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29 March 2024

Leaked files recount tales known by every Iraqi

Published
By AFP

Iraqi schoolteacher Fatima Razak does not need the WikiLeaks revelations to appreciate the scars of the US occupation, which she wears on her disfigured face.

Every morning she looks in the mirror and relives the horror of 2007, when she says a bullet fired by a US soldier sliced through her cheek.

Fatima was caught in a bottleneck at one of the numerous checkpoints the Americans set up throughout Baghdad after the 2003 US-led invasion.

She waited nervously with hundreds of other cars, conscious that a suicide bomber could be lurking.

At the checkpoints were jittery US troops unknowing of Iraqi culture and notorious for being ready to fire at anything that looked like suspicious.

"An American Humvee with mounted guns drove toward the checkpoint," Fatima recalls, almost in a whisper.

"It fired for no apparent reason and a bullet went through my face," she tells AFP, her finger tracing a deep scar from mouth to ear.

"How can I look in the mirror every morning?" asks the 42-year-old English teacher who is awaiting a seventh round of plastic surgery. "I am a woman. I have a husband. I have a child."

Graphic accounts of torture and civilian killings are detailed among nearly 400,000 US military documents made public on Friday on whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

Al-Jazeera television said the main findings included revelations of "hundreds" of civilian deaths at manned American checkpoints.

"When the Americans came the people welcomed them with open arms and flowers," says Sheikh Najeh al-Fatlawi, a Shiite cleric and school headmaster.

"But later, people saw how the Americans behaved and they turned against them."

The turning point for opinions about the invaders was probably the 2004 revelation of shocking photos of US soldiers sexually and physically humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

Iraqis who had endured such treatment under Saddam did not expect the same from America.

"I love Americans, but not as occupiers of my country," said retired teacher Mahmoud Abdulrahim.

In September 2007, the same year Razak was shot, the leaked papers also document the killing at a Baghdad checkpoint of a nine-year-old girl, satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera said.

American soldiers honked their horns at a car that got too close to their patrol, but when it failed to turn around one gunner fired a warning shot.

"Gunner fires one warning shot from his M4. The bullet ricochets and hits one local national (nine-year-old-girl). Patrol stops traffic at the intersection," Al-Jazeera quoted one document as saying.

The news channel's Arabic-language service reported at least 109,000 people were killed, 63 per cent of them civilians, since the invasion until the end of 2009.

Officially, the US military has a "consequence management" compensation system for victims, but applicants complain that it is hard to access and pays trivial sums.

Iraqis say tensions eased after US forces began disappearing from public view from mid-2009.
The Americans have since become nearly invisible after officially ending combat operations at the start of September and handing over control of checkpoints to Iraqi police.

The 50,000 US troops remaining in Iraq until a full pullout at the end of next year rarely venture outside their bases.

Earlier this week, an officer riding in an armoured vehicle to the southern city of Basra from a nearby US base wondered aloud why civilian traffic was keeping its distance.

"Because the gunner's got his weapon pointed at them," said a more experienced colleague.
The perils of getting too close are known to all Iraqis.

Many Iraqis wonder what will happen after the American pullout. Daily bombings, shootings and kidnappings are the curses of an Al-Qaeda insurgency.

Asked if he wants the Americans to leave or stay beyond 2011, Dr Falah al-Qaisi, an education official in Baghdad's provincial council, says sadly he wants them to stay.

"There was a time when we wished for them to leave. But they put us in a position where we have no choice but to wish for them to stay."

Another Fatima, whose sister-in-law and cousin were killed by insurgents and whose 22-year-old daughter was wounded last month by shrapnel, says she wants to appear on Oprah Winfrey's talk show.

"I want to tell the Americans that in Iraq we don't just cry; we shed tears of blood."