Jeremy Scahill: Blackwater

That attack on Ahmed and Mahasin’s vehicle spiraled into a shooting spree that would leave seventeen Iraqis dead and more than twenty wounded.

After Ahmed and Mahasin’s vehicle exploded, sustained gunfire rang out in Nisour Square as people fled for their lives. In addition to the Blackwater shooters in the four Mambas, witnesses say gunfire came from Blackwater’s Little Bird helicopters. “The helicopters began shooting on the cars,” Khalaf said. “The helicopters shot and killed the driver of a Volkswagen and wounded a passenger” who escaped by “rolling out of the car into the street,” he said. 28Witnesses described a terrifying scene of indiscriminate shooting by the Blackwater guards. “It was a horror movie,” said Khalaf. 29“It was catastrophic,” said Zina Fadhil, a twenty-one-year-old pharmacist who survived the attack. “So many innocent people were killed.” 30

Another Iraqi officer on the scene, Hussam Abdul Rahman, said that people who attempted to flee their vehicles were targeted. “Whoever stepped out of his car was shot at immediately,” he said. 31

“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 firing 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.” 32

Salman says as he entered the square that day he was driving behind the Blackwater convoy when it stopped. Witnesses said some sort of explosion had gone off in the distance, too far away to have been perceived as a threat. He said Blackwater guards ordered him to turn his vehicle around and leave the scene. Shortly after, the shooting began. “Why had they opened fire?” he asked. “I do not know. No one—I repeat, no one—had fired at them. The foreigners had asked us to go back, and I was going back in my car, so there was no reason for them to shoot.” 33In all, he says, his car was hit twelve times, including the four bullets that pierced his back.

Mohammed Abdul Razzaq and his nine-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. 34He 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.” 35He said his vehicle “was hit by about thirty bullets. Everything was damaged: the engine, the windshield, the back windshield, and the tires. 36

“When the shooting started, I told everybody to get their heads down. I could hear the children screaming in fear. When the shooting stopped, I raised my head and heard my nephew shouting at me, ‘Ali is dead, Ali is dead!’” 37

“My son was sitting behind me,” he said. “He was shot in the head and his brains were all over the back of the car.” 38Razzaq remembered, “When I held him, his head was badly wounded, but his heart was still beating. I thought there was a chance and I rushed him to the hospital. The doctor told me that he was clinically dead and the chance of his survival was very slim. One hour later, Ali died.” 39Razzaq, who survived the shooting, later returned to the scene and gathered the pieces of his son’s skull and brain with his hands, wrapped them in cloth, and took them to be buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. “I can still smell the blood, my son’s blood, on my fingers,” Razzaq said two weeks after his son died. 40

In all, the melee reportedly lasted about fifteen minutes. 41In an indication of how out of control the situation quickly became, U.S. officials report that “one or more” Blackwater guards called on their colleagues to stop shooting. 42The word “cease-fire” “was supposedly called out several times,” a senior official told the New York Times . “They had an on-site difference of opinion.” 43At one point a Blackwater guard allegedly drew his gun on another. “It was a Mexican standoff,” said one contractor. 44According to Salman, the Iraqi lawyer who was in the square that day, the Blackwater guard screamed at his colleague, “No! No! No!” The lawyer was shot in the back as he tried to flee. 45

As the heavy gunfire died down, witnesses say, some sort of smoke bomb was set off in the square, perhaps to give cover for the Blackwater Mambas to leave, a common practice of security convoys. 46Iraqis also said the Blackwater forces fired shots as they withdrew from the square. “Even as they were withdrawing, they were shooting randomly to clear the traffic,” said an Iraqi officer who witnessed the shootings. 47

Within hours, Blackwater would become a household name the world over, as news of the massacre spread. Blackwater claimed its forces had been “violently attacked” 48and “acted lawfully and appropriately” 49and “heroically defended American lives in a war zone.” 50“The ‘civilians’ reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies.” 51In less than twenty-four hours, the killings at Nisour Square would cause the worst diplomatic crisis to date between Washington and the regime it had installed in Baghdad. Though Blackwater’s forces had been at the center of some of the bloodiest moments of the war, they had largely operated in the shadows. Four years after Blackwater’s first boots hit the ground in Iraq, it was yanked out of the darkness. Nisour Square would propel Erik Prince down the path to international infamy.

Even though tens of thousands of mercenaries have deployed in Iraq, private security forces faced no legal consequences for their deadly actions in the first five years of the Iraq occupation. As of Spring 2008, not a single one had been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In fact, they seldom faced any public outcry from Iraqi officials. Within the Bush administration they were either praised or unmentioned. In Congress, privatized war was almost a nonissue despite the efforts of a few prescient legislators who realized the threat. The belligerent politicians who did pay attention primarily did so to win even more business for the war contractors. Media coverage of mercenary activities in Iraq was sporadic and incident-oriented. Almost no one was looking at the bigger picture. But following Nisour Square, Blackwater and other mercenary firms suddenly lost their fiercely guarded covert status.

While the shooting in Nisour Square put the issue of private forces in Iraq—and Blackwater’s name specifically—on the front pages of newspapers around the world, this was hardly the first deadly incident involving these forces. What was new was that the pro-U.S. Iraqi government responded powerfully. Within twenty-four hours of the shooting, Iraq’s Interior Ministry announced that it was expelling Blackwater from the country; Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called the firm’s conduct “criminal.” 52For the Iraqi government it was the final straw.

The Baghdad government’s anger would be understandable even if the only incident involving Blackwater were Nisour Square. But this was a four-year pattern, one that had intensified in its lethality the year preceding the killing of the seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad. And, particularly enraging to the Iraqis, there had been no consequences for the company’s actions. Contractors in Iraq reportedly had a motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.” 53As one armed contractor informed the Washington Post, “We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night.” 54