The Real Story of Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday
Six days ago, at least 28 civilians died in a shooting incident involving the US security company Blackwater. But what actually happened?
The eruption of gunfire was sudden and ferocious, round after round mowing down terrified men women and children, slamming into cars as they collided and overturned with drivers frantically trying to escape. Some vehicles were set alight by exploding petrol tanks. A mother and her infant child died in one of them, trapped in the flames.
The shooting on Sunday, by the guards of the American private security company Blackwater, has sparked one of the most bitter and public disputes between the Iraqi government and its American patrons, and brings into sharp focus the often violent conduct of the Western private armies operating in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, immune from scrutiny or prosecution.
Blackwater’s security men are accused of going on an unprovoked killing spree. Hassan Jabar Salman, a lawyer, was shot four times in the back, his car riddled with eight more bullets, as he attempted to get away from their convoy. Yesterday, sitting swathed in bandages at Baghdad’s Yarmukh Hospital, he recalled scenes of horror. “I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot,” said Mr Salman. “But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus, he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him, she jumped out after him, and she was killed. People were afraid.”
At the end of the prolonged hail of bullets Nisoor Square was a scene of carnage with bodies strewn around smouldering wreckage. Ambulances trying to pick up the wounded found their path blocked by crowds fleeing the gunfire.
Yesterday, the death toll from the incident, according to Iraqi authorities, stood at 28. And it could rise higher, say doctors, as some of the injured, hit by high-velocity bullets at close quarter, are unlikely to survive.
With public anger among Iraqis showing no sign of abating, the US administration has suspended all land movement by officials outside the heavily fortified Green Zone.
The Iraqi government has revoked Blackwater’s licence to operate but it still remains employed by the US government. The Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has, however, promised a “transparent” inquiry into what happened.
Blackwater and the US State Department maintain that the guards opened fire in self-defence as they reacted to a bomb blast and then sniper fire. Amid continuing accusations and recriminations, The Independent has tried to piece together events on that day.
The reports we got from members of the public, Iraqi security personnel and government officials, as well as our own research, leads to a markedly different scenario than the American version. There was a bomb blast. But it was too far away to pose any danger to the Blackwater guards, and their State Department charges. We have found no Iraqi present at the scene who saw or heard sniper fire.
Witnesses say the first victims of the shootings were a couple with their child, the mother and infant meeting horrific deaths, their bodies fused together by heat after their car caught fire. The contractors, according to this account, also shot Iraqi soldiers and police and Blackwater then called in an attack helicopter from its private air force which inflicted further casualties.
Blackwater disputes most of this. In a statement the company declared that those killed were “armed insurgents and our personnel acted lawfully and appropriately in a war zone protecting American lives”.
The day after the killings, Mirenbe Nantongo, a spokeswoman for the US embassy, said the Blackwater team had ” reacted to a car bombing”. The embassy’s information officer, Johann Schmonsees, stressed ” the car bomb was in proximity to the place where State Department personnel were meeting, and that was the reason why Blackwater responded to the incident” .
Those on the receiving end tell another story. Mr Salman said he had turned into Nisoor Square behind the Blackwater convoy when the shooting began. He recalled: “There were eight foreigners in four utility vehicles, I heard an explosion in the distance and then the foreigners started shouting and signalling for us to go back. I turned the car around and must have driven about a hundred feet when they started shooting. My car was hit with 12 bullets it turned over. Four bullets hit me in the back and another in the arm. Why they opened fire? I do not know. No one, I repeat no one, had fired at them. The foreigners had asked us to go back and I was going back in my car, so there was no reason for them to shoot.”
Muhammed Hussein, whose brother was killed in the shooting, said: “My brother was driving and we saw a black convoy ahead of us. Then I saw my brother suddenly slump in the car. I dragged him out of the car and saw he had been shot in the chest. I tried to hide us both from the firing, but then I realised he was already dead.”
Jawad Karim Ali was on his way to pick up his aunt from Yarmukh Hospital when shooting started and the windscreen exploded cutting his face. ” Then I was hit on my left shoulder by bullets, two of them another one went past my face. Now my aunt is out of hospital and I am sitting here. There was a big bang further away but no shots before the security people fired, and they just kept firing.”
