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Al Jazeera (English)
    Baghdad Burning Blog (by Riverbend, an Iraqi civilian girl)
            Dahr Jamail's Blog from Baghdad
                Imad Khadduri's blog "Free Iraq" (scroll down for English version)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

US Detains Relatives of Suspects in Iraq Attacks
60-year-old Aufa Towqan awoke at 3 a.m. on a cool Saturday. Her husband was away, working as a night watchman. Her daughter-in-law and mother-in-law were still in bed. The house cloaked in darkness, she bowed her head in prayer, as was her custom on a restless night. And moments after she whispered the first ritual words of faith, she said, U.S. soldiers charged through her battered front door. . . . "They were pointing their guns and yelling at us in English," she said, "and I didn't understand them." . . . The soldiers were seeking her fugitive son, Thamer, 31, whom she said she has not seen in four months. They detained her, another son and the other women instead -- one of them, by villagers' accounts, well over 100 years old. She said brown burlap bags were placed over their heads. Terrified and crying, they were driven in Humvees to the nearby U.S. base at Habbaniya. . . . Standing outside her home Wednesday, her hair covered by a black veil and her weathered face adorned with the green tattoos of rural Iraq, Towqan groped for the right words to denounce the five-day detentions, which ignited protests last month in Khaldiya. She found them in the religion that infuses this Sunni Muslim region west of Baghdad. . . . "God does not accept this," she said simply. . . . occurrences have unleashed more anger and etched deeper the cultural divide than several recent arrests of wanted men's relatives -- particularly women -- in Khaldiya and nearby hamlets in the Euphrates River valley. Some villagers insist the relatives have been taken as hostages to force fugitives to turn themselves in . . . Head of the Albu Fahd, a tribe that he says has 100,000 men, Mukhlif insists there are two red lines in the tribal code that have been infused with new vigor since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government: killing an innocent person or mistreating someone's family. "You cannot let either of these pass without a response," said Mukhlif, who speaks with the slow cadence of authority. "You have to take revenge." . . . "I told them they were creating enemies for themselves," the sheik said. "If they don't exist already, you'll make them exist now. They can try to get closer and closer to the people, but these actions wipe everything out." . . . Stories build on themselves, and even rumors -- of soldiers breaking down doors, stealing gold and money -- stand as undisputed truths. . . . Running deep in conversations among local people is the fear that U.S. forces are determined to reshape Iraqis' identity. . . . "In Saddam's time, when he repressed us, he put a gun to our head and fired a bullet. Now, [U.S. soldiers] put us on the ground and step on our head," Ali said. "Would you accept that? It's more dignified to put a bullet in my head." . . . A protest involving about 100 people erupted on the fourth day after the women's arrest. The next day, led by a convoy of dozens of motorcycles flying Iraqi flags, hundreds marched to the U.S. base in Habbaniya. Banners read, "Our religion rejects the arrest of women." . . . As helicopters flew overhead, the crowd chanted: "There is no god but God. America is the enemy of God." Iraqi police, responsible for security along the route, themselves shouted slogans demanding the women's release, witnesses said. . . . On Wednesday morning, Towqan sat outside her house. Her three grandchildren played in the yard. No admirer of Hussein, she was even less approving of U.S. forces. Her perspective was shaped by religion, framed in absolutes that leave little room for gray. . . . "Wild animals are better than the Americans," she said. "They're trying to destroy Islam. They don't like Muslims. They want us to be infidels like them. But we have God, and God is stronger than them. He will rid us of these people."

posted by LoZo 9:38 AM