Posted on 03/23/2003 6:54:48 AM PST by JohnHuang2
Iraqis seethe as coalition forces advance in south
By Michael Georgy
SAFWAN, Iraq, Mar 23 (Reuters) - Civilians in southern Iraq are beginning to wonder if the U.S. and British troops who have captured their towns are liberators or occupiers.
"I swear it was better when Saddam was here," said Jamal Kathim, as his angry friends nodded in agreement.
Iraqis in the predominantly Shi'ite south had high hopes for stability at the start of a four-day-old war that U.S. President George W. Bush said would liberate them.
Instead many are struggling to find food, water and medicine when they leave their mud huts and wander along highways through coalition checkpoints.
Shi'ite emotions are caught between fears of President Saddam Hussein's troops returning and fury over what they say is the failure of coalition troops so far to deliver on the humanitarian front.
When Iraqis are not worrying about food supplies, they wonder why U.S. helicopters have swooped down on their villages and allegedly fired on civilian vehicles.
The dead and wounded are sometimes rushed to a British-controlled checkpoint near Safwan, a town of 16,000.
"All I can do is change the bandage," said a British soldier to a wounded Iraq civilian with shrapnel in his leg.
Hospital officials in Safwan said they have treated about 40 civilians who were injured or killed in air raids by coalition forces since the conflict started.
"We try to move the wounded to bigger hospitals and we find American forces pointing guns at us at checkpoints," said Fadil Abbas, the director of the Safwan hospital, pointing to a stretcher with a blood stain.
Other residents of Safwan, where the Iraqis and coalition forces signed a ceasefire after the 1991 Gulf War, said coalition forces are preventing them from retrieving the corpses of 200 Iraqi soldiers in a nearby town.
After hospital officials placed two civilians in a mosque before burial, teenagers gathered at a petrol station that had been looted, walking barefoot in gasoline and siphoning it for a few dollars.
"The Americans and British said it was going to be a liberation but this is an occupation," said Majid, 15.
In the countryside, women in black shawls scrubbed clothes in dirty water.
Other Iraqis sat outside their huts watching coalition troops crawl along the desert floor and tanks rumble across a highway, their treads ripping up the tarmac.
An electricity pylon that was destroyed by coalition bombing and burnt out Iraqi tanks reminded them of the war that had raised hopes among Shi'ites.
Many have bitter memories of their 1991 rebellion against Saddam, which was ruthlessly crushed after the Americans left.
Frustrations were palpable at a checkpoint where an Iraqi man was urgently trying to tell an American soldier something about a nearby power plant.
"He doesn't understand me. There are four Iraqis who work for the government who won't let us go in there to look for our relatives because it was shelled. The men have guns," said the man. "Why don't they listen?"
Roto-Reuter has a long and deep Kneepad History from the X42 years. It is, in effect, what Pravda was in 1960.
Sounds like Reuters is giving them lessons.
PS, hey Libs how’s that War On Poverty going? Only been 39 years after all!
Great. The new emerging "welfare minority."
What's next? Affirmative action for them?
Reuters reporter runs breathlessly to "interview" Ahmed so he can file this report.
So goes Reuters news stories...
Exactly.
Sort of like Nam when we would scrub down a village and try and weed out VC from the non-VC - it was impossible to do. One minute you would be walking by a 12-year old girl and the next thing she would be drawing an AK47 out from under her dress with you as her main target.
This will not be a quick or easy liberation due to the number of hostiles woven into the social fabric.
But it WILL be a liberation.
Everyone's a critic these days. A very tough audience and hard to please.
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