Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

According to the Washington Post, there had long been concerns that if the United States went after Sadr, it would boost his already rising popularity and possibly make him into a martyr. By March, the Post said, “Bremer’s calculus had changed.” 10On March 28, U.S. troops raided the Baghdad office of Sadr’s small antioccupation weekly newspaper, Al Hawza (The Seminary), ejecting the staff and placing a large padlock on the door. 11In a letter written in “sparse, understated” Arabic, bearing the official stamp of the CPA, 12Bremer accused the paper of violating his Order 14, charging that Al Hawza had the “intent to disrupt general security and incite violence.” 13While U.S. officials could not cite any examples of the paper encouraging attacks against occupation forces, Bremer provided two examples of what he characterized as false reporting. One of them was an article headlined “Bremer Follows in the Footsteps of Saddam.” 14The move against Sadr was carried out with senior Bush administration officials fully behind it. “We believe in freedom of press,” said Bremer spokesman Dan Senor. “But if we let this go unchecked, people will die. Certain rhetoric is designed to provoke violence, and we won’t tolerate it.” 15The crackdown would prove to be a disastrous miscalculation on Bremer’s part. Al Hawza was named for a thousand-year-old Shiite seminary that historically encouraged revolt against foreign occupiers, most notably in the 1920s against the British. 16“In recent months, al-Sadr had been losing popularity,” wrote Newsday ’s veteran Iraq correspondent Mohamad Bazzi. “But after U.S. soldiers closed al-Sadr’s weekly newspaper in Baghdad on March 28, accusing it of inciting violence, the young cleric won new support and established himself as the fiercest Shiite critic of the U.S. occupation.” 17The shutdown of Al Hawza immediately sparked massive protests and fueled speculation that Bremer intended to arrest Sadr. 18Eventually the protests spread to the gates of the Green Zone, where demonstrators chanted, “Just say the word, Muqtada, and we’ll resume the 1920 revolution!” 19

Even before the United States began its attacks against Sadr, there were serious rumblings across Iraq of a national uprising of Shiites and Sunnis. Two days before Bremer shut down Al Hawza , U.S. forces had raided a neighborhood in Fallujah, killing at least fifteen Iraqis in an incident that enraged many Sunnis. 20By the time the four Blackwater contractors were ambushed in Fallujah on March 31, the south of the country was already on the brink, with tens of thousands of Shiites pouring into the streets. On April 2, during Friday prayers, Sadr declared, “I am the beating arm for Hezbollah and Hamas here in Iraq.” 21As U.S. forces prepared to lay siege to Fallujah, Bremer poured gas on the volatile situation by ordering the arrest of Sadr’s top deputy, Sheikh Mustafa Yaqubi, who was taken into custody on Saturday, April 3, 2004. 22For Sadr, it was the final straw. He urged his followers to openly and fiercely rise up against the occupation.

After Yaqubi’s arrest, thousands of outraged Sadr followers boarded buses from Baghdad heading for their leader’s spiritual headquarters in Kufa, next to the holy city of Najaf, 23where many believed Yaqubi was being held by occupation forces. Along the way, they encountered jam-packed roads filled with thousands of men preparing to do battle. “We didn’t choose the time for the uprising,” said Fuad Tarfi, Sadr’s Najaf spokesman. “The occupation forces did.” 24Shortly after dawn on Sunday, April 4, the Mahdi Army began to take over the administrative buildings in the area. Local police commanders immediately relinquished their authority, as did administrators in another government building. But then the massive crowd began moving toward its actual target—the occupation headquarters in Najaf, which was guarded by Blackwater.

On the morning of April 4, 2004, as the sun was rising over the Shiite holy city of Najaf, a handful of Blackwater men stood on the rooftop of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters they were tasked with protecting. At the time, the actual U.S. military presence in Najaf was very limited because of negotiations with Shiite religious leaders who had demanded that U.S. troops leave. As part of its contract in Iraq, Blackwater not only guarded Paul Bremer but also provided security for at least five regional U.S. occupation headquarters, including the one in Najaf. 25Like most of the world, the Blackwater guards in Najaf were well aware of the fate of their colleagues a few days earlier in Fallujah. Now, with a national uprising under way, they watched as an angry demonstration of Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers reached Camp Golf, formerly the campus of Kufa University, which had been converted to an occupation headquarters. Blackwater had just eight men guarding the facility that day, along with a handful of troops from El Salvador. By chance, there were also a few U.S. Marines at the complex.

U.S. Marine Cpl. Lonnie Young had been in Iraq since January 2004. The twenty-five-year-old native of Dry Ridge, Kentucky—population two thousand—was deployed in Iraq as a Defense Messaging System administrator. On the morning of April 4, he was in Najaf to install communication equipment at Camp Golf. “While entering the front gate, I noticed a small group of protesters out in the streets,” Young recalled in an official Marine Corps account of the day. 26“As we proceeded onto the base there were numerous coalition soldiers in ‘riot gear’ near the front gate.” Young and his colleagues met with the local occupation commander, a Spanish official, and then proceeded to the roof of the building to install the communications equipment. About twenty-five minutes later, Young had finished his task. Despite the beginnings of a protest at the camp, Young tried to catch a quick ten-minute nap in the back of his truck, “since we were about twenty-minutes from chow time.” But a few moments later, a colleague of Young’s woke him up and told him the equipment was not working properly. “I told him that I would be right in to help,” Young said. “I got dressed, grabbed my weapon, and was about to get out of the truck when I heard the unmistakable sound of an AK-47 rifle fire a few rounds out in the street in front of the base.” Young said he quickly grabbed his gear and headed into the CPA building, eventually making it to the roof, where he joined eight Blackwater mercenaries and the Salvadoran troops. Young assumed a position on the roof and readied his heavy M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. He peered through the scope of his gun, watching the action unfold below and awaiting orders. “After what seemed like an eternity, which was maybe just a few seconds, I could see people getting out of [a] truck and start running,” Young recalled. “One of the Iraqis quickly dropped down into a prone position and fired several round[s] at us. I started yelling that I had one in my sights and asking if I could engage.” But there was no commanding officer on hand from the U.S. military. Instead, Cpl. Lonnie Young, active-duty United States Marine Corps, would be taking his orders that day from the private mercenaries of Blackwater USA.

“With your permission Sir, I have acquired a target,” Young recalled yelling out. “Finally, the Blackwater Security guys gave the call [to] commence firing.” Young said he then “leveled the sights on my target and squeezed the trigger. I could see that the man had on an all white robe and was carrying an AK-47 rifle in his right hand. He seemed to be running as hard as he could when I fired off a short burst of 5.56 mm rounds. Through my sights I could see the man fall onto the pavement. I stopped for a second, raised my head from my gun, to watch the man lay in the street motionless.”