Home > A Mystery the US is in No Hurry to Resolve
September 13, 2003, Saturday
A Mystery the US is in No Hurry to Resolve
By Robert Fisk
A human brain lay beside the highway. It was scattered
in the sand, blasted from its owner’s head when the
Americans ambushed their own Iraqi policemen.
A few inches away were a policeman’s teeth, broken but
clean dentures, the teeth of a young man. "I don’t know
if they are the teeth of my brother - I don’t even know
if my brother is alive or dead," Ahmed Mohamed shouted
at me. "The Americans took the dead and the wounded away
– they won’t tell us anything."
Ahmed Mohamed was telling the truth. He is also, I
should add, an Iraqi policeman working for the
Americans. United States forces in Iraq officially
stated - incredibly - that they had "no information"
about the killing of the 10 cops and the wounding of
five others early yesterday morning. Unfortunately, the
Americans are not telling the truth.
Soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division fired thousands of
bullets in the ambush, hundreds of them smashing into
the wall of a building in the neighbouring Jordanian
Hospital compound, setting several rooms on fire.
And if they really need "information", they have only to
look at the 40mm grenade cartridges scattered in the
sand near the brains and teeth.
On each is printed the coding "AMM LOT MA-92A170-024".
This is a US code for grenades belt-fired from an
American M-19 gun.
And out in Fallujah, where infuriated Iraqi civilians
roamed the streets after morning prayers looking for US
patrols to stone, it wasn’t difficult to put the story
together. The local American-trained and American-paid
police chief, Qahtan Adnan Hamad - who confirmed that 10
died - described how, not long after midnight yesterday
morning, gunmen in a BMW car had opened fire on the
Mayor’s office in Fallujah.
Two squads of the American-trained and American-paid
police force - from the local Fallujah constabulary
established by US forces last month and the newly
constituted Iraqi national police - set off in pursuit.
Since the Americans will not reveal the truth, let Ahmed
Mohamed, whose 28-year-old brother, Walid, was one of
the policemen who gave chase, tell his story.
"We have been told that the BMW opened fire on the
mayor’s office at 12.30 am. The police chased them in
two vehicles, a Nissan pick-up and a Honda car and they
set off down the old Kandar roads towards Baghdad.
"But the Americans were there in the darkness, outside
the Jordanian Hospital, to ambush cars on the road. They
let the BMW through, then fired at the police cars."
One of the policemen who was wounded in the second
vehicle said the Americans suddenly appeared on the
darkened road. "When they shouted at us, we stopped
immediately," he said. "We tried to tell them we were
police. They just kept on shooting."
The latter is true. I found thousands of brass cartridge
cases at the scene, piles of them like autumn leaves
glimmering in the sun, along with the dark green grenade
cartridges. There were several hundred unfired bullets
but - far more disturbing - was the evidence on the
walls of a building at the Jordanian Hospital. At least
150 rounds had hit the breeze- block wall and two rooms
had burned out, the flames blackening the outside of the
building.
And therein lies another mystery that the Americans were
yesterday in no hurry to resolve. Several Iraqis said
that a Jordanian doctor in the hospital had been killed
and five nurses wounded. Yet when I approached the
hospital gate, I was confronted by three armed men who
said they were Jordanian. To enter hospitals here now,
you must obtain permission from the occupation
authorities in Baghdad - which is rarely, if ever,
forthcoming.
No-one wants journalists prowling round dismal
mortuaries in "liberated" Iraq. Who knows what they
might find?
"The doctors have gone to prayer so you cannot come in,"
an unsmiling Jordanian gunman at the gate told me. On
the roof of the shattered hospital building, two armed
and helmeted guards watched us. They looked to me very
like Jordanian troops. And their hospital is opposite a
US 3rd Infantry Division base. Are the Jordanians here
for the Americans? Or are the Americans guarding the
Jordanian Hospital? When I asked if the bodies of the
dead policemen were here, the armed man at the gate
shrugged his shoulders.
So what happened? Did the Americans shoot down their
Iraqi policemen under the mistaken impression that they
were "terrorists" - Saddamite or al-Qa’ida, depending on
their faith in President George Bush - and then, once
their bullets had smashed into the hospital, come under
attack from the Jordanian guards on the roof?
In any other land, the Americans would surely have
acknowledged some of the truth.
But all they would speak of yesterday were their own
casualties. Two US soldiers were killed and seven
wounded in a raid in the neighbouring town of Ramadi
when the occupants of a house fired back at them.
It gave the impression, of course, that American lives
were infinitely more valuable than Iraqi lives. And had
the brains and teeth beside the road outside Fallujah
been American brains and teeth, of course, they would
have been removed. There were other things beside the
highway yesterday. A torn, blood-stained fragment of an
American-supplied Iraqi policeman’s shirt, a primitive
tourniquet and medical gauze and lots and lots of dried,
blackened blood.
The 3rd Infantry Division are tired, so the story goes
here. They invaded Iraq in March and haven’t been home
since. Their morale is low. Or so they say in Fallujah
and Baghdad. But already the cancer of rumour is
beginning to turn this massacre into something
far more dangerous. Here are the words of Ahmed, whose
brother Sabah was a policeman caught in the ambush and
taken away by the Americans - alive or dead, he doesn’t
know - and who turned up to examine the blood and
cartridge cases yesterday. "The Americans were forced to
leave Fallujah after much fighting following their
killing of 16 demonstrators in April. They were forced
to hire a Fallujah police force.
But they wanted to
return to Fallujah so they arranged the ambush. The BMW
gunmen’ were Americans who were supposed to show there
was no security in Fallujah - so the Americans could
return. Our police kept crying out: We are the police -
we are the police’. And the Americans went on shooting."
In vain did I try to explain that the last thing
Americans wanted to do was return to the Sunni Muslim
Saddamite town of Fallujah. Already they have paid
"blood money" to the families of local, innocent Iraqis
shot down at their checkpoints. They will have to do the
same to the tribal leader whose two sons they also
killed at another checkpoint near Fallujah on Thursday
night. But why did the Americans kill so many of their
own Iraqi policemen?
Had they not heard the radio
appeals of the dying men? Why - and here the story of
the Jordanian Hospital guards and the policemen’s
relatives were the same - did the Americans go on
shooting for an hour and a half? And why did the
Americans say that they had "no information" about the
slaughter 18 hours after they had gunned down 10 of the
very men whom President Bush needs most if he wishes to
extricate his army from the Iraqi death trap?
Copyright 2003 The Independent (London)