If it can happen in Kandahar, it can, and will, happen in Baghdad and beyond.
Posted on 04/03/2003 7:09:25 PM PST by 68skylark
MARINE COMBAT HEADQUARTERS, Iraq - The Iraqi man who tipped U.S. Marines to the location of American POW Jessica Lynch said Thursday he did so after he saw her Iraqi captor slap her twice as she lay wounded in a hospital.
"A person, no matter his nationality, is a human being," the tipster, a 32-year-old lawyer whose wife was a nurse at the hospital, said in an interview at Marines' headquarters, where he, his wife and daughter are being treated as heroes and guests of honor.
"He is an extremely courageous man who should serve as an inspiration to all of us to do the right thing," said Lt. Col. Rick Long, spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
After he saw Lynch slapped, the lawyer slipped into her room at the Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah and told her, "Don't worry." Then he walked six miles to the nearest U.S. Marines and told them where she was.
He later returned to the hospital, at the request of U.S. commanders, to map the facility and count how many Saddam Hussein loyalists were there.
A U.S. commando force whose name remains secret rescued Lynch early Wednesday local time. She was taken Thursday to Germany for treatment of injuries she suffered when she was captured.
The lawyer, whose first name is Mohammed and who asked that his last name not be published, smiled between every sentence as he recounted in broken but expressive English how he helped the Americans. He learned English at Basra University.
Wearing Marine hand-me-downs after fleeing with only the clothes on their backs, Mohammed, his wife Iman, 32, a nurse at Saddam Hospital, and 6-year-old daughter Abir, seemed surprisingly cheerful for a family on the run.
Grateful Leathernecks showered them with Marine unit patches, a commemorative coin and an American flag on their way to a refugee center near the port of Umm Qsar, where they hope to ride out the war.
"I love America. I like America. Why, I don't know," Mohammed said as he recounted the critical role he played in Lynch's rescue.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has long repressed Iraq's people with such a brutal grip that even with American troops at the gates to Baghdad many refuse to rise up against him out of fear that he will outlast the Americans.
But Mohammed's tale is one of a man who didn't like what he saw when he walked into the Saddam Hospital last Friday to visit his wife and was told by a doctor friend that an American woman POW was in the emergency ward.
The friend walked him to the ground-floor ward, taken over by the feared Saddam Fedayeen at the start of the war, and past a window where he saw Lynch, an Army private first class captured after her convoy became lost near Nasiriyah in the opening days of the war.
Her head was bandaged, her right arm was in a sling over a white blanket and she had what Mohammed thought was a gunshot wound to a leg. But her real problem then was the black-uniformed Fedayeen commander who everyone addressed as "colonel."
The man slapped her, Mohammed said. "One, two," he added, making single slapping and back slap motions with his right hand. She was very brave, he recalled.
"My heart cut," Mohammed added, meaning stopped, putting his hand over his chest and grimacing. "There, I have decided to go to Americans to give them important information about the woman prisoner."
He walked into her room with his doctor friend. "I said 'Good morning.' She thought I was a doctor. I say, 'Don't worry.' She smiled," he recalled.
Doctors treating Lynch wanted to amputate her leg, Mohammed said, but his doctor friend persuaded them not to. His friend, he said, "hates Saddam Hussein and hates security of Saddam Hussein."
Mohammed said he told his wife to take their daughter to his father's house for safety, and then set off on foot to find the American troops he had heard were occupying the edges of Nasiriyah.
"This was very dangerous for me because American soldiers shoot," he said, throwing up his hands in the air to show how he carefully approached what turned out to be the U.S. Marines.
He told them about the woman prisoner, and about a U.S. military uniform he had also seen, presumably of a U.S. soldier killed in the fighting in and around Nasiriyah, some of the heaviest of the war.
They asked him to return to the six-story, 234-bed hospital to gather information on its layout, its hallways, stairways and doors, its basement and whether a helicopter could land on its roof.
He walked back, with no taxis in sight, even as U.S. jets bombed parts of the city of more than 500,000 people. "Boom, boom. I walked under bombs. Fire, Fire," Mohammed recalled.
