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Dangerous Liasons

By Peter Beaumont

Guardian
22 June, 2003

There was a picture last week in London's Evening Standard newspaper of a group of young American soldiers. It brought me up short. I had turned inside from the front page story about a group of American soldiers who had admitted that they were so indiscriminate with their fire that they had killed civilians, perhaps a lot of them, in the battle for Baghdad. The young men looked like any other of the US troops I had met in Iraq. And then a face jumped out. One of the group seemed somehow familiar. Scouring the text I realised that I had met men from this unit as I drove into Baghdad. And how, by their own account, they had almost killed me.
It had been a strangely chaotic day when I ran into the men of 3/15th batallion of the 3rd Infantry Division, a support unit, that had followed the first tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles into Baghdad's outskirts with petrol tankers, food and ammunition. We had driven up from the southern port city of Umm Qasr close to the Kuwaiti border, where we had been camping outside the port while we covered the fall of Basra. But as the news from Baghdad became more urgent we decided to head north and try to reach Baghdad on the same day. Four car-loads of us set out - the majority Americans - following the 3rd Infantry Division's main supply route until we emerged on a deserted motorway not far from Baghdad's airport.

The first intimation of trouble came a little later as we tried to pass a burned out Iraqi tank blocking the north bound carriageway. Passing the tank a group of Americans nearby fired a 'warning shot' that passed close to the lead car, so close in fact that a furious row emerged between the American driver and the gunner and commander of the Bradley, who simply laughed it off.

They let us pass and we continued into Baghdad's suburbs past a scene of utter devastation - burning buildings, burning US military vehicles and bodies by the road - spead out between three motorway intersections.

It was late in the day and the fierce fires and smoke in the twilight gave the scene a hellish glow. But for all that the American tank crews we passed, most of them mobbed by curious Iraqi civilians, waved at us cheerfully enough and so we carried on hoping to reach the hotels of Baghdad city centre where we hoped to spend the night.

Aware that we were approaching through a fighting army's rear we took it very slowly the flashers on our cars turned on, with white flags and in cars marked with taped on orange panels and taped on cehvrons to signify that we were friendly.

We crossed a bridge and that is when things suddenly turned nasty. Heading down the bridge towards a luxurious area of palaces we didn't see the wire perimeter across the road ahead or the Bradley in the dusk. We heard the warning shot and stopped the vehicles dead. But something was wrong about the soldiers ahead. We could see them deploying and bringing weapons to bear on our vehicles. And suddenly we very afraid.

Sometimes you make decisions on the hop. Several of us jumped out of our vehicles and strated screaming 'Media!' 'American journalists!' including a tall, blond US woman reporter. So tall and blond - I am convinced - that she could not be mistaken for anything else. As they ran towards us and searched us and our vehicles I recognised something - that these men were both very scared and very angry, the worst kind of soldiers to encounter.

They led us to their headquarters where they fed us and let us sleep. They seemed nice boys. But something the gunner on the Bradley said, scared me. He apologised and told us that he had been about to kill us. He said he had his finger on the trigger. A second later, it would have been too late for an apology.

Later when I went back to visit them they told their stories. Of a terrifying battle with Arab volunteers. Of vehicles destroyed on both sides. They said they had been driven at by suicide cars. What they did not say was what they later told the Evening Standard: that among the hundreds that they had killed in their 8 hour battle on that motorway and in the days that followed, many were certainly unarmed civilians killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I should have guessed. Among those who I interviewed in Baghdad's hospitals over those few days were occupants of cars - many of them children - whose vehicles had been destroyed. Gun camera footage broadcast round the world showed tanks and Bradleys engaging any car they came across as they drove into Baghdad. At Nasiriyah too American troops had admitted the same thing. Faced with the Saddam Fedayeen, in their civilian clothes, anyone was assumed to be an enemy and killed.

A young Marine admitted it to me himself outside the main complex of Baghdad's hospitals: how his unit had shot up a car approaching a checkpoint too fast. The only survivor was a boy with his face cut in half.

So what happened then in the advance into Baghdad - and what is happening still as American soldiers fire on crowds of demonstrators? The answer struck me recently. The world's biggest and most formidible army - the most technologically advanced - lacks discipline regarding its own rules of engagement and an ability - the critical ability - to properly identify targets before engagement.

This is not a new problem. It is behind the too frequent incidences of US friendly fire on its allies; behind the arrogance with which US forces treated many Iraqis.

But the result is a recklessness and a lack of care for civilian casualties that borders on the criminal.

When I look at that picture of those young men from the 3/15th, when I remember their terrible baptism by fire in the battle on that motorway, I would like to feel more sympathy for them than I do. They are good men most of them, but they have put on the green suit and taken up the gun. And they have failed in the terrible responsibilty that this confers upon them.