Baghdad’s “Bloody Sunday” has become a test of sovereignty between the powers of the Iraqi government and the US. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said: “We will not tolerate the killing of our citizens in cold blood.” The shooting was, he said, the seventh of its kind involving Blackwater.
The company, which has its headquarters in North Carolina, is one of the largest beneficiaries of the lucrative occupation dividend, holding the contract to provide security for top-level American officials.
Its reputation in Iraq is particularly controversial. It was the lynching of four of the company’s employees in 2004 which led to the bloody confrontation in Fallujah. The men’s bodies were set on fire, dragged through the streets and then hung from a bridge. Blackwater personnel are recognisable from their “uniform” of wraparound sunglasses and body armour over dark coloured sweatshirts and helmets. Employees are thought to earn about $600 (£300) per day.
Sunday’s shooting happened at Mansour, once one of the most fashionable districts of Baghdad, with roads flanked by shops selling expensive goods, restaurants and art galleries. In the height of the sectarian bloodletting between Shias and Sunnis earlier this year dead bodies would be regularly strewn in the streets. A semblance of safety has returned since, and Mansour was held up as an example of how the US military “surge” was cutting the violence.
We were in Mansour on Sunday when we heard the sound of a deafening explosion just after midday. Black plumes of smoke rose from a half-blasted National Guard (army) post near a mosque. Five or six minutes afterwards there was the sound of prolonged shooting towards the south.
Police Captain Ali Ibrahim, who was on duty near Nisoor Square, said: ” We heard the bomb go off, it was very loud, but it wasn’t at the square. The police were, in fact, trying to clear the way for the contractors when they became agitated, they opened fire. No one was shooting at them.”
Asked about the witness accounts, Ali al-Dabbagh, an Iraqi government spokesman, confirmed: “The traffic policemen were trying to open the road for them. It was a crowded square and one small car did not stop, it was moving very slowly. They started shooting randomly, there was a couple and their child inside the car and they were hit.”
© 2007 The Independent
For some reason, strongly believe the Iraqi citizens and police accounts. These so called security guards of Blackwater are nothing but frightened hoodlums. Of course they fit right in with the Bush doctrine. “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies and amber waves of grainnnnn. For purple mountains majesty, dah dah dah dah daahhhh”. ____ Lord help us.
So much for Iraqi sovereignty - Blackwater is back at work today, escorting state departemnt officials.
Iraq’s population is about 1/12th that of the US - even less considering the 2-5 million who’ve been forced to flee their jobs, homes and country thanks to the civil war we’ve unleashed by our presence and duplicity in arming all sides.
Twelve times the 28 slaughtered by Blackwater (who, along with all other US hired thugs, have a license to kill thanks to the constitution Bremer forced the Iraqi government to sign) is equivalent to 336 US civilians gunned down if an occupier committed such an atrocity within our borders. Of course the Iraqis want us dead.
Add to this crime the thousands of atrocities and trampling of Iraqi’s human rights by other contractors plus the hundreds of unreported incidents (destruction of property, theft, assault, murder and rape) committed daily by our troops - how can anyone say they support the troops.
All illegal, immoral invaders deserve death regardless of nationality. We are not “the good guys” and never have been.
- beginning with the invasion of “America”, slaughter of the natives, theft of their land and spirituality. The fraudulent Louisiana Purchase and buying Alaska from those who never owned it. Stealing Texas and trumping up a war in order to steal half of Mexico. The annexation of Hawaii at gunpoint. Invasion and slaughter of Filipinos and Cubans - who helped us defeat Spain - and our occupation of these “protectorates”. Theft of Puerto Rico whom we yet to grant independence or statehood (you’re not alone D of C and neither are dozens of islands in the Pacific over which we retain control).
Multiple invasions of Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, Dominican Republic, San Salvador. A government that has lied us into wars with Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan (which, we the sheeple bought, and a megaphone media cheered us into dying for).
US financed and orchestrated coups in Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Panama and Iran and to depose democratically elected leaders. We created dozens of dictators including Saddam, and repressive regimes including the Taliban which spawned Al Queda.
