Horrors of Mahmoudiya and Haditha: Lest we forget

By Ameen Izzadeen

When Lebanon has been dominating the world media headlines in the past six weeks, Iraq remained somewhat obscured and the war there forgotten. Even bomb blasts that killed as many as 60 people did not receive much media coverage, partly because such deadly explosions had become a daily occurrence and therefore no longer makes big news and partly because the world media — most of them controlled by Israel's patron — were preoccupied with the war in Lebanon.

If not for the media's preoccupation with Lebanon, the news about the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmoudiya, Iraq, and the murder of the girl and her family would have raised a hornet's nest and there would have been further pressure on the US administration to withdraw its troops from Iraq. The shocking details of the Mahmoudiya crime, which took place in March this year, were unraveling just as Israel started its terror campaign on Lebanon on the pretext of punishing Hezbollah for kidnapping two of its soldiers and killing eight others on July 12.

During the height of the Lebanon war, news agency reports on August 8 said a US military court was deciding whether four soldiers in the Mahmoudiya crime should be court-martialled. A witness said that troops were "driven nuts" by combat stress and got high on cough syrup.

US Soldiers Patrol a street in Baghdad's Ghazaliya neighborhood. AFP

The witness, Private First Class Justic Cross said conditions "pretty much crushed the platoon", which lived in constant fear of being killed in Mahmoudiya.

The court at Camp Liberty in Baghdad's high security Green Zone heard that three of the soldiers took turns raping Abeer al-Janabi and murdered her and her family.

Cross said soldiers often drank whiskey and took prescription painkillers to relieve the stress of serving in Iraq. "It drives you nuts. You feel like at every step you might get blown up. You just hit a point where you're like, 'If I die today, I die.' You're just walking a death walk," said Cross.

The sickening details of the case shocked and angered the Iraqis but the rest of the world which was watching aghast at Israel's destruction of southern Lebanon, took little notice of it.

Israel's war on Lebanon in a way offered a fig leaf to the US administration to hide its shame of Mahmoudiya — and also Haditha. "What happened in Haditha?" one may ask.

In Haditha, a group of US Marines is alleged to have killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in November 2005. It was one of a series of incidents in which US troops are suspected of killing civilians in Iraq. The Marines upon returning to their base are alleged to have made a log entry saying the civilians died in a roadside explosion.

The New York Times reported on Friday that a Pentagon investigation into the Haditha killings has found possible concealment or destruction of evidence by the Marines involved in the case.

Quoting two Defence Department officials, the report said the unit's logbook had been tampered with and an incriminating video taken by an aerial drone was not given to investigators until a top-ranking commander in Iraq intervened.

Two investigations were initiated into the Haditha case — a murder inquiry and a probe into the Marines' procedures following the killings.

The New York Times said a probe report faulted officers in the Second Marine Division for not aggressively investigating the Haditha killings.

The defence officials were quoted as saying the report also found commanders had created a climate that minimized the importance of Iraqi lives, particularly in Haditha, where insurgent attacks were rampant, The New York Times said.

Another horrific news item that came from Iraq during the Lebanon war was the unusually high monthly death toll. Yet the news received only a passing mention in most of the Western media channels.

According to a New York Times report on Wednesday, July was the deadliest since the US invaded Iraq in 2003, with a total of 3,438 civilian deaths reported — an average of more than 110 a day.

"The rising numbers indicate that sectarian violence is spiralling out of control, and seem to bolster an assertion many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have been making in recent months: That the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping into one...," the New York times news report said.

All this indicates that the US policy in Iraq has failed. It has neither brought in political stability nor offered security for the people. Yet, President George W. Bush and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claim that the situation is turning better and express hope that the Iraqi government and its security forces will soon be in a position to bring the entire country under their control. They beam with confidence even as opinion polls in the United States show that the American people's support for their country's military campaign in Iraq is fast declining.

In recent weeks, some 50,000 US and Iraqi security forces have been carrying out a massive military operation in Baghdad, targeting particularly Shiite militants loyal to radical preacher Moqtada al-Sadr and other anti-US mullahs.

They are not going after the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council of Islamic Republic of Iraq (SCIRI), which is working in cahoots with the US. Members of the Badr Brigade militia are alleged to have formed death squads that target the Sunni Muslims and fan the sectarian violence. So are Sunni extremists funded by Wahhabi elements who view the Shiites as heretics.

During the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the Sunnis and the Shiites lived like brothers and good neighbours. But many Iraqis today see the sectarian violence that is gripping their country as a manifestation of a curse, which is nothing but the presence of foreign troops.