He did the same thing the next day to report back to the Marines.
There were 41 Fedayeen based at the hospital, with four guarding Lynch's room in civilian clothes but armed with AK-47 assault rifles and carrying radios.
"I drew them a map. I drew them five maps," he said, plainly relishing his cloak-and-dagger missions into the heart of Saddam's terror network.
Fedayeen raided his house the next day, he said, taking away all his possessions and even his car, a Russian-made Muscovitch Brazilia 680. He said a neighbor was shot and her body dragged through the streets just for waving at a U.S. helicopter.
"Very bad people," he said. "There is no kindness in my heart for them."
He got his family out of Nasiriyah on Tuesday night, hours before a task force of U.S. commandos rescued Lynch in a raid so noteworthy that the U.S. Central Command in Qatar called a 4:30 a.m. news conference to announce it.
Four American journalists who have had regular access to the Marines' combat operations center in southern Iraq were asked to stay away from the COC as the rescue operation was getting underway.
Mohammed and his family are now officially "temporary refugees."
After showers, Mohammed put on an oversized green Marine pullover, his wife put on one of the gray T-shirts that MTV donated to the Leathernecks and his daughter was covered to her knees in a green T-shirt from a Marine chemical warfare unit.
But Mohammed did not appear despondent, as his wife smiled and stayed shyly in the background and daughter Abir played with a neon-green illumination stick given to her by a Marine.
"I am very happy," he said, adding that his wife wants to work in a hospital helping Americans and that he is eager to help the Marines any way he can until he can return home to Nasiriyah and resume his normal life.
"In future, when Saddam Hussein down, I will go back to Nasiriyah because my house and office are there," he said. As for the Fedayeen, he said, "when Saddam Hussein down, I sure they go away."
"Believe me, not only I, all the people of Iraq, not the people in the government, like Americans," Mohammed said. "They want to help the Americans, but they are all afraid."
I tried to make a similar point once about a friend of mine, back when the Islam/Christianity debate broke out here on FR and all it earned me was flames. I wish I had worded it more akin to the way that you have here.
I saw that thread a few days after-the-fact, that's why I flagged you. You were right and more than held your own against superior forces in the numerical sense only. :-)
He's a better american than daschole.
Reading this story should be a lesson to them.
I guess the operative word here is "should."
Muslim belivers who have assimilated into modern civilizations and political states ... in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Israel to name a few ... have enjoyed great religious experession, community cohesion and relatively peaceful pursuits of prosperity and well-being. They are vital, lawful and positive members of the communities in which they live. That's the outcome when Islam is practiced in a milieu of modernity. It's all good.
The emotion and passion of the Arab "street" is fickle and easily influenced. Arabs are world class smart and savvy, they'll go along with the best program that feeds their cultural imperative for respect and ritual tribute, but most importantly keeps them alive long enough until Allah wills that they prevail over their oppressors some future day. They go along to get along.
But, they are still primarily creatures of their history. Nomads by geographic necessity. They were Tribal and monarchial as a tool for order and survival. Their resource-free birthplaces have rendered them merchants, brokers, traders and often violent theives by necessity. They don't know production, long term investment and invention. They'll always struggle with democratic institutions and secular tradeoffs. The Western quasi-religion of diversity and enlightened tolerance will never be popular over there. They distrust, verify, then distrust again. They're nature will always be, like the Spainiards said of the Moors, "at your feet or at your throat." So what? As long as they disabuse themselves of any notion or access to kill US, I can live with the Arab Street jibba jabbing insults at us and dancing around cluelessly when summoned. They go right back inside their apartments, grab a Pepsi Cola and box of Ritz Bitz and watch Xena, MTV or Baywatch.
Islam cannot be eradicated by the forceful influence of outside forces. Islamist terrorists, their funding and logistic networks, and those States that sponsor these trans-national ambush murderers can. That's what we're doing.
As you seem incapable of coherent thought, it’s probably unfair to expect you to possess the emotional maturity and self-knowledge necessary to experience shame.
