The Legacy, Part Thirteen

Lots of dead people

Photo:   A poster outside Ahmed Hassan's trailer commemorates his three sons killed by militants in 2006. [Al Jazeera]

Lots of dead people

The legacy of the Iraq war for Ahmed Hassan can be reduced to a single image, the faded photograph of his three dead sons, all of them killed by armed groups, which hangs above the cramped trailer he and his family now call home.  All three were killed within a span of six months. Muthanna, a doctor, and Thamar, a professional volleyball player, were both shot in the head; Laith, a police officer, was assassinated by a roadside bomb planted near his car.  He blames his neighbours in Diyala province, an ethnically and religiously mixed area which became a stronghold of al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006.  "The ones I was sitting with day and night, my friends, they are the ones who killed my sons," Hassan, a Shia Muslim, said bitterly. "My neighbours told al-Qaeda about us."

Celebrating US Withdrawal from Iraq? Shame on Us!

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”  The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

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The vast majority of American people does not know or care about all these deaths while our troops were occupying the country.    They have no idea, and they have not ever taken the time to educate themselves.  Most deaths in Iraq were caused by other Iraqis, but a significant number were caused by US troops.  And I believe the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence was caused by the decisions of the Bush administration, in particular, sending Negroponte into Iraq.  

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