Brutal Reality
That Fans
The Flames Of Hatred In Iraq
By Robert Fisk
in Saqlawiyah, Iraq
Independent, UK
26 September 2003
If
anyone wants to know why Iraqis set bombs for American soldiers, they
had only to sit in the two-storey villa in this little farming village
and look at the frozen face of Ahmed al-Ham and his angry friends yesterday.
Ahmed's 50-year-old
father, Sabah, was buried just a week ago - 35 days after he died in
American hands at the Abu Ghraib prison - and the 17-year-old youth
with his small beard and piercing brown eyes blames George Bush for
his death. "Pigs," he mutters. Ahmed was a prisoner, too,
and his father died in his arms. According to a cousin of Sabah's, their
tragedy began at 3am on 3 August when about 40 US military vehicles
arrived in Saqlawiyah, a Sunni village 10 miles from Fallujah, the scene
of dozens of fatal attacks on US occupation troops. A framed and undamaged
photograph of Saddam Hussein hangs on the wall above us as we talk.
The cousin, a retired
farmer with prostate problems who pleads that his name should not be
used lest he be rearrested, says that he willingly allowed the Americans
to search his home - just as Sabah al-Ham did a hundred metres away
- and freely walked across to a group of US officers outside his house
when was asked to do so.
"I gave my
name and told them who I was and then some military police arrived,"
he says. "I was asked to walk inside a barbed wire enclosure where
about 30 other village men were brought. Ahmed was there with his father,
Sabah. We were kept there for seven hours, sitting on the ground. Then
they bound our hands and blindfolded us and put us on a truck. That's
when it went bad. The next night, we were kept in an old army base.
Each of us was locked inside a toilet cubicle."
None of the men
was known to be on any wanted list and Sabah - who had high blood pressure
and breathing difficulties - was, his cousin says, a mere "under-officer"
in the Iraqi army, equivalent to a second lieutenant.
"We complained
about our health problems. I can only urinate through a catheter and
Sabah kept saying he needed cold water. We were then taken by lorry
to a big hall where we had to spend a day, sitting or ordered to stand
with our hands bound and then afterwards taken to the prison camp at
Baghdad airport. Here they had just three questions to ask us: 'Have
you attacked Americans?' 'What type of attacks did you stage?' 'Do you
know any officials of the previous regime?' We all said no.
"That was all
the interrogation we had. Sabah was always asking for water but they
did nothing else for him though we told them he had very high blood
pressure. Then they moved us south to Nasariyah, into a desert camp
under tents which was about 55 degrees. Sabah was in a bad way."
After four days,
during which an American medical officer administered liquid by tube
for dehydration to Sabah, the men were all trucked north again, this
time to Abu Ghraib. On the way, according to Ahmed, his father pleaded
for cold water but the soldiers would give him only hot water and a
tiny piece of ice to put in his mouth. In a tent in the heat again at
Abu Ghraib, Sabah quickly lost consciousness.
"We asked again
and again for help and they gave him the drip feed again but they wouldn't
send him to hospital or let him go," Ahmed says.
Ahmed held his father
as he died in the medical tent. "I washed his body and the prison
imam said prayers over him and then they told me his body would be taken
to his family village in three days. They said 'sorry'." But when,
a month later, Ahmedand the others were freed, they returned to Saqlawiyah
to find his family asking where he was. The Americans still had his
body. "We dared not tell most of his family that he was dead,"
the cousin says.
Only after they
had asked the Red Cross for help did the Ham family trace Sabah's corpse.
It had been stored at Baghdad airport, they were told, and eventually
found in a refrigeration area close to the old presidential palace in
Baghdad. With much anger - and with guns fired into the air - the village
buried Sabah on 17 September. No American offered the family compensation
or formally expressed regret to them.
The cousin did say
that there was a "good American" at Abu Ghraib who believed
all the men were innocent. "He told us how sorry he was when Sabah
died. And when we were freed, he came up to each one of us and shook
us by the hand. His name was Johnson. He was a good man. The rest were
bad."
Meanwhile, the war
goes on. In Baghdad yesterday, a roadside bomb blew up shortly after
a US patrol had passed - tearing apart a city bus, killing one passenger
and wounding 20.