A “mercy killing” in Baghdad

This has to be one of the saddest and most maddening of stories to be produced by the American Occupation of Iraq to date:

Two U.S. soldiers could face murder charges in a military trial in Baghdad for shooting and killing a severely wounded Iraqi teenager who had been mistaken for an insurgent by American troops, The Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site.

The newspaper said on Thursday that the two army staff sergeants had admitted that they had shot the Iraqi boy as he lay moaning on the ground but that they had said they did so out of mercy.

A total of seven Iraqis were killed in the incident in August in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, in which U.S. troops fired on a garbage truck on Aug. 18 after mistakenly concluding that it was planting roadside bombs, the newspaper said, quoting Iraqi witnesses and U.S. military officials.

The two soldiers told U.S. officials that they had killed the teenager to “put him out of his misery,” the paper said.

But Iraqi witnesses, including a relative of the boy who had pleaded for U.S. troops to help him, were said to be enraged by the killing.

The teenager was shot as U.S. medics rushed to treat a half dozen or so of those wounded on Aug. 18 when the garbage truck was fired upon and bust into flames.

Staff Sergeant Cardenas Alban, 29, of Carson, California, and Staff Sergeant Johnny Horne Jr., 30, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, both of 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, face military court proceedings in Baghdad to determine if there is enough evidence for court martial, the newspaper reported.

If convicted, they could receive the death penalty.

The army said it was unable to identify the boy who was killed. But citing Iraqi witnesses, The Los Angeles Times identified him as Qassim Hassan, 16, who had been working the night shift on the garbage truck with his brother and several cousins.

They shot him “out of mercy” to “put him out of his misery” in front of his screaming family and medics who could have helped him. This, after they fired on his garbage truck “by mistake.”

More evidence on the looting of Al QaQaa

US soldiers describe the looting of Al Qaqaa, which they were powerless to stop:

In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material away from the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.

The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.
[…]
The soldiers, who belong to two different units, described how Iraqis plundered explosives from unsecured bunkers before driving off in Toyota trucks.

The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad.

“We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out,” said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003.

“On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave” so looters could come in and take munitions.

“It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots,” another officer said.

He and other soldiers who spoke to The Times asked not to be named, saying they feared retaliation from the Pentagon.

Further evidence that Al Qaqaa remained unguarded, as if any more were needed, is gathered here by BruceR of Flit:

Nouvel Observateur article confirms Al QaQaa unguarded in November

Well, I’ve read Sara Daniel’s original piece for the French magazine La Nouvel Observateur, which ran in November, 2003. I’ve translated it here. It repeats her claim in the magazine this week that she spent time with a guerrilla group, the one responsible among other attacks for the SAM attack on the DHL Airbus last November, and that it was still using the Al QaQaa munitions dump to supply itself with TNT that month, seven months after the fall of Baghdad, and that the depot was effectively unguarded when she drove on to it and wandered around in broad daylight along with the guerrillas. Daniel’s website has a photo from the dump apparently taken Nov. 6, 2003.

The rest of the interview with “Abou Abdallah,” the guerrilla leader, is interesting in its own right, specifically on how the guerrillas were organizing themselves a year ago (at the doors of mosques), and how he and others specifically disavowed either loyalty to Saddam (then still at large), suicide bombing, or foreign Muslim influences. It’s well-read in company with the contemporaneous Paris-Match interview, apparently with a leader of this same group of insurgents (“Abou Abdallah” again?). One thing you can say for sure… a year ago, the French periodical industry seems to have had a much better human intelligence penetration into the Iraqi resistance than the Americans did.

Read the rest.

3 Black Watch troops killed; 8 wounded

Three Scottish Black Watch soldiers and a translator have been killed by a suicide bomber at a checkpoint while 8 others were wounded in the subsequent mortar attack. “Soldiers manning a vehicle checkpoint were targeted by a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device in a suicide attack, followed shortly afterwards by mortar fire,” Junior Defense Minister Adam Ingram told a news conference in London.

Blackwatch_flyer


The Scotland-based unit has been trying to lower tension by playing down its Britishness, handing out flyers which read “please allow me to introduce myself — I am a Scottish soldier with the Black Watch Regiment.”
The flyers have a Scottish flag, rather than a British flag.