Ramadi - Meeting the witnesses to the killings in Ramadi and the family and friends of the men who were shot.
There was, after all, a welcome in Ramadi. I can’t say the rumours that it’s dangerous are exaggerated, but my hands were not cut off and wherever I went people gave me chai, invited me in and wanted to talk. It’s true there was a constant percussion of gunfire, but Thursday afternoon is peak time for weddings and a lot of firing in the air goes on.
We were outside the army base to ask the commander for an explanation about the raid which killed Ibrahim and Sabah Odai and their cousin Mohammed when guns were pointed at us and we were surrounded by an incoming convoy of humvees. They were already “on lock down” when we got there, apparently having some warning of the attack on the other side of the palace which, a couple of minutes later, made the ground quake as I haven’t felt since the war and the appointment with Captain Galloway was postponed by implication.
In Ramadi, for the first time since I got back to Iraq, I was besieged by people saying they want Saddam back. The anger is tangible: not only the lack of electricity, petrol, water, jobs and so on, but the collective punishments, the deliberate cutting of supplies and services, raids and the continued presence of the US troops in the town, a couple of months after it was agreed that they’d withdraw to the edges.
Ismail Odai went to get the bodies of his brothers, Sabah and Ibrahim. The doctors wrote and signed death certificates saying the men died from fractures and body wounds. Both men were shot dead by the troops in a raid on November 20th. “There were American soldiers there with a Lebanese interpreter. They asked why is that man [Ismail] shouting?
‘The interpreter said, because they have written that the cause of death was fractures and wounds in the body. The Americans were on the head of the doctor when he wrote the death certificate. It was not wounds and fractures, it was assassination – they shot them on the ground, but the doctor refused to write that. There are bullets in the ground where they shot him. The doctor was sitting writing and the Americans were there standing over him.
“This was doctor Khattan Abed Hanish at Ramadi Hospital who signed the death certificate for Sabah. It was apparent that the doctor was under pressure from them. A different doctor, Dr Hamdi, signed the certificate for Ibrahim but he gave the same cause of death.”
We chased wild geese around the city and eventually failed to find either doctor but an Iraqi friend who works with foreign journalists explained that he has encountered Dr Hamdi before. He signed the death certificate for a Hungarian civilian worker killed recently. Three different causes of death were given in public statements by the US authorities, none of them mentioning shooting, though witnesses indicated that the man was shot by American troops. My friend stayed outside the hospital chatting while the reporters went inside and were told nothing. Away from the cameras the guards told him the man was bleeding from bullet wounds when he arrived.
Khalid was outside the house with Sabah, Ibrahim and their cousin Mohammed, waiting for futtoor, the meal which breaks the day’s fast during Ramadan. “American cars came on the road. Ibrahim’s mother asked what’s going on. He said it was only traffic control. We stayed outside the house, not thinking the troops were coming for us.
“The first car stopped beside the bush there and the others were standing on the road. The soldiers came from the road towards the house and they were running. They surrounded the house. We were outside the front of the house. The soldiers came and put ties on us and put us on the ground. The Americans entered the house through two doors – this is one and the other one is at the back.
“The women and children were in and outside the outdoor kitchen building when the Americans arrived. The soldiers entered through two doors and started shooting each other. The soldiers were terrified, between themselves, and reacted thinking each other were the enemy. They were firing as well from outside the house, through the windows. Three or four Americans were killed inside the house, killed by Americans. As revenge they came outside and shot us on the ground. They killed Ibrahim and Sabah and Mohammed and I was shot in the arm.”
He carefully removed the coat from around his shoulders and undid enough buttons to show us the wounds on his arm, dark scabs surrounded by yellowed bruising, a smallish, ragged entry wound and a larger exit wound. He’s no idea why they let him live. The house was devastated by continued attacks. Shell casings litter the ground outside. The US troops threw a grenade into a front room with no one inside. Ibrahim was a human rights lawyer and the papers for all his cases were taken from his car. One of the family’s Qurans was torn and thrown outside.
The rest of the family is now living in the medical aid building. Ibrahim’s wife is in mourning for three months and wouldn’t see us though her brother in law says she wants to send the information overseas for lawyers outside Iraq to take on the case. Ibrahim’s daughters were also indoors in mourning. His nine year old son Ibed stood outside among the adults in silence, the devastated, lonely, speechless, powerless rage in his eyes answering any question you might think of asking him. I’m not clear exactly where he was standing but his uncle says he saw his father shot.
