WMC Exclusive: What a War Crime Looks Like

Milon Nagi

One story is still untold: that of the last few moments of Abeer’s life, and those of her mother, father and sister. The little we are able to piece together from the accounts of their killers raises still more questions (...) When Fikhriya, along with her husband and Hadeel, was forced into the bedroom, she knew that Abeer was out there alone with soldiers who had been eyeing her for weeks. Fikhriya’s cousin, who found the bodies, suggested that Fikhriya’s arms had been broken. Could she have been forced, as Cortez’s prosecutors described, to watch helplessly as her seven-year-old child and husband were shot? Abeer must have died knowing what was happening to her family. While Cortez and Barker raped her, she probably heard screams and may have noted a sharp silence after the last gunshots were fired. After Green entered the room, presumably with her family’s blood on him, there can have been little doubt. We can hope that her terror prevented her from focusing on these details, or from feeling, however wrongly, that it was her fault that her parents and her sister had been killed so the soldiers might get to her. Perhaps she had a moment to thank Allah that her two younger brothers were away at school. They were later found crying by the burning house, where they could look inside and see the bodies. We can’t be sure, of course. Key witnesses are dead. But this is what a war crime looks like...

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WMC Exclusive: The Casualties of War Crimes— Who Weeps for Abeer?

Helen Zia

Sandwiched between International Women’s Day on March 8 and the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19 is another date that marks a tragic nexus of the two: the day one year ago when 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi was stalked, gang-raped, shot in the head and her corpse burned in her own home in Mahmoudiya, Iraq. Four U.S. soldiers and one former soldier are charged with the crimes committed March 12, 2006.(...) Numerous observers, including soldiers themselves, say that abuses of Iraqi civilians are not uncommon. A report by Code Pink and the Global Exchange describes incidents where U.S. soldiers tortured female detainees, among them young girls, in the form of sexual abuse and rape, including stripping them naked, then burning their skin or dousing them with water. Sometimes women were tortured in prison cells near their husbands so that their screams could be used to torture the Muslim male detainees...

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