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Army Backlash Against Recalcitrant Sunnis?
This article appeared on Sunday, and is starting to make the rounds. EFLUS soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops. Since when did the US Army turn into the IDF? Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district. This is where I start to not believe a word of it. "They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. I doubt jazz was allowed under Saddam. How does a simple farmer even know what it sounds like? "Hey, Mahmoud, I couldnât hear well over the sound of bulldozers. Was that from Milesâ âKind of Blueâ?" "You know-nothing! It was the driving hard bop of Lee Morganâs âThe Sidewinder.â" Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because âyou know who is in the resistance and do not tell usâ." Right. Weâre supposed to take the word of a Sunni farmer, from a town where a father executed his own son because he was a suspected informant. The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. Shades of St. Rachel Corrie, Blessed Pancake? They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didnât tell us." And that paragraph contains the only quote supposedly given by an American soldier. One whose first name and his division are not given. The "reporter" never bothers to get official word from CENTCOM about what, if anything, happened there. But why bother? Just take the localsâ word for it. I donât believe this story for a minute. I wish it could be debunked, because itâs going to spread. Posted by: growler 2003-10-13 |
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