Ordinary Iraqis complain about random U.S. military shooting

BAGHDAD, August 17 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Further Igniting anti-American outrage among ordinary Iraqis, trigger-happy U.S. soldiers continue to kill innocent people already suffering in the war-shattered country, a press report said on Sunday, August 17.

Ezhar Mahmood Ridha and her sister-in-law were on their way to a wake when they met their deaths at the hands of U.S. soldiers, according to the report by the Chicago Tribune newspaper.

As their broken-down car stood stranded on a dusty overpass, a guerrilla fighter nearby detonated a huge explosive device at a passing U.S. military convoy. As the soldiers turned and fired, the car carrying the assailant sped away, according to witnesses and U.S. military officials.

The Americans hit the only object left on the overpass: Ridha's blue 1982 Mitsubishi sedan, said the report.

Witnesses said that bullets ripped through Ridha's body, as she slumped over in the back seat, eyes frozen, while her 6-month-old baby slipped from her arms.

The shooting at dusk on August 1 was just one of dozens of cases in which civilians have been caught in the crossfire.

The firing warranted only a five-paragraph statement from the U.S. military public affairs office in Iraq, said the report.

The family was headed from their village about 15 miles north of Baghdad to attend the wake of a relative when the car sputtered to a halt, according to Al-Tumaymi and his two brothers.

It was broiling hot, the family members recounted. The 6-month-old was crying. Ridha called to her husband to hurry up as he bent over the hood cleaning the gasoline filter.

Al-Tumaymi was about to restart the car when he heard the first gunshots.

"The shooting began everywhere," recalled Al-Tumaymi. "They were targeting right inside the car."

Al-Tumaymi stripped off his white Arab tunic, called a dishdash, and frantically waved it at the troops to stop shooting.

"He was screaming, `We are a family! Don't shoot,!' " said Louay Ismael, a witness who raced out of his home after hearing the explosion. "He was crying."

Four bullets ripped though the right side of the vehicle, shattering the windows.

"As his brother Salam crawled away to get help, Al-Tumaymi said he saw that his sister Kameela was badly injured and that both his 18-month-old son and brother Kamil were bleeding from head wounds. His wife, he said, was slumped over in the back seat, motionless.

Al-Tumaymi said he asked Kamil if his wife was dead. Kamil reached over and put his hand to her chest.

“I can still feel her heart," Kamil said.

As Ridha and his sister lay critically injured, Al-Tumaymi said, one officer offered an apology.

“He said, `May God be merciful to them. We are sorry,'" Al-Tumaymi recalled.

“I said, `Is that enough?'" Al-Tumaymi remembered. "I said, `Look at the bodies. Look at my screaming children. Look at us--we have no guns, no bombs. Why did you do this?' "

Al-Tumaymi said he was forced to flag down a passing car and take his wife to the hospital himself, but they soon got caught in traffic. By the time they reached the hospital, Al-Tumaymi said, his wife was dead.

Kameela made it to the emergency room of a second hospital but died minutes later, according to the doctor who treated her.

The cause of death for both women was listed as "fractures and bleeding in the lungs caused by bullets," according to Iraq Health Ministry records, said the Tribune.

Outrageous

But the tragedy and its aftermath reveal much about the chaotic, unpredictable nature of combat here and how the deaths of civilians can turn residents of an entire village, once sympathetic to the U.S. occupation, into bitter enemies, said the Tribune.

In the family's hometown of Hammamiyat, a cluster of tan brick homes housing 2,000 residents on the northern outskirts of Baghdad, tribal leaders are furious at the Americans.

"I hate them! I hate them!" said Jameel Sultan Al-Tumaymi, 40, Ridha's husband and the brother of the second shooting victim, speaking about the troops.

"We were trying to help them, but they are criminals," said Tumaymi.

Ironically enough in an unprovoked shooting attack, Maj. Clark Taylor, a spokesman for the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, whose soldiers fired on the Ridha family's car, said the U.S. forces have the right to “defend themselves”

“U.S. soldiers have the right to defend themselves," Taylor said.

Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Iraq, said she understands the dangers facing the troops and the inevitability of civilian casualties in war. But she said the soldiers should use only "proportionate force" when responding to a threat.

“Whenever there is fighting, civilians get killed," Doumani was quoted by the Tribune as saying

"But there are always precautions that can be taken in the presence of civilians. We mean that not just for U.S. forces but those who are their attackers. I hope they do this, but I don't know,” she added.

In the most recent case, soldiers shot and killed a 12-year-old Iraqi boy during a clash with demonstrators in a sprawling Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad on Wednesday. Two Iraqi police officers were also killed last week by U.S. forces in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

Nadeem Hatim Sultan, a community leader and head of the local branch of the Tameem tribe, said the village had strongly supported the U.S.-led ouster of Hussein, whose regime killed more than 50 villagers because they are Shiite Muslims.

Sultan said he has met frequently with the local U.S. military commander and helped U.S. troops uncover several arms caches.

Tanks stopped by the village only days before the shooting, he said, and residents gave soldiers cold water and food. The soldiers responded by handing out candy to children and helping rebuild several schools.

But Sultan and other tribal elders said they are now rethinking their relationship to the Americans in the wake of the shootings on the overpass.

"We are avoiding [the Americans] now because we consider them dangerous," Sultan told the Tribune.

For his part, Al-Tumaymi, an impoverished farmer and sometime taxi driver, recalled with bitterness how Ridha had encouraged their six children to wave in friendship at passing U.S. troops.

Now she is gone, and Al-Tumaymi has no one to help care for them.

“Because of the Americans, they don't have a mother," he said. "The Americans say they believe in freedom. But they only believe in blood."

U.S.-led forces occupying Iraq have faced almost-daily attacks the Americans blamed on loyalists of Saddam's ousted regime.

But anti-American sentiments against forces are running high among many of ordinary Iraqis jeering at continued occupation of their oil-rich country and slow pace of improvement on the ground.