Collective punishment

I counted 9 small tails of the mortar rounds sticking into the air in this small section of the field.

I asked if the family had requested that the Americans come remove the unexploded ordnance.

Mr. Shakr, with a very troubled look told me, “We asked them the first time and they said ‘OK, we’ll come take care of it.’ But they never came. We asked them the second time and they told us they would not remove them until we gave them a resistance fighter. They told us, ‘If you won’t give us a resistance fighter, we are not coming to remove the bombs.’”

He holds his hands in the air and said, “But we don’t know any resistance fighters!”

Also last winter I also reported on home demolitions in Samarra by the military. The consistent pattern then was that anytime an attack occurred against occupation forces, nearby homes/buildings/fields were then raided or destroyed by the military, along with complimentary electricity cuts for the villages and/or cities.

That pattern appears to remain the same, as I found today in another visit to the al-Dora region of Baghdad.

Seven weeks ago, after having suffered many attacks by the Iraqi resistance in the area, the military began plowing date palm orchards, blasted a gas station with a tank, cut the electricity which is still down, and blocking roads in the rural farming area.

Mohammed, a 15 year-old secondary school student stands near his home explaining what he saw. “There is a grave of an old woman they bulldozed,” and then he points to the nearby road, “They destroyed our fences, and now there are wolves attacking our animals, they destroyed much of our farming equipment, and the worst is they cut our electricity.”

[...]

Rounding a bend I saw a large swath of date palms which had been bulldozed to the ground. Large piles of them had been pushed together, doused with fuel, and burned.

[...]

“These trees are hundreds of years old and they cut them. Why?”

[...]

“These are our grandfathers’ orchards. Neither the British nor Saddam behaved like this."

“They come by here every night and fire their weapons to frighten us.” [...] “Yesterday at 5:30pm they came here and fired their weapons for 15 minutes randomly before they left.”

[...]

A 20 year-old farmer sees us talking and walks up to us. “For almost the last 2 months, since they plowed these fields, we have had no electricity. “How can I irrigate my fields without pumps,” asks Khalid, “With no electricity there is no water. They come here every evening and fire their weapons, and now my house has no glass in the windows.”

Read more...

Iraq war photos by Dahr Jamail

Interview with American independent journalist Dahr Jamail

My greatest concern is the reaction of my own government. I’m reporting information that the Bush regime wants kept under wraps. I fear reprisal from both the government and military far, far more than being kidnapped or blown up by a car bomb.