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The GrandDaddy of them all!
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sry, wrong story.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...l/iraq/2038968
Quote:
Iraqis seek retribution for civilian casualties
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BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Uday Ahmed walked across an auto repair yard in south Baghdad, holding the car part he needed replaced: an ignition distributor.
The object gleamed in the sunlight, clearly visible to anyone on the rooftop of a police station adjoining the yard. It was round and metallic, slightly bigger than a fist. From a distance, it strikingly resembled a hand grenade.
One shot exploded in the air.
In the chaotic minutes that followed, Ali Hassan remembers seeing the 24-year-old Ahmed doubled over on the ground and then glance up briefly at the police station roof, where soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were posted behind sandbags.
It might have been the last thing Ahmed ever saw. A second shot, fired from the roof of the police station, struck his chest.
"It hit him, and he dropped. There was blood everywhere," said Hassan, who runs a falafel stand about 20 feet from where Ahmed fell.
That death last month, witnessed by several people who later spoke to a reporter, has been almost forgotten as the daily attacks against U.S. soldiers continue to dog the American occupation of Iraq. Most soldiers at the 82nd Airborne's base two blocks from the auto-repair yard could not recall the incident.
But the mounting numbers of deaths among their own have hit the Iraqis hard. In numerous interviews, they warned that more than other factors like widespread crime, high unemployment or electricity blackouts, civilian casualties have hardened their feelings toward the GIs and could prolong or widen the armed resistance.
"It's increased our hate against Americans," says Ali Hatem, 23, a computer science student at the University of Baghdad. "It also increases the violence against them.
"In Iraq we are tribal people. When someone loses their son, they want revenge."
Neither Iraqis nor the U.S. military keeps statistics for dead civilians like Ahmed the mechanic, whose shooting the military calls a tragic accident. Yet such incidents are reported regularly.
On July 27, for instance, U.S. soldiers opened fire on cars that overshot a military cordon in the plush west Baghdad suburb of Mansour. At least three people were killed.
In late April, 82nd Airborne soldiers fired on a demonstration in Fallujah, about 50 miles west of Baghdad, killing 13 people. In June, soldiers opened fire on a protest outside the Republican Palace in Baghdad, killing at least two people.
In both those cases, soldiers said they believed armed insurgents hidden in the crowd had fired on them.
U.S. regrets deaths
U.S. officials have expressed regrets that innocent people have been killed in the crossfire of the conflict with Saddam Hussein's loyalists that has raged since May 1 when President Bush declared major combat operations over.
The military officials say they are still fighting a war and that such incidents are an unfortunate consequence.
Still, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, told a reporter last week that the military had decided to limit the scope of raids conducted the past few weeks in a hunt for Baath Party operatives and others. Other operations in Iraq, and the Americans' rules for firing weapons when they deem their lives are endangered, apparently were not affected.
So far, Iraqis have filed two wrongful death claims against the Americans. The military will not specify which cases they are. But the claimants are unlikely to win.
Under U.S. laws drafted during World War II, the military is not legally liable if civilians are killed during combat operations. "Our soldiers are conducting combat operations," says Col. Marc Warren, the senior American military attorney in Iraq. "We are still engaged in combat operations."
At least one case has been so unsettling to both American soldiers and Iraqis that U.S. forces have decided to break their own rules and open formal investigations into a death.
The tragic incident occurred on June 28.
At 10:30 that night, 12-year-old Mohammed Al-Kubaisa had gone to the rooftop of his family's home, where he and his twin brother, Moustafa, were to sleep, a favorite summertime habit. Mohammed had just reached the top, when he turned to watch a group of armed American soldiers patrolling the street below. One soldier looked up in the darkness and saw a figure on the roof, watching him. A bullet was fired, and Mohammed was hit.
"I held him while his blood poured on the floor," said his mother, Wafa Abdul Latif, 44, recalling the hours following. She said the soldiers slammed through the front door and pushed her aside as they searched the house. "He was still alive. He was struggling to breathe."
Delay at a checkpoint
Worse was to come. The family's neighbor, Yaser Ala, bundled young Mohammed into his car, and tore through the streets toward a hospital. They reached a group of soldiers at a roadblock.
"They stopped us at the checkpoint because it was nearly curfew time," said Ala, 17. "They said we could not go on, even though they saw Mohammed bleeding."
No civilian is permitted outdoors in Baghdad after 11 p.m.
Distraught, Ala returned to the house. Mohammed died in the car seat shortly afterward.
Mohammed's death was cited in a report released by the London-based Amnesty International, which said that U.S. forces were at times trigger happy and were ill-prepared for policing Iraq. "Coalition forces must abide by law enforcement standards and therefore use force in line with the principles of necessity and proportionality," the report said.
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i'm not a car person and got confused with an "ignition distributor" and a spark plug.
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"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal
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