Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

“I had a weird feeling come over me,” Young recalled. “I had many emotions kick in at once. I felt a sense of purpose, happiness, and sorrow, which all hit me at once.”

While Young and Blackwater contend that the Iraqis initiated the shooting that day, other witnesses interviewed by journalists on the scene said it went down differently; they claimed the battle began when the forces guarding the occupation headquarters fired percussion rounds from atop the roof as the protesters assembled. “Alarmed to see the throng still moving toward them, [the forces on the roof] fired percussive rounds designed to break up the crowd, which instead enraged it,” wrote Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid. “They may then have switched to live fire. Armed men in the crowd returned fire with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars.” 27Estimates of the crowd size outside the occupation headquarters that day ranged from seven hundred to more than two thousand.

Regardless of how it started, once the shooting began, Blackwater’s men, the Salvadorans, and Corporal Young were unloading clip after clip, firing thousands of rounds and hundreds of 40 mm grenades into the crowd. 28They fired so many rounds that some of them had to stop shooting every fifteen minutes to let their gun barrels cool. 29Sadr’s men responded with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s. 30Shadid reported, “At one point, witnesses saw a vehicle carrying four Salvadoran soldiers caught outside the gate. Demonstrators overwhelmed the terrified occupants, seizing and executing one prisoner on the spot by putting a grenade in his mouth and pulling the pin. Two of the other soldiers, their faces bruised from recent beatings, were [later] seen being led by armed men into the mosque.” 31

In the midst of the fighting, several active-duty military police officers joined the force on the roof being managed by Blackwater’s men. During the battle, which would rage on for nearly four hours, a Blackwater contractor began videotaping the action. That video would make it onto the Internet and provide remarkable historical documentation of the events of April 4, 2004. 32The home video opens with a deafening barrage of outgoing gunfire, as Blackwater’s men, Corporal Young, and at least two other soldiers dressed in camouflage fire round after round. “You’re aiming too high buddy,” one contractor yells at the soldiers.

“You see a guy on the ground?” the voice yells. “RPG!”

“Where?”

“Right in front of the truck, right on the wall!”

Boom boom, rat-a-tat-tat. Explosive gunfire rips for thirty seconds. “Got more ammo?” someone yells. Then: “The truck’s empty, the truck’s empty.”

The shooting stops as the men assess the situation below them. “Hold what you got, hold what you got right there,” a voice commands. “Just scan your sectors. Scan your sectors. Who needs ammo?”

“We got mags, we got mags right here.”

“Fuckin’ niggers,” says another voice as the men begin to reload their weapons. The camera then pans to what appears to be the cameraman—a goateed Blackwater contractor wearing sunglasses—who looks into the camera and smiles. As the camera pans back to the action, he quips laughingly, “What the fuck?” The camera then turns to a man who appears to be a U.S. soldier, and the cameraman asks him about his weapon, “That shit fuckin’ hot, dude?”

“I spent all this time [unintelligible] in the fucking Marine Corps—never fired a weapon,” the soldier replies. Another voice yells, “Mark your target!”

Men who appear to be Salvadoran troops can also be seen on the roof; a Blackwater contractor wearing a blue T-shirt and a baseball cap apparently instructs one Salvadoran on how to position the heavy weapon. “Hang tight, hang tight, hang tight,” says another goateed man wielding a machine gun and wearing a T-shirt, bulletproof vest, and a blue baseball cap.

“Hey, all these fuckers right here,” says another voice.

“Yeah, Mahdi ass!”

With that, the heavy firing once again begins as the men unload from the rooftop. Along with machine-gun fire, there is the methodical boom, boom, boom from heavier weapons. “Hey, get some!” someone yells as the deafening rip of gunfire explodes over Najaf. One of the Blackwater men appears to be directing three camouflaged soldiers firing from the roof.

As the battle raged on, Iraqi snipers hit a total of three of the men protecting the occupation headquarters. According to Young, a Blackwater contractor got hit and blood spurted five feet out from his face. “I could see a quarter-sized hole in his jaw,” Corporal Young remembered. “By this time, the guy had lost about a pint of blood. I tried to press on the wound and stop the bleeding that way, but the blood was squirting out between my fingers.” Young said he reached into the wound and pinched the man’s carotid artery closed. He then picked him up and got him to Blackwater’s medic before returning to his rooftop post. A picture taken that day shows Young on the rooftop aiming his SAW at the crowd with heavily armed Blackwater men in sunglasses positioned directly behind him and alongside him. “I gazed over the streets with straining eyes, only to see hundreds of dead Iraqis lying all over the ground,” Young said. “It was an unbelievable sight; even though there were so many lying dead, the Iraqis were still running towards the front gate. I opened fire once again. Emptying magazine after magazine, I watched the people dressed in white and black robes drop to the ground as my sights passed by them. All I could think about at that time was that I had to either kill or be killed. It felt as if we were losing ground. In many senses we were, but that feeling just made me fight harder.”

Blackwater later said that throughout the battle, its men tried to make contact with U.S. military commanders but were unsuccessful. A senior Blackwater executive, Patrick Toohey, told the New York Times that at one point the crowd was moving in fast on the compound, and Blackwater’s men “were down to single digits of ammo, less than 10 rounds a man.” 33The besieged men eventually contacted Blackwater’s headquarters in Baghdad. Within moments, Paul Bremer’s staff gave the go-ahead for Blackwater to send in three company helicopters—known as “Ass Monkeys,” the very ones used for Bremer’s security—to deliver more ammunition. 34The helicopter crews also rescued Corporal Young after he was wounded. 35“We ran outside and I saw three Blackwater helicopters sitting there,” Young recalled. “I ran to the farthest helicopter and got inside the front passenger seat. I felt very nervous as we took off from the ground. I didn’t have any body armor at all, nor did I have a weapon. I looked all around the base and saw that everybody was firing their weapons…. I felt almost helpless sitting there.” In the end, the Blackwater helicopter transported the Marine to safety. “It was OK with [Bremer] if they went out and saved some American lives,” said Toohey. 36

In another video filmed on the CPA roof in Najaf, Blackwater helicopters can be seen dropping off supplies. 37The video then cuts to a closeup of what appears to be a Blackwater contractor aiming a large sniper-style weapon. “He slipped into a building,” a man says off camera. “Guy on the wall runnin’?” asks the sniper. Before the man off camera says, “Yep,” the sniper calmly pulls the trigger. Three shots ring out. He reloads his clip.

“We got a group of three. They’re all runnin’ now,” says the man off camera. “Wow, we’ve got lots of—see the guy in white? He’s goin’ too fast—now they’re haulin’ ass.” The sniper adjusts his scope. “We got a big group comin’. On the wall, squeezin’ off,” he calmly announces. Three more shots are fired off. “Wow, you got a whole group of ’em,” says the man off camera, who appears to be acting as a spotter.