250 years of serial aggression qualifies us as the world’s number one terrorist nation by whatever definition you choose - US, UN, International.
So fuqbushthetroops and the mindless, clueless, flag-waving U S of Assholes who proudly serve and those who send their children and loved ones off to kill and be killed. I’m a disabled vet who managed to avoid the draft long enough to miss being sent to Korea. Every soldier has the moral choice and responsibility to decide whether or not to push the button or pull the trigger. To hell with any of them who lack the humanity to make the ethical decision.
I think it was Machiavelli who said the nation’s have the governments they deserve. I don’t deserve this one. Do you?
In the seventeenth century, the famous Japanese Zen poet Basho wrote a time-honored haiku:
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams
Public health advocate Susan Clarke, though, adds:
Not even grasses remain
when TOXIC WAR WASTE undermines
their very nature
——————————————-
The US Fascist Corporate State is running on fumes and will eventually fail like the Roman Empire and every empire before it due it overweening Economic overreach and rising US Imperial debt. How many more innocent civilians will have to die before that happens? How many more billions of dollars will have to be wasted? How much of Blackwater’s infamy and damage can America stand?
BLACKWATER’S MOTTO:
So much Evil to do, so much money to make and so little time….
so shoot to kill and don’t give a fuck about the crime….
Blackwater is nothing more than a CIA “Off Book Operation”.
Cofer Black went from Director of Counter-Terrorism for the CIA to Vice President of Blackwater Inc.
Putting CIA people in private enterprises has been a long standing procedure. The purpose is to avoid Congressional Supervision and Oversight….and, Congress does not inspect the Civilian Contracts issued by the State Department, Department of Defense, CIA, FBI, and NSC……
Wait until all these mercenaries return to the United States and start their killings at home with DOD, CIA, FBI protection. Oh, another Geneva Convention Violation, but who cares?
Just another day working in the financial and killing fields of fascism. Power and money for more death — and more death for more money and power. Heckuva job, Blackwater and the people who contracted ya! One heckuva job! You do us real proud!
Yuck!
one day the Iraqui’s will wake up and realize that all their sectarian violence was most prob started by these wonderful examples of humanity… when that day comes and they stop blowing other Iraqi’s up and start on the root of their problems ie. the occupying forces then watch the Neo con nazi’s whine In my mind is is in the best interest of the US to keep this civil war going as it then gives them the right to force gunboat diplomacy down the throats of those who don’t want it.Like they have done so many times before by the use of terrorism to appoint worse dictators those who support the US policies the good old USA land of the Rape Pillage and Plunder, which is what it has done since its founding.
You want your “legacy” you bastard bush?
Here is your F’in legacy -
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……..(’(…´…´…. ¯~/’…’)
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Expect to find a few more hanging ‘contractors’ in Iraq. They can’t hide 24/7.
Doesn’t it all just make you love the enablers in this country? And the spinners, with no interest in the truth of anything ever?
The patterns of the vapid-brained behind
this tragedy are so well known by now that you can say almost any dark thing about them and with more evidence it will turn out true.
The miltonfriedmanites are all about the glories of shock doctrine and private contracts to remould the social order. But once you get behind that, in reference to Blackwater, there’s another line of dogmatic emotionalism trying to occur here.
That is, “These guys didn’t do anything wrong, but even if they did, they’re different from our wonderful volunteer Army, the best in the world and friend of
everybody (and I support them! do you? Huh? Huh? Huh?).”
I DON’T, except for the ones who have turned against Master Bush. And these will
freely tell you they shoot and blow up
innocent civilians every day, and in large
numbers, because they are afraid. That’s what our boys do, whether in private or public enterprise.
In what numbers, exactly? Five or six at
a time? Fifty, a hundred? It adds up, doesn’t it, with all the other war-related killings, to 1.2 million dead Iraqis at latest count.
The people running this country are absolutely hopeless, with the best that can be said about them being that they are hapless, too.
They never read The Red Badge of Courage, or if they did, it didn’t register; never read the anti-war poets, nor Ambrose Bierce or All Quiet on the Western Front or the chapters of Huckleberry Finn that are about false nobility along the lower Mississippi– a place where everybody talks about honor all the time while killing each other in warring, feuds and brainless duels.