Would a translation of this article from English to Fortune Cookie help you understand it better?
Or do you respond the way you do because you’re hooked up to a machine, like Stephen Hawking, except the communication program you're using is limited to just a few Sound Bites?
I’ll take another “Islam is the enemy” as a yes.
"A person, no matter his nationality, is a human being."
I like this phrase -- it approaches the simple eloquence and decency of some of the words that this country was founded on, like "All men are created equal." Not bad for someone with little training in English!
Mohammed's tale is one of a man who didn't like what he saw when he walked into the Saddam Hospital last Friday.
I like this phrase also. America was founded by individuals who looked at something they didn't like, and who took action to change it.
I'd like to see Mohamed and his family come to the U. S. if that's what he wants -- he's really got the American spirit!
My greatest fears are not that Iraq cannot flourish in freedom, but that it will not be allowed to because such is a grave threat to the fanatical bloodlust of Islamism and despotic regimes remaining in the Middle East.
I also fear that we are in perhaps this nations most dangerous hour, with an insidious corrosion driving the other main party, dividing the people, trashing our founding principles. Senator Kerry's comments and subsequent defense of same --with clintonesque spin and misdirection-- and the democrat party expedient defense of his licklespittle shows the treachery of liberalism in action.
What Kerry said is far more than political rhetoric, it impugns the service of our honorable Soldiers at war under their Commander-in-Chief. By obvious yet ignored association, his comments compare our troops to the Republican Guard serving an evil dictator in his torture and murder of the Iraqi people, a regime in need of changing. That the media is too timid or too blind to see and expose such perfidy is a frightening indictment of their servile posture before Liberalism. And that trend is a mutation of the press, the source for public reflection on our leadership.
Our nation is at risk at home, as it is abroad, from forces set on changing or destroying this land of the free. Moslems wishing to live in peace and tolerance of other religions are no where near the 'threat' to America that the current leadership of the Democrat Party and their servile press pose. We the people had better take note and become active against this threat, or this nation shall not much longer endure under our founding principles.
Iraqi citizens, as their sense of personal safety grows, will not take up arms against the fedayeen and security thugs hiding and taking hostages in their neighborhoods. They will, however, share their educated guesses on the current whereabouts of these butchers with our badass, gun-toting guys.
The killers, rapists and torturers can't hide in mosques, storefronts and tenaments forever. Guys like Muhammed the lawyer are helping us target undercover bad guys this very moment, all over Iraq.
You paint a nice picture -- I hope you're right!
Like you, I suspect and hope that Iraqis aren't stupid -- I hope they'll recognize the source of their pain (Saddam), and the source of their freedom (the United States of America). I hope things will work out well for them in the future -- that will benefit them, and benefit us also.
I personally would like to see this guy get a seven-figure bank account, and a chance to live in any coalition country he chooses. And a medal for heroism from the U. S. military also, if that's possible.
Places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Lebanon and Iran were thrown together based on rough considerations of language, physical features like rivers and mountains, religious or ethnic commonality ... but mainly, it was divied up by the desires of who could be counted on as a client of the United States and who was going to be a client of the Soviet Union.
OK ... Despots, Communists, shahs, sheiks and military strongmen on your mark, get set ...
The Iraqis will be ok, they're secularized and have a pretty solid infrastructure. The Iranians are educated and many are Westernized, they'll be fine. Pakestanis are 20th century authorized. The Turks and Jordanians are ahead of the game and moving on up. The Palestinian state? Oh oh. They will have a population with less: aggregate education, productive economic skill and experience, enlightened political awareness, beneficial social tools and future success prospects than even that collection of brain-quagmired "Sweathogs" from "Welcome Back Kotter."
Palestinian state? What is going to be their main economic export, suicide bombers? Dead body street parade event planners? That situation is hopeless ... we should send them to Mexico. Nah, Mexicans don't deserve an influx of non-languaged foreign interlopers offering dirt cheap skilless labor and providing the natives nothing but a massive government burden.
If it can happen in Kandahar, it can, and will, happen in Baghdad and beyond.
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