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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
A Villager Attacks U.S. Troops, but Why?
Iraqi's Life and Death Provide Cautionary Tale
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 11, 2003; Page A01
ALBU ALWAN, Iraq -- On a sun-drenched plain along a bluff of barren cliffs, a cheap headstone made of cement marks the grave of Omar Ibrahim Khalaf. His name was hastily scrawled in white chalk. Underneath is a religious invocation that begins, "In the name of God, the most merciful and compassionate." It is followed simply by the date of his death, Friday, Aug. 1.
But one word on the marker distinguishes Khalaf's resting place. His epitaph declares him a shahid, a martyr.
In a 15-minute battle so intense that villagers called it a glimpse of hell, U.S. forces killed Khalaf as he tried to fire rocket-propelled grenades at a convoy. A .50-caliber round tore off his skull. Machine-gun fire almost detached his left arm and ankle, which were left dangling from a corpse riddled with bullets and smeared with blood and the powdery dirt of the Euphrates River valley.
Beyond Khalaf's home of Albu Alwan, his death has been little more than a footnote in a simmering guerrilla war that has claimed the lives of 56 U.S. soldiers since major combat operations were declared over May 1. But in the mystery that still shrouds the dozen or so attacks carried out daily against U.S. troops occupying the country, Khalaf's life provides a cautionary tale about today's Iraq -- and where the combustible mix of poverty, anger and resentment can lead.
American officials contend that the vast majority of the attacks are driven by remnants of former president Saddam Hussein's government and the Baath Party he used for 35 years to hold power. Men like Khalaf, they say, are the foot soldiers lured by bounties that run as high as $5,000, perhaps motivated by loyalty to the fallen government, or by fear from threats to their family if they refuse to fight.
But the portrait of Khalaf that emerged from interviews last week suggests a more complicated figure.
A 32-year-old father of six, he was an army deserter who, villagers say, had nothing to do with the Baath Party. He prayed at the mosque on Fridays, although he was not a fervently religious man. His hardscrabble life was shaped by the grinding poverty of his village, whose burdens have mounted since the government's fall on April 9. In the end, many here speculated he was changed irrevocably by the perceived day-to-day humiliations of occupation.
To some of his friends and family, he represents an Iraqi everyman, a recruit whose very commonality does not bode well for U.S. troops battling a four-month guerrilla campaign in northern and western Iraq that few in Albu Alwan seem to believe will end soon.
Hiding in the Canal
A nine-vehicle convoy of the 43rd Combat Engineer Company was just a few miles outside of Fallujah when the attack began. It was 7:15 a.m., and the assailants were hidden about 50 yards from the well-traveled road.
It was already a chaotic day for soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which patrols most of western Iraq, an arid swath intersected by the Euphrates River. Three attacks had been reported overnight. Four more would follow later that day. For a region that had previously witnessed just three or four attacks a week, the ambushes and raids marked one of the most violent 24-hour periods in recent times.
Khalaf and at least 10 others seemed to have chosen their spot for the canals that provided cover. They lay waiting in one, and another canal snaked behind it. Both were filled with stagnant water and overgrown with reeds as high as 10 feet. The village of Falahat was less than a mile away, but the spot itself was interspersed only with fields of clover and orchards of apricot trees and palms laden with ripening dates.
The first volley sent three rocket-propelled grenades at the convoy, soldiers said. Two missed their mark; a third hit the road underneath a Humvee, damaging the oil pan and transmission and disabling the vehicle.
The soldiers returned fire with .50-caliber machine guns, lighter weapons and grenade launchers, the burst so intense that even villagers in Falahat said they sought cover. The U.S. troops immediately called in reinforcements, and Lt. Noah Hanners, the platoon leader of Heavy Company, arrived soon after in a tank from a base about six miles away.
