Massacre
In Baghdad’s Sadr City
By Patrick Martin
02 July, 2007
WSWS.org
In
one of the largest raids into the largely Shiite Sadr City district
of eastern Baghdad, US forces killed some 26 people and detained another
17, according to an announcement by a military spokesman Saturday. The
early-morning raid produced an explosion of violence, with US tanks
and helicopters opening fire in the densely populated working-class
neighborhood and destroying both vehicles and entire buildings.
While US military officials
portrayed the incident as a pitched battle between US troops and armed
militants using roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic
weapons, residents who spoke to Western reporters afterwards said there
was no organized response by the Mahdi Army militia, loyal to Shiite
leader Moqtada al-Sadr.
Despite the claims of fierce
and close-quarter combat, there were no US casualties reported, a fact
that suggests the one-sided character of the engagement.
There were conflicting reports
on the toll of dead and wounded. A representative of al-Sadr who spoke
to the media in Najaf said that four members of one family, including
women, were killed by a US bomb, and another 16 young men died. “There
were no clashes between the Mahdi army and occupation forces,”
he said. “We are condemning this attack, which targeted the innocent
people in their homes, and we are calling on the government to open
an investigation with the occupation forces to find out what happened.”
An eyewitness who spoke with
the Washington Post confirmed aspects of the account given by the al-Sadr
spokesman, including the killing of four family members in their house.
He described “random shooting” in the neighborhood but no
direct attacks on US troops. “What’s the goal of this savage
act?” he asked. “What are they trying to do—make the
people hate Americans more or simply kill the Iraqis?”
Other eyewitnesses told the
Associated Press (AP) that US troops had opened fire without warning,
shooting into buildings whose residents were mostly asleep. Basheer
Ahmed, a Sadr City resident, said, “At about 4 a.m., a big American
convoy with tanks came and began to open fire on houses, bombing them.
What did we do? We didn’t even retaliate. There was no resistance.”
An Iraqi policeman wounded
in the raid, Montadhar Kareem, spoke to AP from his bed at Al Sadr General
Hospital, where he was being treated. “The bombing became more
intense, and I was injured by shrapnel in both my legs and in my left
shoulder,” he said.
Another resident was interviewed
while watching a funeral procession for several of the victims. She
said, “We are being hit while we are peacefully sleeping in our
houses. Is that fair?”
Eleven-year-old Laith Jassim
spoke to the Los Angeles Times after he was wounded in the shoulder
by shrapnel. “When I was injured, my brothers were not able to
send me to the hospital because the Americans were shooting,”
he said, asking, “Do I look like a Mahdi army member to you?”
US spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher
Garver repeated the claim, invariably made after every military massacre,
that US troops only kill armed combatants. “Everyone who got shot
was shooting at U.S. troops at the time,” he said. “Every
structure and vehicle that the troops on the ground engaged were being
used for hostile intent.” he said.
Such blanket assurances insult
the intelligence of the public, since both the officer and the reporters
who took down his statement are well aware that it is impossible for
soldiers, opening fire in pitch darkness in a crowded urban area, to
know precisely who and what they are hitting, let alone give assurances
that “every” target is a military one.
Meanwhile, there was an unconfirmed
report of an even more gruesome US massacre in Diyala province, the
focus of the military offensive entitled Arrowhead Ripper, begun June
15. The Iraqi Islamic Party, the Sunni component of the US-imposed coalition
government, published a statement Sunday claiming that more than 350
people have been killed in Baquba, the provincial capital, in what they
termed a “collective punishment” of the population, treating
all residents of the city as insurgents.
The statement declared, “Neighborhoods
in western Baquba have witnessed, since last week, fierce attacks by
occupation forces within Operation Arrowhead Ripper ... The forces shelled
these neighborhoods with helicopters, destroying more than 150 houses
and killing more than 350 citizens, their bodies still under wreckage,
in addition to arresting scores of citizens.”
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki,
a Shiite elected to his position with the backing of the al-Sadr movement,
issued a statement condemning the attack on the eastern Baghdad. “The
Iraqi government totally rejects US military operations...conducted
without prior approval from the Iraqi military command,” he declared.
“Anyone who breaches the military command orders will face investigation.”
Maliki’s government
appears even more impotent than the US-backed stooge regime of President
Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. While Karzai is openly derided as the “mayor
of Kabul,” because his political realm is limited to the Afghan
capital city, Maliki cannot control even that much. After he blocked
one proposed US invasion of Sadr City last fall, Maliki was compelled
to endorse future incursions as part of the ongoing US military “surge”
that has mobilized an additional 30,000 combat troops. His protests
over the latest US atrocity in his own capital will be brushed aside.
It appears that the raid
into Sadr City was aimed at promoting the US campaign against alleged
Iranian involvement in the guerilla resistance to the US occupation
of Iraq. The military spokesman, Lt. Col. Garver, said that the 17 men
detained were suspected of “close ties to Iranian terror networks.”
Lt. Gen. David Petraeus,
the top US commander in Iraq, told reporters Saturday that he would
shortly “lay out for the press” the extent of Iranian support
of “secret cells” of Mahdi Army militiamen. “There’s
actually been operational...direction provided to these militia organizations
by the Iranian Quds Force,” he claimed. He made this statement
during a visit to a southern Baghdad neighborhood where a powerful armor-piercing
roadside bomb killed one US soldier in a convoy of Humvees. Three others
were wounded.
The raid on Sadr City comes
at the conclusion of another bloody month, in which more than 1,200
Iraqi civilians died, according to government figures, which are considered
low estimates. Some 101 US troops were killed in June, bringing the
three-month total to 331, the highest such quarterly toll since the
war began. During the same period, 22 British soldiers were killed,
more than in any similar period except the actual invasion in March
2003. For the six months January through June, 574 US soldiers, Marines
and airmen have died in Iraq, a staggering 62 percent increase over
the same period in 2006.
In another development Saturday,
two American soldiers were charged with premeditated murder in the killing
of three Iraqis near the town of Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad. The
killings were separate incidents but had a common methodology: in all
three cases, according to the charges, the soldiers planted weapons
with their victims and claimed they were insurgents, then lied about
the killings to investigators.
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