Corpses dragged through street after nine Americans killed
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MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT
April 1, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A crowd of cheering Iraqis dragged the burned and mutilated bodies of four American contractors , through the streets of Fallujah Wednesday and hung two of them from a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. In a nearby town, five U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing.
The contractors were ambushed by machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades as they drove in two SUVs through Fallujah, a restive Sunni Muslim city that has become the epicenter of anti-American sentiment in Iraq. The vehicles erupted in flames, and a crowd gathered around them, chanting, "Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans."
Television footage showed people cheering around the burning cars, while others descended on the bodies. As one body lay burning on the ground, one man doused it with gasoline. Another man beat a charred corpse with a metal pole.
Others tied a yellow rope to a body, hooked it to a car and dragged it down a main street. Two mangled corpses were hung from a green iron bridge across the Euphrates.
"The people of Fallujah hung some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep," resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed told Associated Press Television.
Slightly northwest of Fallujah, the five soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division were killed when a roadside bomb exploded beside their armored personnel carrier, military officials said. The deaths brought the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq during March to 48, the second highest for any month since President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1.
The scenes of bodies being dragged through the streets of Fallujah were reminiscent of an October 1993 incident in Somalia, when 18 U.S. Army Rangers were killed and two U.S. helicopters downed. A cheering mob dragged the corpse of one soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, triggering American public outrage that led eventually to a U.S. withdrawal from the African nation.
Bush administration officials vowed that Wednesday's killings would not change U.S. plans in Iraq. "It is offensive, it is despicable the way these individuals have been treated," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "There are terrorists, there are some remnants of the former regime that are enemies of freedom and enemies of democracy, but democracy is taking root."
McClellan said Washington was holding fast to a June 30 deadline for handing power to a transitional Iraqi government. But some Iraqi officials have voiced worries that newly trained Iraqi police and civil defense forces will not be ready to take over security in many parts of the country. About 120,000 U.S. troops are expected to remain in Iraq indefinitely after the official end of the occupation.
U.S. and Iraqi officials had hoped that the capture of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13 would blunt the insurgency's momentum and reduce attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqis. While the number of attacks on American forces has declined since Hussein's capture, troops are still being killed at a roughly constant pace. Large-scale attacks against Iraqi civilians have increased dramatically.
Since the war began last March, 597 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq. Of those, 459 have died since major combat was declared over on May 1,.
Attacks against foreign civilians working in Iraq have also increased sharply since January. But none had been as brutal as Wednesday's ambush and its aftermath in Fallujah.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said the four contractors, all men, "were trying to make a difference and to help others." He did not identify the workers or their company because their next of kin had not been notified. The contractors appeared to have worked for Blackwater Security Consulting, based in Moyock, N.C., the company said in a statement. The company was hired by the Pentagon to provide security for convoys that delivered food in the Fallujah area, it said.
No U.S. soldiers or Iraqi police officers were seen in central Fallujah for several hours after the attack, but a U.S. fighter plane roared overhead. U.S. Marines assumed control of the city on March 24, as units of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division were rotated out. Two days later, Marines and insurgents fought a lengthy street battle in Fallujah. One Marine was killed and seven were wounded; five Iraqis were killed.
TV footage of Wednesday's ambush showed several of the men killed had been wearing bullet-proof vests. Some witnesses said the contractors had weapons in their cars. Footage showed a U.S. passport near one corpse, and one Fallujah resident displayed what appeared to be ID tags taken from another victim. Portions of the grisly footage were shown throughout the day on the pan-Arab satellite stations Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.
Some people in the cheering crowd around the burning cars held up computer-printed signs with a skull and crossbones and the phrase, "Fallujah is the cemetery for Americans."
Fallujah, a city of 500,000 people that lies about 30 miles west of Baghdad, was well-treated by Hussein because it is dominated by the minority Sunni sect that made up his regime.
There have been more attacks against U.S. forces in Fallujah and surrounding villages than anywhere else in Iraq. Within weeks of the Americans' arrival last April, the city emerged as a center of resistance to the U.S.-led occupation. Fallujah lies in the heart of the so-called "Sunni Triangle," an area west and north of Baghdad that formed the foundation of support for Hussein and his ruling Baath party.
But the city's Baathist and Sunni ties only partly explain what turned its residents against the Americans. Fallujah has long been a center of smuggling, and it prospered under 13 years of United Nations sanctions imposed on Iraq after Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990. Under the U.S. occupation, smuggling has become less lucrative and more dangerous.
Fallujah also has a strong tribal tradition and a conservative Islamic bent that flourished even under Hussein's secular regime. It is a place where the nationalist forces of the Iraqi resistance have converged with Islamic radicals calling for a holy war against foreign occupiers.