BAGHDAD, June 19 (IslamOnline.net) - It seems that Iraq has become a second occupied Palestine with military checkpoints, barbed wires, trigger-happy occupying soldiers, women humiliation and unemployment becoming everyday scenes in the war-scarred country, with the only difference that the occupiers are Americans not Israelis.

Over the past two days, Baghdad was the scene of incidents identical of those taking place day in and day out in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The U.S. occupation soldiers stepped up their search operations, established a myriad of checkpoints at the entrances and exits of Baghdad and kept provoking Iraqis.

To mention but a few examples of the suffering and humiliation endured by the Iraqis under occupation, U.S. soldiers battered and assaulted an Iraqi woman at one of these numerous military checkpoints, just because she objected to being frisked.

Irked by the incident, two Iraqi men could not help stand handcuffed and opened fire at the American soldiers, leaving one dead and seriously injuring another before making their escape.

"It was a natural reaction to the American assault on the Iraqi lady," one eyewitness told IslamOnline.net.

"The U.S. soldiers traded the Iraqi fire with indiscriminate fire, leaving nearby houses damaged," he said, adding that it was a mirror image of the Israeli practices Iraqis used to watch in televised media coverage.

"When the protesters reached the headquarters of the U.S. civil administrators (Paul Bremer) to demand him fulfill his pledges, a U.S. military patrol tried to disperse the crowd.

"Suddenly, an American woman soldier opened fire from her semi-automatic gun, killing two former Iraqi soldiers Mortada al-Sayeed Ali, a father of one, and Samir Abdul Qader, who was fathering four children," Khaled Abdul Sattar, one of the protesters, told IOL.

"The Americans promised us one moth ago to give each serviceman $50 per month, but they did not honor their promise," former Brig. Gen. Sief Kamaludin, who took part in the demonstration, told IOL.

Just as the Israeli occupation troops attack foreign reporters to hide their crimes, Abdul Sattar asserted that U.S. soldiers assaulted the correspondent of the Lebanese LBC satellite channel, who was filming the rally.

Some eyewitnesses confirmed to IOL that U.S. troops rounded up pressmen and photographers for refusing to hand over their cameras.

As for al-Bayaa district, U.S. soldiers cordoned off the entire region Wednesday night with barbed wires and prevented anyone from entering or leaving the area from 6 p.m. to midnight.

They also closed a stand where public-transport buses were setting, which link ten areas around Baghdad.

The Americans prevented the buses from transferring the Iraqi citizen to their destinations under the pretext they were hunting down some armed Iraqis.

For his part, Dr. Ahmad al-Kubaissi, the head of the Unified Iraqi National Movement (UINM), told IOL that the U.S. practices against the Iraqi people reaffirmed that the U.S. occupation is not respecting the human rights of "this down-trodden people, and is only preoccupied with controlling the resources of the country.