'Please stop the American troops killing any more people'

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Michael Howard Irbil
Friday June 2, 2006
The Guardian

The news that US soldiers are to be investigated for the alleged killing of civilians in Haditha six months ago has done little to allay the scepticism of many ordinary Iraqis.

Thaer Juma, a lawyer and director of a non-government organisation in Baghdad, said: "These crimes are happening every day in [the western Iraqi cities of] Haditha and Ramadi, but the international community knows nothing about them because there are media blackouts on the operations, and there are no international humanitarian NGOs to record these transgressions."

Omar Saed, 55, a university lecturer in Baghdad, said: "We'd like to send a brief letter to all the world: 'Please stop the American troops killing any more people.' We need full cooperation from all to help us avoid any more incidents like what happened in Haditha and Ramadi and all the [other] Iraqi cities."

Omar al-Hadi, a businessman in Baghdad's affluent Mansour district, said: "Why are the Americans making a big deal of this now? Don't they know how many thousands of Iraqis have died at the hands of the foreign forces, the terrorists and the militias, and how nothing is ever done about it - apart from occasional expressions of regret?"

Hussein al-Jassim, a baker in the capital's Karrada district, said: "I don't care who was responsible - the Americans or the terrorists. All I know is their deaths and all the deaths are for nothing.

"Iraq was finished the minute Saddam took over, and then the minute the Americans thought they could come and save us from him."

Reports of the killings at Haditha had been circulating since March but the reaction of Iraqi politicians and the media had been relatively muted. And it was not until Tuesday that the new Iraqi prime minister chose to comment. "We emphasise that our forces, that multinational forces, will respect human rights, the rights of the Iraqi citizen," Nouri al-Maliki said in an interview with the BBC.

But Mahmood Talib, a Haditha trader who moved to Baghdad a year ago, said: "Weekly, the American troops and the terrorists surprise us by aggressive operations against our people in the Sunni triangle."

Additional reporting by Daud Salman