Schoolboy Issam Naim Hamid...was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself with his parents in his home...It was three in the morning, according to his mother, Manal, when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division came to the house, firing bullets through the gate. One of the rounds pierced the door, punched through a window and entered Issam's back..His father was hit in the ankle and was taken to Tikrit hospital yesterday in serious condition. Issam cries in pain in the Samarra emergency hospital ward, a drip-tube sticking into his stomach through a wad of bloody bandages....The Americans claimed to have killed 54 "insurgents"...and the only dead to be found in the mortuaries were nine civilians, including an Iranian pilgrim...Four days ago, they boasted of a further 11 "insurgents", but the only dead man who could be found was a vegetable seller....31-year-old farmer Maouloud Hussein who was trying to push his five young daughters and son into the back room of his two-room slum home...yet another bullet came whizzing through the gate and the outer wall of the house, and smashed into Maouloud's back......Hamed winces as he sees Maouloud cringing in agony --the wounded man tries to wave a hand at me and lapses into unconsciousness...23 bullets hit the house...lay bleeding for several hours before help came. Manal, Issam's mother, tells a terrible story. "The Americans had an Iraqi interpreter and he told us to stay in our home," she says. "But we had no telephone, we couldn't call an ambulance and both my husband and son were bleeding. The interpreter for the Americans just told us we were not allowed to leave the house."
..."You said you would bring us freedom and democracy.." he asks. "My neighbour, the Americans took him in front of his wife and two children and tied his hands behind his back and then, a few hours later, after all this humiliation, they came and said his wife should take all her most expensive things and they put explosives in their house and blew it up...
A Mississippi private said: "That's us", when I asked who was blowing down doors. "And you know what?" he asked. "After we do that, they go to the American authorities and ask for compensation." Which is true....young men tell me that they intend to join the mukawama--the resistance--after the humiliation and shame visited upon their homes. "We are a tribal people and I am from the al-Said family," one says to me. "I have a university degree and I am a peaceful man, so why are the Americans attacking my home and filling my wife and children with fear?"
The American military still talk about their battle against "terrorism" in Samarra, a story that might be more convincing if their troops were not accompanied in the city by hooded men in plain clothes carrying Kalashnikov rifles... Just a day earlier, the Americans announced that after an "investigation"--the oddest in recent history, one has to say--they had concluded that the truck bombing in Baghdad which killed 16 innocent civilians on Wednesday morning, was a "traffic accident"...in the land of innocent "insurgents" and "traffic accidents", the war continues to be spun. Just don't mention the hooded policemen. Or schoolboy Issam Hamid.
http://www.counterpunch.com/fisk12192003.html
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