“Bush is the head of the terrorists,” Ismail said. “The Americans came the next day and smashed the car. On the second day after, they came and said we are sorry, you are not the people we want, it’s a mistake. They were from the 8th Brigade – the commander was Isle.” (No one had any idea how the commander’s name was spelt, so that’s my guess).
A local police officer came with us from the outskirts of Ramadi to show us the way. He told us his full name but asked to be identified only as “Hussein”. He knew Ibrahim as a police cadet, an uncommonly honest man who refused to accept bribes. “He was very ambitious to be a lawyer, so he studied and got his degree and when he became a lawyer he started coming back to his friends who were still policemen, asking us to send him our cases in which the people in prison were illegally or dishonestly accused, in Saddam’s time.
“He graduated 2 years ago and started to work with those people accused by the others. He wouldn’t work for anyone who was trying to harm anyone else – it was the first time I’d ever seen a lawyer who wouldn’t accept bad things being done. Beside Ibrahim’s house, which you saw, near the medical aid place, there was an office of the Baathist party. When any soldier leaves his unit and goes absent without leave the Baathis used to come and take him from his house and send him back to his unit.
“This was near Ibrahim’s house and he told all the police that when people escaped from the army they shouldn’t tell the Baathists, he told them do not take anyone from his house, just talk to them and try to persuade them to go back. Don’t take them to the prison. This is a good thing from Ibrahim, because they weren’t punished if they went back, only if the Baathis took them.”
Hussein said there is no electricity most of the time. About a month ago the supply was stopped almost completely. The outlying villages are given it for one hour a day and the city of Ramadi has a little more but not much. Wherever I went in Ramadi, in cafes, markets, to the medical clinic to look for Doctors Hamdi and Khattan, people were eager to talk. The fury is tangible here.
Jo Wilding
December 11th, 2003
December 3rd -
Killings in Ramadi
- US troops raid the wrong house and execute the wrong men.
Modified: 08 Dec 2003
Two days before the end of Ramadan, just as they were about to break their fast, the family was interrupted by two groups of US troops from the 82nd Airborne Division bursting into the house, from opposite sides. The family dived for cover and the troops fired on each other, killing three of their own. They then separated the women and girls, putting them in an outside kitchen building of the home near Ramadi.
Three men, brothers Ibrahim and Sabah Odai and their cousin, were taken outside the house, forced face down in the mud and shot dead.
The next day the military returned to the village bringing papers with them. They were sorry but they had raided the wrong house, acting on false information. Claims for compensation for any damage suffered could be submitted, along with proof of fault, photographs of damage, medical reports, death certificates, details of the amount of money claimed, and so on, to the nearest office.
The women of the village were in mourning, in black, indoors, the widow and children of one man, the mother of the two brothers, a little girl with a dressing covering a shrapnel wound on her face, a young woman with her arm heavily bandaged. The house was more or less destroyed. A white car was a strainer of bullet holes. There were bloodstains on the ground where the men were executed.
I’m passing on information from an independent journalist friend. I’ve seen the photos but I haven’t yet been able to go and take statements from the people. Ibrahim was a human rights lawyer and today there was due to be a demonstration by other lawyers in Ramadi. It hasn’t been much in the news though and I thought it was too important to wait till I get to see them. I’ll give you more details when I do.
We attempted to go to Ramadi today to join the demonstration and get their statements but by the time we got petrol it was 9:30 and we wouldn’t even have got out of Baghdad by 10, so the journalists I was hitching a lift with decided not to go. I’ll go on Saturday, inshallah. Cross your fingers for me. It’s a scary place. When I told Raed I was going to Ramadi he pleaded with me not to go. “They will cut off your hands. And your tongue.”
The reason it took until 9:30 to get petrol was that the queue went round the entire block from each of the petrol stations. Men wait outside their cars on the street parallel with the one where the actual pumps are and, every few minutes, open the driver’s door, put their shoulder to the frame and push the vehicle forward a few minutes. To leave the engine running or restart it for every step forward would be unaffordable madness.
The petrol station just past Wathiq Square said it had no petrol to sell, but still there was a motionless queue two cars wide and easily a hundred long. Even the black market sellers now have lines. The queues block the road and the rage of waiting is amplified by the continued inertia outside the station, burning the fuel so hard won. You never see a humvee in a petrol queue.
