was very disturbed and sad by that. They had to because of the deteriorated security situation. No safety. The American soldiers suddenly come to school. The militias suddenly come in. Most of my friends and classmates made the same decision and stopped going to school after that. Half the teachers also stayed at home, concerned about their lives. The other half continued to come to school but not regularly.
I am very ambitious. And did very well in school, but alas I couldn’t achieve my dream because of the security situation in Baghdad and the killing and violence and terrorism. I always wanted to be a good citizen for my society and achieve at least one of my dreams that I have been dreaming of. I wanted to achieve the Iraqi children’s dreams, children who faced the same tragedy as mine and my classmates at school. Now I am afraid of everything. Now any incident happens in front of me, I start crying and get frightened. I am sure it is not only me who feels this way; many Iraqis have been feeling the same.
I wish for every Iraqi as well as me and other kids my age and older to achieve their dreams. And for the violence to disappear. I wish for Iraq to be better than this, so that at least we, the new generation, can freely study and learn in order to build a better society, fix this destruction, end the violence in our country, and make our country beautiful. We want to be good people for our society to build our civilization not in a case of terror
and fear and destruction and see all these things that affect everybody. Not just me or my sister or few people, I am talking about everybody who lives in Iraq.
Salam Talib
Journalist and Computer Engineer
32 years old
Resident of Baghdad
Shukran jazeelan lehadhurikum wa insh’Allah nethheb jamea’n ile al-Iraq wa nettasharek fi el-sa’ade wa aman. Al-yom sanattahdeth an al-wada’ fi al-Iraq.5 [stunned silence from the audience of veterans]
I’m sorry—did I speak in Arabic? Guys—I think this is the problem. Iraqis actually speak another language.
I worked with most of the independent journalists that came to Iraq. I didn’t work for big corporations. Before the American invasion, I was a computer engineer. I came from a family that had been oppressed by Saddam. After Saddam was overthrown, I worked as a journalist just because there was nothing else to do.
One day I was driving in Baghdad, crossing an American checkpoint, and I was stopped along with all the other people. That day I was grouchy because the electricity had been off all day the day before. Before the war, when there was no electricity we used to sleep outside on the roof, but we can’t do that now. It’s not safe, because you never know what’s going to fall on you.
So I had to sleep indoors and it was really hot. And at seven in the morning I had to go to work. So what happened—at this checkpoint—they stopped me. And as you all notice I use crutches, because I had polio as a baby. One of the soldiers came to me, pointing a gun at me and said, “Get out of the car.” But he wasn’t saying it in polite, nice language, he was swearing and I began to fear for my safety. But despite the risk, I decided to speak my own language, a language the soldier didn’t understand.
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