Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

On March 24, the First Marine Expeditionary Force took over responsibility of the city from the Eighty-second Airborne and immediately attempted to impose U.S. dominance over the antioccupation residents of Fallujah. A few days earlier, Marine commander Maj. Gen. James Mattis had outlined his strategy for dealing with Fallujah and the other areas of the largely Sunni Anbar province at a “handover” ceremony. “We expect to be the best friends to Iraqis who are trying to put their country back together,” Mattis said. “For those who want to fight, for the foreign fighters and former regime people, they’ll regret it. We’re going to handle them very roughly…. If they want to fight, we will fight.” 6Less than a year later, Mattis spoke about his time in Iraq and Afghanistan, telling an audience, “Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot,” adding, “It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.” 7

As Mattis’s forces took Fallujah, the Associated Press reported from inside the city, “Newly arrived U.S. Marines are leaving no one in doubt about their resolve to defeat insurgents. Residents are awed by the show of force but remain convinced that the Marines will fail to stamp out the resistance.” 8In a message to arriving troops, Mattis compared the Fallujah mission to battles in World War II and Vietnam: “We are going back into the brawl…. This is our test—our Guadalcanal, or Chosin Reservoir, our Hue City…. You are going to write history.” 9Khamis Hassnawi, Fallujah’s senior tribal leader, told the Washington Post , “If they want to prevent bloodshed, they should stay outside the city and allow Iraqis to handle security inside the city.” 10Two days after they arrived, the Marines engaged in street battles with Iraqis in the working-class al-Askari neighborhood that raged for hours. In the end, one Marine was killed and seven were wounded. Fifteen Iraqis—among them, an ABC News cameraman 11and a two-year-old child 12—died in the fighting. A Marine crackdown quickly followed that “many residents say was unlike any they’d seen in nearly a year of U.S. occupation.” 13The Marines’ aggressive move into Fallujah also presented many residents with a harsh sea of choices: surrender to foreign occupation, flee their homes, or resist. While some chose to leave, the more civilians that died, the more emboldened people in Fallujah became.

There was also another significant incident around that time that was fanning the flames of Sunni resistance. It happened not in Iraq but in Palestine. The Israeli military openly assassinated the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in Gaza. As he was being wheeled in his chair out of a morning prayer session on March 22, 2004, an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a Hellfire missile at his entourage, killing Yassin and at least a half-dozen others. 14The “targeted assassination” enraged Muslims globally, particularly Sunnis like those living in Fallujah. Right after the assassination, more than fifteen hundred people gathered for prayers in the city to remember Yassin, with Sunni clerics saying the killing presented “a strong case for jihad [holy war] against all occupation forces.” 15Shops, schools, and government buildings were shut down as part of a general strike in Fallujah. For many in Iraq, the U.S. occupation of their country was part of the broader pro-Israel agenda in the region, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. invasion of Iraq were seen as intimately linked. “The assassination of an old man on a wheelchair, whose only weapon is his fierce drive to liberate his land, is an act of cowardice that proves the Israelis and the Americans do not want peace,” said sixty-four-year-old Muslih al-Madfai, a Fallujah resident. 16The timing of the assassination, which happened as the aggressive Marine takeover of Fallujah was beginning, fueled the belief that the United States and Israel were working in concert. As it was, many ordinary people in Iraq believed private security contractors to be Mossad or CIA.

As the Marines began fanning out across Fallujah, residents began reporting house-to-house raids and arbitrary arrests. “If they find more than one adult male in any house, they arrest one of them,” said Fallujah resident Khaled Jamaili. “Those Marines are destroying us. They are leaning very hard on Fallujah.” 17On Saturday, March 27, the Marines issued a statement saying they were “conducting offensive operations… to foster a secure and stable environment for the people.” It went on to say, “Some have chosen to fight. Having elected their fate, they are being engaged and destroyed.” 18The Marines blockaded the main entrances to the city with tanks and armored vehicles and dug foxholes along the roads. Graffiti began popping up on buildings in the Askari neighborhood with slogans like “Long live the Iraqi resistance,” “Long live the honorable men of the resistance,” and “Lift up your head. You are in Fallujah.” Many in the city began hunkering down as the U.S. forces escalated their campaign to take Fallujah. “We are all suffering from what the Americans are doing to us, but that doesn’t take away anything from our pride in the resistance,” said Saadi Hamadi, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Arabic studies from Baghdad’s al-Mustansiriyah University. “To us, the Americans are just like the Israelis.” 19Tension was mounting inside Fallujah as the Americans began warning people—using patrols with bullhorns—that their neighborhoods would be turned into a battlefield if the “terrorists” did not leave. 20By then, some families had already begun to flee their homes.

“The American forces had withdrawn from Fallujah over the winter, saying that they were going to rely on Iraqi security forces to do the work there for them, and so as not to be provocative,” the veteran New York Times foreign correspondent John Burns said at the time. “The Marines, who took over authority for the Fallujah area from the 82nd Airborne Division, only last week changed the template. They decided to go back into Fallujah in force, and take a real crack at some of these insurgents. That resulted in a whole series of running battles last week, in which a number of marines were killed. Quite a few Iraqi civilians [were killed], 16 in one day last Friday.” 21It was part of a Marine strategy to draw the “insurgents” out. “You want the fuckers to have a safe haven?” asked Clarke Lethin, the First Marine Division’s chief operations officer. “Or do you want to stir them up and get them out in the open?” 22According to Washington Post defense correspondent Thomas Ricks, “Marine patrols into Fallujah were familiarizing themselves with the city, and in the process purposely stirring up the situation. Inside the city, insurgents were preparing to respond—warning shops to close, and setting up roadblocks and ambushes with parked cars.” Even still, on March 30, 2004, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters, “The Marines are quite pleased with how things are going in Fallujah, and they’re looking forward to continuing the progress in establishing a safe and secure environment and rebuilding that province in Iraq.” 23In reality, the United States was swatting a hornets’ nest in Fallujah, one in which Scott Helvenston and three other Blackwater contractors would find themselves less than twenty-four hours later.

Jerry Zovko was a private soldier years before the “war on terror” began. 24He had joined the U.S. military in 1991 at age nineteen and fought his way into the Special Forces, eventually becoming an Army Ranger. 25The Croatian-American was deployed, by choice, in Yugoslavia, his parents’ homeland, during the civil war there in the mid-1990s, where his family says he participated in covert operations. He was independent-minded, stubborn, and ambitious, and after Yugoslavia he trained to become an elite Green Beret but was never given a team assignment. In 1997, Zovko left the military. “He did something for the government that he couldn’t tell us about,” recalls his mother, Danica Zovko. 26“We don’t know what it was. You know, I never knew what he was doing. To this day, I do not.” She says her son once showed her some small copper “tokens” the size of a silver dollar that he said would prove who he was to people who needed to know. She remembers a conversation where Jerry said, “Mom, it’s easy to be an Army Ranger—that’s physical work. But going into Special Forces, that’s where your intelligence comes in.”