The Iraqi assailants fired their Kalashnikov rifles wildly and lobbed badly aimed grenades every couple of minutes, Hanners said. But outgunned and outtrained, it was a losing battle almost from the start. The U.S. soldiers were on higher ground. Khalaf and the others, all in civilian clothes, were concealed by the canal's vegetation but, Hanners said, they had no way to flee.
"You could see the cattails move as they tried to run, so we just put a large volume of fire down on the canals," Hanners said.
Hanners said he believes Khalaf was one of the first to die, when he raised his head above the canal's reeds and was struck by a .50-caliber round. "His head was pretty much missing," he said. One or two others were killed at about the same time. As the assailants tried to escape through the canals, two or three more were killed, Hanners said. No U.S. soldiers were hurt.
By the time a second tank arrived at about 7:30 a.m., the fight was over, and the soldiers took the body of Khalaf and two others to the base. At least one other corpse -- too badly mangled to move -- was left behind.
Days later, Hanners speculated that Khalaf was at the end of a chain that began with a paymaster, who was in turn linked to a former military officer or someone else who could find weapons and plan the ambush. He was confident that Khalaf was paid.
But as for motives other than money, Hanners said, it was only guesswork. "Pretty much anything you can come up with, any motive you can come up with, is a possibility," he said. "They could be anybody."
A Hatred for Americans
Khalaf was the second-youngest in a family of six brothers and six sisters who belong to a Sunni Muslim tribe that gave its name to the village. He was known as hot-tempered, but with a sense of humor. He had curly black hair and a patchy beard more the product of oversight than grooming. As a 12-year-old, he lost one front tooth and chipped the other while roughhousing.
Like many in the village of a few thousand, his education ended with elementary school, and he soon went to farming hay, barley, wheat and sunflowers on an eight-acre plot he inherited from his father. He was drafted during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, but deserted his post after serving six months in the Euphrates town of Hit. He married young and struggled to make money.
A few years ago, he landed a $600 contract hauling construction material to the resort of Sadamiya on Tharthar Lake, friends said. But most of the time was spent surviving, driving a truck back and forth to Jordan and herding his 15 sheep and one cow.
His brother, Abdel-Latif, said that before the war Khalaf managed to make about $90 a month, enough to get by. In its chaotic aftermath, he said, he was making no more than $6 a month. His house, started four years ago, remains an empty shell of concrete floors and unfinished tan brick walls. His wife gave birth to their sixth child last month, a boy named Radwan.
"He had no money," said Khaled Mawash, a neighbor who knew Khalaf's family.
In a village where everybody knows everybody's business, neighbors said he was devastated by the quick fall of Baghdad. One shopkeeper said Khalaf told him that he wept all day at his home after the American forces arrived in the capital. Others recalled the anger that he loudly voiced as the U.S. patrols barreled down the highway perched just over his house and fields. The sight, they said, was so repugnant to him that he quit playing soccer in a dusty field adjacent to the bridge that the convoys used.
A month ago, a boy from the village threw a grenade at a nearby convoy, and soldiers responded by entering the village and surrounding Khalaf's house.
"If I had a grenade, I would kill myself and take them with me," a childhood friend, Mawlud Khaled, recalled him saying.
Neighbors said his behavior grew increasingly erratic as the weeks passed. In vain, he once fired a Kalashnikov rifle at a U.S. helicopter passing overhead. One morning a week before his death, the summer heat already hanging like a haze over the village, he ran at a passing convoy dressed only in shorts, neighbors recalled. His family had to restrain him.
"He hated the Americans," Khaled said. "He didn't care whether he died or not."
Two weeks ago, neighbors said, he wrote the names of three people on a piece of paper. He owed each money -- between $10 and $30. A few days later, on Aug. 1, he woke up early and dressed in gray pants and a plaid shirt. A little before 7 a.m., he was seen taking his sheep to graze in a nearby pasture. He left without saying a word to his wife, his family or anyone else in the village.
"Nobody knew where he went," Nawar Bidawi, a 41-year-old cousin, said.
