In
Iraq, The Killing Of 18 Teenagers
Is A Horrible Routine
By Robert Fisk
01 March, 2007
The
Independent
This is a story with a caution.
Eighteen teenagers were killed on Monday at a football field east of
Baghdad. On Sunday, equally young students of Mustansiriya University
- the oldest in Baghdad - were blown up by a suicide bomber. It has
become a routine, at one and the same time more horrible and more normal
each day. Only two years ago, a suicide bomber drove into an American
convoy in Baghdad, killing 27 civilians, half of them children taking
sweets from American soldiers. What price innocence?
Well, as usual, nothing is
as it seems in Iraq. Within hours of the mass deaths in Ramadi yesterday
came a disturbing statement by the US military. They knew of no deaths
in Ramadi, although - and here was the sinister part of the whole thing
- it was true, the Americans said, that 30 people had been "slightly
wounded" in Ramadi when US troops set off a "controlled explosion"
near a football field. "I can't imagine there would be another
attack involving children without our people knowing," an American
officer announced. Quite so.
Then he apparently half-acknowledged
that there was another explosion near the soccer field, a "barbaric
crime" by al-Qa'ida. The police said it was a car bomb. The American-funded
Iraqi television service said it was a roadside bomb. A local tribal
leader said that of the 18 dead, six were women - not, presumably, football
players.
In Iraq, as we all know now,
they go for the jugular. The old, the young, pregnant women, infants,
soldiers, gunmen, murderers. They all die violently, the innocent along
with the guilty. One of the insurgents' principal financial supporters
- we had met in Amman, of course, not in Baghad - put it very succinctly
to me. "A decision was made that we have to accept civilian casualties.
If we attack the Americans, the innocent will die. We know that. What
do you people call it when you kill women and children? Collateral damage?"
But exactly what happened
in Ramadi remained suspiciously unclear. The football stadium where
the 18 youths were reported to have been killed was near a US base.
But there are no American troops on the campus at Mustansiriya. There
was talk yesterday that a local Sunni imam in Ramadi had denounced al-Qa'ida
- which operates in loose co-operation with Sunni insurgent groups -
and that this might have prompted a revenge attack by the organisation.
But such is the level of
violence and anarchy in Iraq today that all such events are filtered
through pro-American Iraqi security officials or through the US army
or through insurgents' websites. Insurgents' victims are claimed to
have been killed by the Americans, civilians killed by US troops are
said to have been murdered by insurgents. Who knows if that did not
happen in Ramadi? In fear of their lives, Western journalists can no
longer investigate these atrocities. The Americans like it that way.
So, one suspects, do the insurgents. Accurate information in Iraq is
like water in the desert: precious, rare, often polluted.
Ramadi is a no-go area for
every Westerner, including most US troops. So who set off the truck
bomb near a mosque in the city which killed 52 people on Saturday? Or
the ambulance outside a police station near Ramadi, which killed 14
people on Monday? Shia militiamen seeking further blood in their war
on Sunni fighters? Sunni groups trying to implicate Shia? Al-Qa'ida?
Or the other shadowy groups who have affiliations with the American-supported
Iraqi government, with the ministries of interior or health or "defence"?
The reality is that Iraq's
war now exists in a fog through which we can see only vague figures.
They may be insurgents or they may be soldiers. Or they may, for all
the Iraqis know, be units from the 120,000 - yes, 120,000 - Western
mercenaries now believed to be operating in Iraq for any number of legal
and quasi-legal organisations. These hired gunmen constitute a force
almost equal to the entire US contingent in Iraq. Who do they work for?
What are their rules? The answer to the first may be "everyone".
The answer to the second question? None.
Besides these great mysteries,
what did the lives of 18 teenagers matter to the world yesterday, let
alone who killed them?
© 2007 Independent News
and Media Limited