Please, God, lay a little intelligence on
The United States. And no, I don’t mean the CIA . Self-awareness has disappeared.
Iraq today,
the US, Canada, Mexico are next.
Is it true that Remington and Winchester have stopped selling ammo to private citizens?
Enjoy yourselves, people. Go to Disneyland… ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz…….
I haven’t heard they refuse to sell ammo to civilians, but won’t be surprised to learn that’s so. Police departments across the nation are having a hard time getting ammo, they often are put on a one year waiting list. There was an article about that here a month ago. If we have a depression, and we will, bows and arrows will be more common after a year. After that, homemade spears and rocks. We have lots of rocks where I live. You can make a swell broken glass and nail cannon with a welding and cutting torch outfit.
I resent the connection of this mass murder and Bloody Sunday. I was a serving soldier in Northern Ireland and although the shooting of these civilians was a disaster the troops had no alternative but to open fire. What the media forgot to tell the world about that event was the troops came under fire from the rooftops but their natural reaction was to fire back indiscriminately since it wasn’t clear where the fire was coming from.
I know the officer in charge of that patrol and I can assure you he’s no psychopathic killer unlike these thugs in Iraq.
This puppet Iraq ” government ” has no power but it is a useful tool for the Bush gang as a source of blame for any lack of progress or unlawful behaviour.
Where is the UN in this grand crime, this armed robbery and genocide, nowhere, why, because it’s nothing but a talking shop and rubber stamp for capatalist criminal activities.
As I recall,
Here is the way we got rid of a president before….
“Deepthroat” told the Washington Post reporters: “Follow the money”
And that’s what we have to keep in mind here. Bush is a nobody. A dolt. A clown who can’t spell his own name.
We have to realize this world-war for corporate dominance is all about market monopoly. All we have to do is get grassroots movements going, to Boycott everything produced by this maligant form of corporate communism. Shun the Fortune-500! Gas, Clothing, food, everything. A previous poster on another thread championed a victory garden, whereby you let the Monsanto poison Frankenfood, rot on the shelves (if it ever does.) Shun hormone soak beef and make texas eat their own chit. Refuse to cloth yourself at wallmart. Default on your mortgage for six months and renegotiate the crummy loan before they forclose….
These things create realtime Pressure whereas a letter to a congressmen just gets chucked since the voting is manipulated by Diebold software anyway. It’s the only thing these criminals cherish: Money. FALLING EARNINGS will be noticed by the real Players: American CEO’s. And they will drop the Bushmonkey and his Organ-grinder Cheney like a bad habit…… because there is no honor among theives.
These enemies of free people everywhere hijacked Lady Liberty! It’s time they take a beating on their stock packages!
That’s what I think.
pacplyer
When more of the people don’t have enough money to pay for their basic needs, it will be felt. Correction: It is being felt. Foreclosures are up for a reason. With recession comes increased unemployment. I’ve read that some of the arab states that had been buying our government bonds are cutting way back on their investments. China recently did as well. Inflation, a devaluing of the US dollar, is the inevitable result. It’s difficult to boycott with a family to feed and clothe, a job to get to, often more than one job, and associated expenses. For more than half the citizens of this nation living pay check to pay check with very little in the way of discretionary funds and no vacation time is already the status quo. That is what the corporatists have been leaving us with …and worse. Ain’t it great being in a nation with medical care, but only if you have the gelt? Many of us didn’t need to boycott that. We were priced out of the market. May my husband rest in peace.
urthsong, yes it is very difficult to resist with a family to feed who may not share your views or be frightnened shitless but there are many other countries to go to. I don’t know your age but I feel sorry for Americans in their 80s still having to work. This doesn’t happen in Europe, the over 65s are looked after but the over 75s get a free ride. I’m British, I live in the USA because it’s cheap and my wife is American and I also have a good income.
If I was an American under 40 years old I would be off to better pastures this USA is a terrible place for the working class. If a european was offered the pay Americans work for they would be out on strike in seconds.