Eyewitness account of U.S. Operation Quick Strike on Haditha

 

Azzaman, August 22, 2005

 

(Editor’s note: U.S. troops attacked the city of Haditha, 270 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, early this month. For nearly a week, the city’s 90,000 people were target of massive shelling by helicopters, tanks and artillery. This article is by a resident of Haditha who saw what went on in one of the neighborhoods. The paper withholds the writer’s name for security reasons.)

 

It was Friday, August 5, when the bombs started falling on our city. They came in like heavy rain and their thunder broke the silence and early morning calls to prayer from the mosque’s minarets.

 

The Pentagon called this new military offensive Operation Quick Strike. There were warplanes, tanks explosions and shrapnel. Many of us began reciting verses from the holy Koran pleading with the Almighty to save us from U.S. fire as we had nowhere to hide and nothing to defend ourselves with.

 

We were subject to a terror attack by the U.S. The operation could be nothing but terror.

 

The same day the U.N. Security Council had passed a resolution condemning terrorist attacks in Iraq and the government’s U.N. representative in New York, Samir al-Sumaidi, himself born in Haditha, was quoted over the radio as thanking the council for adopting the resolution.

 

When the shelling subsided, U.S. commanders ordered their marines to storm the city. They searched Haditha quarter by quarter, house by houses and arrested scores of young men and even women and prevented us from holding the afternoon Friday prayers.

 

In one bloody incident I saw the marines killing two unarmed inhabitants. One of them was in his bed in the Sheikh Hadid district, where Sumaidi was born. The second was killed as he strolled in his garden.

 

More residents began falling. In our area only the marines killed five people, all of them unarmed and had nothing to do with the insurgents.

 

For us, those killed by the U.S. are martyrs. The convoy of Iraqi martyrs is growing and innocent blood keeps flowing from the Iraqi artery the U.S. has torn.

 

Sumaidi, other senior Iraqi officials and the world have said nothing about the five innocent people U.S. troops killed in our neighborhood. The world knows about the victims and Sumaidi and his government know who the murderer is. But no one utters a world of protest.

 

Still there are many who would like us to stand behind the government and give the U.S. and its marines a chance.

 

We would have rallied behind Sumaidi and his government if they had stood up to denounce the U.S. occupation and U.S. military’s random and barbaric killing of innocent people.

 

What does the world expect from us? What does the government expect from us? Do they want us to thank the U.S. for sending its marines, Apache helicopters and F16s to destroy our houses, kill our children, detain our women and break our bones?

 

We have set our own standards on how to deal with them.

 

Since the government supports U.S. occupation troops whose fire tears the bodies of our martyrs into pieces, there is nothing it can do to regain our trust.