Honored as a Hero
At a U.S. base near Habaniya, Khalaf's body was stored in a black body bag in a small cement room for three days. The stench from the bodies was so overpowering that soldiers at the front gate, about 100 yards away, burned paper to fend off the smell.
Khalaf's oldest brother, Abdel-Latif, and his brother-in-law were escorted by Iraqi police to the base. Soldiers suggested they take all three bodies, but Abdel-Latif said he claimed only his brother, whom he identified by his bloodied clothes and his chipped front tooth. The rest of his face, he said, was unrecognizable.
Along the gulf that divides occupier and occupied, the slights often seem unintended, perhaps unavoidable. Khalaf's family was outraged that he had been left lying on his stomach, rather than his back. His head faced the ground, rather than the Muslim holy city of Mecca. His body was left in a hot, windowless room, rather than refrigerated. And they insisted it was already riddled with maggots.
"The treatment was inhuman," said Mohammed Ajami, Khalaf's brother-in-law.
In a blue Volvo, they returned at 3:30 p.m. and, before dusk, buried Khalaf in a wooden coffin at the Kiffa cemetery. As a martyr, he was interred as he died, in his clothes and unwashed. The wounds, according to custom, bore testimony to his martyrdom.
His family said a convoy of 100 cars carrying 250 people accompanied Khalaf's body. And in the mourning that ensued, Khalaf went from spectacle to hero. The three men he owed money forgave his loans, said Omar Aani, the sheik at the village mosque. Neighbors collected money for his children, now considered by Islamic tradition to be orphans. A family that had battled with Khalaf for a year over the rights to water from an irrigation canal apologized to his family and declared they were ashamed by their enmity.
"They recognized that he was a true hero," said Khaled, the childhood friend. "They regretted not talking to him."
In private, a few in Albu Alwan voiced rumors that Khalaf may have been motivated in part by money. Others vigorously and sometimes angrily shook their heads at the suggestion, a denial motivated perhaps more by respect than reality.
"The most important thing is that he was so upset" by the soldiers, said Muwaffaq Khaled, a 21-year-old neighbor. "Money wasn't important because he knew he would be killed. If I'm Muslim and I respect God, I can't die for money. It's haram, forbidden."
"I know him well," his brother, Mawlud, interjected. "It wasn't a matter of money."
In villages like Albu Alwan, bound by tradition and populated by Sunni Muslims who have bristled most at the occupation, many insist they are confused by the source of attacks on U.S. troops. Are they loyalists of Hussein, or driven by Islam?
At one house, a neighbor of Khalaf, Saad Kamil, 22, expressed puzzlement at graffiti he saw recently in nearby Fallujah. One slogan saluted Hussein as "the hero of heroes." But another intoned in religious terms, "God bless the holy fighters of the city of mosques." Nearby was graffiti that read, "Fallujah will remain a symbol of jihad and resistance."
"People are confused. Is it for Saddam or is it for Islam?" he asked. "I tell you I don't know."
But a week following his death, Khalaf's decision to fight the Americans had become a larger symbol of objections to the occupation. A 23-year-old shopkeeper across the street from Kamil's house, Abdel-Salam Ahmed, called Khalaf a hero motivated by hatred of the American presence that many in the village have found humiliating. What will follow, he said, is clear. "Revenge is part of our tradition," he said.
Khalaf's brother talked of the promises he said were broken by the Americans -- a share of Iraq's oil they were supposed to receive, $100 payments that would come with better rations, jobs and prosperity that were supposed to follow more than 12 years of sanctions. His brother-in-law complained of the daily degradations -- U.S. soldiers making men bow their heads to the ground, an act he said should only be done before God. He recalled soldiers pointing guns at men in front of their children and wives.
"He has become a model for everyone to follow," said Aani, the village sheik, who acknowledged that he had to ask friends who Khalaf was after he died. "The person who resists this situation becomes an example."
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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This report tells you what going on in iraq