The Turkish drivers don’t want to drive to Baghdad anymore, according to Mohammed, and there isn’t enough fuel coming in from Kuwait and other neighbours to satisfy the demand for both cars and generators. Iraqi plants are generating too little because they need repairs and the Iraqi engineers know how to fix them but are not being allowed to.
As well, the prices are going up, because Halliburton (the one that’s paying Dick Cheney $1 million a year ‘pension’) is charging, via the US administration, $2.65 per gallon (4 litres) to transport it in from Kuwait. Even the Pentagon, known for its robbery of US taxpayers, used to do the job for $1.12 / gallon.. Iraqi businesses were managing to bring it in for less than $1 a gallon.
As we drove away with a full tank after a half-hour wait, even for black market petrol, Mohammed indicated another queue occupying two lanes of the highway we were passing over. The roadside sellers said an American tank just crushed two cars in that queue and drove away. No one was hurt, because they were out of the cars, just very, very angry.
Jo Wilding
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
More from Jo Wilding's Diary
December 10th - Nahrain University - A friend's university, Saif's escape from Saddam and some of Ahmed's stories from his time driving the ambulance. http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/49/index.php
December 8th 2003 - Ahmed and Ali - The US offer of reward money for information means an ambulance volunteer has had to go into hiding. The petrol queues are getting worse. http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/48/index.php
December 6th - The Mess Between Two Rivers - Iraq's unseen environmental catastrophe and its health consequences.
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/47/index.php
Bit of a Biography
- Brief details of who I am, what I'm doing here and what I've done before.
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/46/index.php
Please also see:
Samarra-US Military Using Weapons of Mass Deception? - Dahr Jamail is an American freelance journalist currently in Baghdad. He went to Samarra to try to find out the truth behind the wildly differing stories of what happened in the battle there. http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/51/index.php
Student Opinion Poll - Dahr went to Mustansariyah University to ask students their opinions on the occupation. Also some ideas for action. He's a freelance writer from Alaska. http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/52/index.php
To receive Dahr's reports direct, e mail dahrma90@yahoo.com and ask to be added to his list.
Jo Wilding
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
There was, after all, a welcome in Ramadi. I can’t say the rumours that it’s dangerous are exaggerated, but my hands were not cut off and wherever I went people gave me chai, invited me in and wanted to talk. It’s true there was a constant percussion of gunfire, but Thursday afternoon is peak time for weddings and a lot of firing in the air goes on.
We were outside the army base to ask the commander for an explanation about the raid which killed Ibrahim and Sabah Odai and their cousin Mohammed when guns were pointed at us and we were surrounded by an incoming convoy of humvees. They were already “on lock down” when we got there, apparently having some warning of the attack on the other side of the palace which, a couple of minutes later, made the ground quake as I haven’t felt since the war and the appointment with Captain Galloway was postponed by implication.
In Ramadi, for the first time since I got back to Iraq, I was besieged by people saying they want Saddam back. The anger is tangible: not only the lack of electricity, petrol, water, jobs and so on, but the collective punishments, the deliberate cutting of supplies and services, raids and the continued presence of the US troops in the town, a couple of months after it was agreed that they’d withdraw to the edges.
Ismail Odai went to get the bodies of his brothers, Sabah and Ibrahim. The doctors wrote and signed death certificates saying the men died from fractures and body wounds. Both men were shot dead by the troops in a raid on November 20th. “There were American soldiers there with a Lebanese interpreter. They asked why is that man [Ismail] shouting?
‘The interpreter said, because they have written that the cause of death was fractures and wounds in the body. The Americans were on the head of the doctor when he wrote the death certificate. It was not wounds and fractures, it was assassination – they shot them on the ground, but the doctor refused to write that. There are bullets in the ground where they shot him. The doctor was sitting writing and the Americans were there standing over him.
“This was doctor Khattan Abed Hanish at Ramadi Hospital who signed the death certificate for Sabah. It was apparent that the doctor was under pressure from them. A different doctor, Dr Hamdi, signed the certificate for Ibrahim but he gave the same cause of death.”
