"The mean streets of Baghdad"

[Minstrel Boy]

From today's Asia Times, by Pepe Escobar.


BAGHDAD - Ahmad, a 23-year-old Jordanian student, stepped out of his apartment in Haifa Street this past Saturday morning to hail a taxi, but he was confronted by a US checkpoint. "Move your ass from here," a GI ordered him. "Don't talk to me like that. I'm not your slave," answered Ahmad. "Aren't you? taunted the GI. Ahmad rose to the bait and answered back, so the outcome was inevitable. He was arrested.

Ahmad was kept in a Hummer for two hours, and then taken to the main building at Baghdad (former Saddam) International Airport. A translator said to him, "Are you crazy? Never talk to these people, whatever they say to you." Ahmad finally managed to show the translator his Jordanian identity card. The Americans were not convinced. "What are you doing in Iraq? Are you a fedayeen ?" Ahmad replied that he was a student, and showed his university papers. The Americans said these might be fake.

...

Last month, Nudir, a young engineer, was arrested with two friends in a BMW because GIs found a revolver in the glove compartment: practically every Iraqi carries a gun for self-defense. Nudir says he was beaten up by the soldiers and then spent 16 days in Camp Cropper, the prison inside the airport grounds that Ahmad was lucky not to see.

US repression is relentless. Red Cross officials confirm that more than 20,000 people have been arrested in Baghdad in the past few months. Most come and go - but there's no way to keep tabs on all the cases: there are no functioning courts and judges. Amnesty International has already denounced cases of "torture", and an unknown number of Iraqi civilians have been gunned down by US search patrols. The bunkered-down Coalition Provisional Authority simply refuses to mention how many Iraqi civilians are being shot or killed every day - either victims of crime or victims of US repression. Like the Iraqi interpreter killed by an American soldier in the front seat of a car occupied by Pietro Cordone, the Italian diplomat who is the official adviser to the new Iraqi Ministry of Culture. Baghdadis take for granted that American soldiers are now free to shoot civilians in any Iraqi civilian vehicle if they look even remotely suspicious.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EI23Ak01.html