Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Viva l'Iraq libero e democratico!

Se ci fosse ancora Saddam Hussein... ragazze di 18 anni sarebbero
uccise
da soldati cosi', come se niente fosse.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1037081,00.html
Farah tried to plead with the US troops but she was killed anyway 
The death of two innocent Iraqis was thought so unremarkable the US
military did not even report it, but Peter Beaumont says it reflects
an increasingly callous disregard of civilian lives in coalition
operations
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer 
Farah Fadhil was only 18 when she was killed. An American soldier
threw a grenade through the window of her apartment. Her death, early
last Monday, was slow and agonising. Her legs had been shredded, her
hands burnt and punctured by splinters of metal, suggesting that the
bright high-school student had covered her face to shield it from the
explosion.
She had been walking to the window to try to calm an escalating
situation; to use her smattering of English to plead with the soldiers
who were spraying her apartment building with bullets.
But then a grenade was thrown and Farah died. So did Marwan Hassan
who, according to neighbours, was caught in the crossfire as he went
looking for his brother when the shooting began.
What is perhaps most shocking about their deaths is that the coalition
troops who killed them did not even bother to record details of the
raid with the coalition military press office. The killings were that
unremarkable. What happened in Mahmudiya last week should not be
forgotten, for the story of this raid is also the story of the dark
side of the US-led occupation of Iraq, of the violent and sometimes
lethal raids carried out apparently beyond any accountability.
For while the media are encouraged to count each US death, the Iraqi
civilians who have died at American hands since the fall of Saddam's
regime have been as uncounted as their names have been unacknowledged.
Mahmudiya is typical of the satellite towns that ring Baghdad, and the
apartment block where Farah died was typical of the blocks to be found
there - five storeys or so high, set among dusty paths lined with
palms and stunted trees. In Saddam's time, the people who lived here
were reasonably well-off - junior technicians for the nearby factories
run by the Ministry of Military Industrialisation. These are not the
poorest, but they are by no stretch of the imagination well-off.
When the Americans arrived, say neighbours, the residents of this
cluster of blocks liked the young GIs. They say there were no problems
and that their children played with the troops, while residents would
give them food as the patrols passed by.
But all that came to a sudden bloody end at 12.30am last Monday, when
soldiers arrived outside the apartment block where Farah and her
family lived. What happened in a few minutes, and in the chaos of the
hours that followed, is written across its walls. The bullet marks
that pock the walls are spread in arcs right across the front of the
apartment house, so widely spaced in places that the only conclusion
you can draw is that a line of men stood here and sprayed the building
wildly.
I stood inside and looked to where the men must have been standing,
towards the apartment houses the other way. I could not find impacts
on the concrete paths or on the facing walls that would suggest that
there was a two-way firefight here. Whatever happened here was
one-sided, a wall of fire unleashed at a building packed with sleeping
families. Further examination shows powder burns where door locks had
been shot off and splintered wood where the doors had been kicked in.
All the evidence was that this was a raid that - like so many before
it - went horribly wrong.
This is what the residents, and local police, told us had happened.
Inside the apartment with Farah were her mother and a brother, Haroon,
13. As the soldiers started smashing doors, they began to kick in
Farah's door with no warning. Panicking, and thinking that thieves
were breaking into the apartment, Haroon grabbed a gun owned by his
father and fired some shots to scare them off. The soldiers outside
responded by shooting up the building and throwing grenades into
Farah's apartment.
The randomness of that firing is revealed by a visit to the
apartments. Windows are drilled with bullet holes; ceilings in
kitchens and bedrooms and living areas are scarred where the rounds
smashed in. Hodhbain Tohma was on the roof, fiddling with his new
satellite dish to make it work, when the soldiers came. 'I heard the
shooting first, then an explosion. Then I heard women screaming. I
looked over the roof and saw a line of soldiers on the path firing
weapons wildly towards the building as a helicopter arrived above us.
The shooting all seemed to me to be on one side.'
Abdul Ali Hussein was in the apartment next door to Farah's when the
shooting began. 'I was asleep when we heard the shooting, and then an
explosion blew open my door and filled my apartment with smoke. I
grabbed my family and took them to another room and covered them with
my body.
'I went to see if anyone needed my help next door. I went into three
rooms, saw Farah lying in the kitchen near the window. She was injured
and burnt, but still alive. I ran to get cotton wrapping and bandages
to try and treat her. We didn't have enough and so tore up a
head-cloth to try and stop the bleeding. The soldier shouted at me:
"Where are the fedayeen ?" They told me to leave her because she was
dead.'
As we were talking, a weeping man in a head-cloth arrived - Qasam
Hassan, the brother of the second fatality, Marwan. Qasam told us how
Marwan died. 'When I heard the heavy shooting, I was in another
apartment building visiting friends. My brother was worried, so he
went out to look for me. He was not carrying any arms. He could not
find me, and as he came back to the building the Americans shot him.
He ran and fell behind the building and died. Among all of them they
only had one translator. How could people know what was going on?'
What is most curious about this story is that, when I called the US
military press office in Baghdad, it said it could find no record of
the raid or of the deaths. It is curious because the police in
Mahmudiya have told us how US military policemen delivered the bodies
to their station the next morning; how the local commander had
expressed his commiserations; how the same Iraqi police had complained
that the new troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, who arrived fresh
from the US last month, had apparently reversed the policy of the
previous US unit in the town to take local police on raids.
It became less puzzling when I spoke to Nada Doumani, spokeswoman for
the International Committee for the Red Cross, who confirmed what she
has said before - that despite repeated requests from the Red Cross,
it can neither get information nor figures on civilian deaths during
raids.
What happened at Mahmudiya would be disturbing enough if it was
unique, but it is not. It is part of a pattern that points not to a
deliberate policy but perhaps to something equally worrying, an
institutional lack of care among many in the US military for whether
civilians are killed in their operations. It is not enough to say, as
some defenders of the US military in Iraq do, that its soldiers are
tired, frightened and under pressure from the simmering guerrilla
attacks directed against them. For it is the impression that the US
military gives of not caring about those innocent Iraqis that they
kill that is stoking resentment.
Iraqis have been killed at vehicle checkpoints and killed in their
homes in night-time raids. Policemen have been shot down doing what US
forces have asked them to do, trying to keep the peace. Indeed, the
allegations that US soldiers are too 'trigger happy' even led to
complaints, in mid-August from Ibrahim al-Jaffri - then holding the
rotating presidency of the Iraqi provisional government - urging US
troops to exercise more care before firing.
'All we want are answers,' said Qassam Hassan. 'All we are asking for
is justice.'

 Farah tried to plead with the US troops but she was killed anyway
----
She had been walking to the window to try to calm an escalating
situation; to use her smattering of English to plead with the soldiers
who were spraying her apartment building with bullets. 
But then a grenade was thrown and Farah died. So did Marwan
Hassan who, according to neighbours, was caught in the crossfire as
he went looking for his brother when the shooting began. 
----
Farah alla finestra non c'e' mai arrivata e i soldati non hanno mai
sentito il suo inglese ne l'hanno mai vista alla finestra.
Quindi Torrieri e' inutile il tuo tentativo di fare disinformazione
cercando di mostrare i soldati USA quali assassini di povere ragazze
quando l'articolo stesso indica che c'era un "crossfire" in cui i due
ragazzi si sono trovati in mezzo loro malgrado.
-Stefano