In December 2020, President #Trump #pardoned four #Blackwater security guards who committed one of the worst acts of #terrorism. Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Nicholas Slatten were part of the convoy that killed 17 innocent Iraqi citizens including a nine year old Ali, 19 year old Ahmed and 11 year old Qasim.
On Sept 16, 2007, at approximately 12:08 p.m., in Nisour Square, Baghdad, a heavily armed Blackwater convoy consisting of four large South African made “Mamba” armoured vehicles with machine guns mounted on top made a surprise U turn as they entered the square. While they entered, a young Iraqi medical student named Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie was driving his mother, Mahasin, in the family’s white Opal sedan after dropping his father Jawad at a hospital where he worked as a pathologist. Ahmed was in the third year of medical school. It was the month of Ramadan so they were fasting. Ahmed’s mother, was also a doctor--an allergist. They could've left Iraq but Jawad believed they were needed in the country.
“I feel pain when I see doctors leaving Iraq,” he said.
While the blackwater convoy proceeded to drive the wrong way on a one-way street. Ali Khalaf Salman, an Iraqi traffic cop was on duty in Nisour Square on that day. As Khalaf watched, the convoy came to an abrupt halt. He says a large white man with a mustache, positioned atop the third vehicle in the Blackwater convoy, began to fire his weapon “randomly.”
Khalaf heard a woman screaming, “My son! My son!” The police officer sprinted toward the voice and found a middle-aged woman inside a vehicle holding a 22 year old man who had been shot in the forehead and was covered in blood. “I tried to help the young man, but his mother was holding him so tight,” Khalaf recalled.
Another Iraqi policeman, Sarhan Thiab, ran towards the car. “We tried to help him,” Thiab said. “I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was crying out, ‘My son, my son! Help me, help me!’”
While Khalaf was yelling, “Don’t shoot, please!” But as he stood with his hand raised, a gunman from the fourth Blackwater vehicle opened fire on the mother gripping her son and shot her dead before Khalaf’s and Thiab’s eyes. “I saw parts of the woman’s head flying in front of me, blow up,” Thiab said. “They immediately opened heavy fire at us”.
Within moments, Khalaf says, so many shots had been fired at the car from “big machine guns” that it exploded, engulfing the bodies inside in flames, melting their flesh into one.
“Each of their four vehicles opened heavy fire in all directions, they shot and killed everyone in cars facing them and people standing on the street,” Thiab recalled.
The victims were identified as Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie and his mother, Mahasin. Ahmed’s father, Jawad, has a brother, Raad, who worked in a nearby hospital where victims of the shooting were being taken. “He heard the shots,” Jawad recalls. “It was a battle, a fight, a war. And of course, it didn’t occur to him that his mother and brother were the victims--among the victims of the incident.”
Raad “went to the morgue, and the person who was responsible for the morgue told him that they received 16 bodies as casualties from the incident that day.
They were all identified,
identifiable, except for two. Two bodies completely burnt. . . . They were put in black plastic bags.”
Raad suspected that it could be Ahmed and Mahasin but, he said, “my heart didn’t want to believe it.” He and his wife drove to Nisour Square and ound a badly burnt white sedan. The license plate was not on the vehicle, but Raad’s wife found an imprint of the numbers in the sand. Raad called Jawad and began reading the numbers on the vehicle and confirmed his worst fears.
Jawad raced to the morgue and found out that were some forty bullet holes in their vehicle.
Seventeen Iraqis died and more than twenty wounded in one of the worst acts of terrorism.
Another Iraqi officer on the scene, Hussam Abdul Rahman, said that people who attempted to flee their vehicles were targeted. “Whoeve tepped out of his car was shot at immediately, he said.
“I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot,” said Iraqi lawyer Hassan Jabar Salman, who was shot four times in the back during the incident. “But still the iring kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about ten leaping in fear from a minibus--he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him. She jumped out after him, and she was killed”
Mohammed Abdul Razzaq and his 9 year old son, Ali, were in a vehicle immediately behind Ahmed and Mahasin, the first victims that day.
“We were six persons in the car - me, my son, my sister, and her three sons. The four children were in the back seat,” Razzaq said. He recalled that the Blackwater forces had “gestured stop, so we all stopped. . . . It’s a secure area, so we thought it will be the usual: we would stop for a bit as convoys pass. Shortly after that they opened heavy fire randomly at the cars with no exception.” He said his vehicle, “was hit by about thirty bullets. Everything was damaged.
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#Iraq #politics
