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U.S. Troops Fire on Iraqi Protesters NYTimes
Excerpts follow.In Monday's incident Iraqis said the soldiers opened fire, unprovoked, while the Americans â who were positioned in a school â said they were fired on first and then carefully counterattacked.An unruly angry crowd, shouting and waving automatic weapons, with shots occasionally ringing out, should not provoke anyone, of course. What's the difference between protestors and rioters? Three hospitals, two in Falluja and one in Ramadi to the west, reported 15 dead and 65 injured. Captain Davidson said that his soldiers recovered nine automatic rifles, two pistols and 2,000 rounds of ammunition from the houses across the street, and that the roofs were littered with spent cartridge cases.Empty cartridge cases in the middle East are like confetti in Times Square on New Year's Day. People just celebrate differently there. Residents said their anger stemmed from a general opposition to having American soldiers in a residential neighborhood as well as complaints that the soldiers used their binoculars and night-vision equipment to look at women, who are veiled and by Islamic tradition stay out of public, and had shown children pornography â an allegation that the soldiers strongly denied.If the women stay "out of public" the soldiers will have to use their Xray vision equipment. NYTimes is rarely this ungrammatical. "Pornography" is anything the unnamed Islamists behind this statement choose to object to. A soldier may have shown an Iraqi child a photo of the soldier's wife, unveiled, an act of unspeakable pornography to a true Muslim believer. "Our soldiers returned deliberately aimed fire at people with weapons, and only at people with weapons," Captain Riedmuller said.Has anyone else noticed the drastic decrease in the quality & quantity of information about the situation in Iraq, both in regular media, and on the internet, since Saddam's statues fell? Events like these will prove very important in determining the outcome of the overthrough of Saddam, and the US military and Iraqi civilians will continue to die and be injured for some time to come. Posted by: Tresho 2003-04-30 |
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