We chased wild geese around the city and eventually failed to find either doctor but an Iraqi friend who works with foreign journalists explained that he has encountered Dr Hamdi before. He signed the death certificate for a Hungarian civilian worker killed recently. Three different causes of death were given in public statements by the US authorities, none of them mentioning shooting, though witnesses indicated that the man was shot by American troops. My friend stayed outside the hospital chatting while the reporters went inside and were told nothing. Away from the cameras the guards told him the man was bleeding from bullet wounds when he arrived.
Khalid was outside the house with Sabah, Ibrahim and their cousin Mohammed, waiting for futtoor, the meal which breaks the day’s fast during Ramadan. “American cars came on the road. Ibrahim’s mother asked what’s going on. He said it was only traffic control. We stayed outside the house, not thinking the troops were coming for us.
“The first car stopped beside the bush there and the others were standing on the road. The soldiers came from the road towards the house and they were running. They surrounded the house. We were outside the front of the house. The soldiers came and put ties on us and put us on the ground. The Americans entered the house through two doors – this is one and the other one is at the back.
“The women and children were in and outside the outdoor kitchen building when the Americans arrived. The soldiers entered through two doors and started shooting each other. The soldiers were terrified, between themselves, and reacted thinking each other were the enemy. They were firing as well from outside the house, through the windows. Three or four Americans were killed inside the house, killed by Americans. As revenge they came outside and shot us on the ground. They killed Ibrahim and Sabah and Mohammed and I was shot in the arm.”
He carefully removed the coat from around his shoulders and undid enough buttons to show us the wounds on his arm, dark scabs surrounded by yellowed bruising, a smallish, ragged entry wound and a larger exit wound. He’s no idea why they let him live. The house was devastated by continued attacks. Shell casings litter the ground outside. The US troops threw a grenade into a front room with no one inside. Ibrahim was a human rights lawyer and the papers for all his cases were taken from his car. One of the family’s Qurans was torn and thrown outside.
The rest of the family is now living in the medical aid building. Ibrahim’s wife is in mourning for three months and wouldn’t see us though her brother in law says she wants to send the information overseas for lawyers outside Iraq to take on the case. Ibrahim’s daughters were also indoors in mourning. His nine year old son Ibed stood outside among the adults in silence, the devastated, lonely, speechless, powerless rage in his eyes answering any question you might think of asking him. I’m not clear exactly where he was standing but his uncle says he saw his father shot.
“Bush is the head of the terrorists,” Ismail said. “The Americans came the next day and smashed the car. On the second day after, they came and said we are sorry, you are not the people we want, it’s a mistake. They were from the 8th Brigade – the commander was Isle.” (No one had any idea how the commander’s name was spelt, so that’s my guess).
A local police officer came with us from the outskirts of Ramadi to show us the way. He told us his full name but asked to be identified only as “Hussein”. He knew Ibrahim as a police cadet, an uncommonly honest man who refused to accept bribes. “He was very ambitious to be a lawyer, so he studied and got his degree and when he became a lawyer he started coming back to his friends who were still policemen, asking us to send him our cases in which the people in prison were illegally or dishonestly accused, in Saddam’s time.
“He graduated 2 years ago and started to work with those people accused by the others. He wouldn’t work for anyone who was trying to harm anyone else – it was the first time I’d ever seen a lawyer who wouldn’t accept bad things being done. Beside Ibrahim’s house, which you saw, near the medical aid place, there was an office of the Baathist party. When any soldier leaves his unit and goes absent without leave the Baathis used to come and take him from his house and send him back to his unit.
“This was near Ibrahim’s house and he told all the police that when people escaped from the army they shouldn’t tell the Baathists, he told them do not take anyone from his house, just talk to them and try to persuade them to go back. Don’t take them to the prison. This is a good thing from Ibrahim, because they weren’t punished if they went back, only if the Baathis took them.”
Hussein said there is no electricity most of the time. About a month ago the supply was stopped almost completely. The outlying villages are given it for one hour a day and the city of Ramadi has a little more but not much. Wherever I went in Ramadi, in cafes, markets, to the medical clinic to look for Doctors Hamdi and Khattan, people were eager to talk. The fury is tangible here.
Jo Wilding
December 11th, 2003
December 3rd -
Killings in Ramadi
- US troops raid the wrong house and execute the wrong men.
Modified: 08 Dec 2003
Two days before the end of Ramadan, just as they were about to break their fast, the family was interrupted by two groups of US troops from the 82nd Airborne Division bursting into the house, from opposite sides. The family dived for cover and the troops fired on each other, killing three of their own. They then separated the women and girls, putting them in an outside kitchen building of the home near Ramadi.
