Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/25/2003 2:48:20 PM PDT by MadIvan
FOR a few days Abid Minqash was the most famous man in Iraq. Today, however, his farm, in the Hindiyah district, an hour’s drive from Baghdad, takes some finding.
It is not just the confusing network of lanes and irrigation canals, or the dust storm that throws an orange cast over the land. Strangers have been here before asking after Mr Abid, and the local people do not like talking about him.
“Don’t know” is the typical answer to inquiries about his whereabouts. Two children point in opposite and equally misleading directions. “He’s one of the big liars,” one man snorts, “but now everyone believes him!”
Within the space of five weeks, Mr Abid has gone from being an anonymous farmer to a pan-Arab hero to an object of contempt among his neighbours.
On Monday, March 24, Mr Abid became famous, with a broadcast on Iraqi television that was beamed around the world. The film showed the elderly farmer clutching a rifle and wearing the headdress of a military irregular, surrounded by a cheering crowd. Beside him was his astonishing prize: a mighty US Apache attack helicopter, which he had brought down with a shot from his Kalashnikov.
The symbolism was irresistible: American military technology felled by the pluck and wiliness of an old peasant. Lavish rewards were promised for Mr Abid — Saddam Hussein personally referred to him in one of his last recorded speeches. But this week, the story seemed to fall apart. A Kuwaiti newspaper published what it claimed was an interview with Mr Abid in which the whole thing was denounced as a sham. He had not shot down the helicopter, the newspaper quoted him as saying, and there had been no reward.
Mr Abid does not like to talk about it now — it takes two hours and much tea-drinking before he opens up — but finally it becomes clear that both previous versions, in their way, had been manipulations of the truth.
“The Kuwaiti journalists came here and told me the story they wanted to write,” he said, in the cushioned guest room of his mudbrick family compound. “I wouldn’t answer their questions, but they wrote that story anyway.”
But the Iraqi version was also misleading. Mr Abid did, indeed, shoot down the helicopter, not out of particular love for Saddam but mostly because it was a terrible nuisance. “God has given us a peaceful life here,” he says, beneath a portrait of the Shia hero, Imam Ali. “We want nothing to do with politics. We are nothing to do with the US military or the Iraqi.”
Iraqi soldiers were based a couple of miles from the farm, and day and night American aircraft were heard overhead. “It was so frightening for the children,” he said. “They would run and hide inside the rooms, crying out — the women, too. There were aircraft as well as helicopters, all day and all night. When the helicopters came very low, all the farmers in this area began firing at them, and the Iraqi soldiers, too.”
As he tells it, he was just one among them. He cannot be sure that it was his bullet that struck the helicopter or that of a neighbour, or even if it was a malfunction that brought it down. But his sons speak of taking aimed shots at the back of the Apache after it had passed the house and of seeing the sparks of their father’s bullets flying off its fuselage.
As the sun rose two hours later, Mr Abid found the helicopter in his field, with no obvious signs of damage. The crew members were captured. Soon afterwards, a group of officers arrived at his farm. “They asked: ‘Is this your land?’ And I said: ‘Yes.’ They said: ‘Did you shoot it down?’ And I said: ‘Yes.’ ”
At that moment Mr Abid’s life changed. More and more people started arriving. A few were local people, but many were people whom he did not recognise. Others were senior military officers, apparently from Baghdad.
There were photographers and cameramen and Mr Abid was posed carefully alongside the helicopter. “I didn’t like the way they changed the way I look,” he said. “I prefer these clothes, but they wanted me to look like a military type.
“That day I was so tired, and I felt ill, and I had a sore throat. You look at that film — I wasn’t the one who was shouting and cheering. I hadn’t slept for the past few nights. They all arrived in the morning, they took their pictures and took away the helicopter in the evening, and I came back here and fell asleep.”
A month later, Iraq had changed and a man who shot down an Apache could no longer expect to be a hero. The Kuwaiti journalist told Mr Abid that he wanted to help him by telling a different story. The memory of the conversation makes him bristle with anger. The reward, he insists, never materialised, although certainly something has happened to turn his neighbours against him.
Compared with other parts of southern Iraq, the Hindiyah area is prosperous. The irrigation canals that keep the desert at bay have been dug in the past ten years. Men such as Mr Abid have more reason than most to be grateful to Saddam. What does he feel now about the departed dictator? “No comment.”
“Any Iraqi in my situation would have been proud of himself, and I was proud,” he admitted. But so far Mr Abid’s lucky shot has brought him nothing but trouble.
The two helicopter crewmen were luckier. They are back with their families.
Regards, Ivan
| Rummy's perspective about this type of revelation and the Iraqi regime's lies comes to mind: | |
| He's [Baghdad Bob] been lying like that for years, over and over, and media carries it as though it's true. It's been happening a month ago, two months ago, three months ago. He's been lying exactly the same way. And yet it's been carried and transmitted across the globe as though it were true. It's only when people had split screens and could see it that they finally said, "Oh, my goodness, this fellow lies. Isn't that amazing?" There's gambling in the casino. |  |
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