Three men, brothers Ibrahim and Sabah Odai and their cousin, were taken outside the house, forced face down in the mud and shot dead.
The next day the military returned to the village bringing papers with them. They were sorry but they had raided the wrong house, acting on false information. Claims for compensation for any damage suffered could be submitted, along with proof of fault, photographs of damage, medical reports, death certificates, details of the amount of money claimed, and so on, to the nearest office.
The women of the village were in mourning, in black, indoors, the widow and children of one man, the mother of the two brothers, a little girl with a dressing covering a shrapnel wound on her face, a young woman with her arm heavily bandaged. The house was more or less destroyed. A white car was a strainer of bullet holes. There were bloodstains on the ground where the men were executed.
I’m passing on information from an independent journalist friend. I’ve seen the photos but I haven’t yet been able to go and take statements from the people. Ibrahim was a human rights lawyer and today there was due to be a demonstration by other lawyers in Ramadi. It hasn’t been much in the news though and I thought it was too important to wait till I get to see them. I’ll give you more details when I do.
We attempted to go to Ramadi today to join the demonstration and get their statements but by the time we got petrol it was 9:30 and we wouldn’t even have got out of Baghdad by 10, so the journalists I was hitching a lift with decided not to go. I’ll go on Saturday, inshallah. Cross your fingers for me. It’s a scary place. When I told Raed I was going to Ramadi he pleaded with me not to go. “They will cut off your hands. And your tongue.”
The reason it took until 9:30 to get petrol was that the queue went round the entire block from each of the petrol stations. Men wait outside their cars on the street parallel with the one where the actual pumps are and, every few minutes, open the driver’s door, put their shoulder to the frame and push the vehicle forward a few minutes. To leave the engine running or restart it for every step forward would be unaffordable madness.
The petrol station just past Wathiq Square said it had no petrol to sell, but still there was a motionless queue two cars wide and easily a hundred long. Even the black market sellers now have lines. The queues block the road and the rage of waiting is amplified by the continued inertia outside the station, burning the fuel so hard won. You never see a humvee in a petrol queue.
The Turkish drivers don’t want to drive to Baghdad anymore, according to Mohammed, and there isn’t enough fuel coming in from Kuwait and other neighbours to satisfy the demand for both cars and generators. Iraqi plants are generating too little because they need repairs and the Iraqi engineers know how to fix them but are not being allowed to.
As well, the prices are going up, because Halliburton (the one that’s paying Dick Cheney $1 million a year ‘pension’) is charging, via the US administration, $2.65 per gallon (4 litres) to transport it in from Kuwait. Even the Pentagon, known for its robbery of US taxpayers, used to do the job for $1.12 / gallon.. Iraqi businesses were managing to bring it in for less than $1 a gallon.
As we drove away with a full tank after a half-hour wait, even for black market petrol, Mohammed indicated another queue occupying two lanes of the highway we were passing over. The roadside sellers said an American tank just crushed two cars in that queue and drove away. No one was hurt, because they were out of the cars, just very, very angry.
Jo Wilding
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
More from Jo Wilding's Diary
December 10th - Nahrain University - A friend's university, Saif's escape from Saddam and some of Ahmed's stories from his time driving the ambulance. http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/49/index.php
December 8th 2003 - Ahmed and Ali - The US offer of reward money for information means an ambulance volunteer has had to go into hiding. The petrol queues are getting worse. http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/48/index.php
December 6th - The Mess Between Two Rivers - Iraq's unseen environmental catastrophe and its health consequences.
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/47/index.php
Bit of a Biography
- Brief details of who I am, what I'm doing here and what I've done before.
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/46/index.php
Please also see:
Samarra-US Military Using Weapons of Mass Deception? - Dahr Jamail is an American freelance journalist currently in Baghdad. He went to Samarra to try to find out the truth behind the wildly differing stories of what happened in the battle there. http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/51/index.php
Student Opinion Poll - Dahr went to Mustansariyah University to ask students their opinions on the occupation. Also some ideas for action. He's a freelance writer from Alaska. http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/52/index.php
To receive Dahr's reports direct, e mail dahrma90@yahoo.com and ask to be added to his list.
Jo Wilding
http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk