Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Just before the sun set over Najaf, Muqtada al-Sadr issued a public call for an end to all protests, instead exhorting his followers to rise up. “Terrorize your enemy,” he said. “God will reward you well for what pleases him…. It is not possible to remain silent in front of their abuse.” 52That night U.S. forces began moving into the Sadr City section of Baghdad. A U.S. military spokesman said U.S. fighter jets and helicopter gunships were striking back in response to the Najaf clash, and Reuters television footage showed images of tanks crushing civilian cars in the neighborhood. 53As word spread of Sadr’s orders, his followers carried out ambushes against U.S. forces, including in Sadr City, where Cindy Sheehan’s son, Casey—a Specialist in the U.S. Army—was killed that day. 54In all, eight U.S. soldiers died in Sadr City April 4 and fifty were wounded, along with an unknown number of Iraqis. 55Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, would later call the fighting in Sadr City that day “the biggest gunfight since the fall of Baghdad a year ago.” 56Ultimately, Sadr’s followers staged uprisings in at least eight cities across Iraq.

On Monday, April 5, Paul Bremer officially labeled Muqtada al-Sadr an outlaw. “He is attempting to establish his authority in the place of the legitimate authority,” Bremer declared. “We will not tolerate this. We will reassert the law and order which the Iraqi people expect.” 57Hours later, occupation authorities announced that there was a warrant for Sadr’s arrest. 58It would prove to be a disastrous decision that would boost Sadr’s status tremendously. Along with the situation in Fallujah, the crackdown on Sadr would also briefly unite Shiites and Sunnis in a guerrilla war against the occupation.

Back in the United States, a debate was beginning to rage about the increasing use of private contractors—a development due in no small part to Blackwater’s involvement in Fallujah and Najaf. In an unsigned editorial, the New York Times referred to the Fallujah ambush as evidence of “America’s troubling reliance on hired guns” and the Najaf firefight as an indication that the “Pentagon seems to be outsourcing at least part of its core responsibilities for securing Iraq instead of facing up to the need for more soldiers.” 59The Times editorial said, “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pledged that the Pentagon will keep looking for ways to ‘outsource and privatize.’ When it comes to core security and combat roles, this is ill advised. The Pentagon should be recruiting and training more soldiers, rather than running the risk of creating a new breed of mercenaries.” 60Amid mounting criticism of the use of private soldiers, Blackwater was lionized in some circles, particularly the Republican Congressional leadership. If there had been any question before, it was now clear that Blackwater was a major player in the war. The night of the Najaf firefight, hundreds of miles to the northwest, more than a thousand U.S. Marines had Fallujah surrounded and were preparing to exact revenge for the killing of the four Blackwater contractors five days earlier.

EVEN ASa Shiite rebellion spread across Iraq, the White House remained determined to crush Sunni Fallujah. The Blackwater ambush had provided the administration—enthusiastically encouraged by Paul Bremer in Baghdad—with the ideal pretext to launch a massive assault on a population that was fast becoming a potent symbol suggesting that the United States and its Iraqi proxies were not really in control of the country. To back down in the face of the boldest insurrection to date among antioccupation Sunnis and Shiites and talk of a Mogadishu redux, the administration reasoned, would have sent the message that the United States was losing a war that President Bush had already declared a “mission accomplished.” Bremer and the administration had calculated that in “pacifying” Sunni Fallujah and making an example of the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, they could surgically eliminate organized resistance in Iraq. While Washington’s disastrous policies resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of U.S. soldiers, they simultaneously facilitated an extraordinary business opportunity for Blackwater and its mercenary friends (which will be discussed in depth later in this book).

The first U.S. siege of Fallujah began on April 4, 2004, the day of the Blackwater firefight at Najaf. It was code-named Operation Vigilant Resolve. That night, more than a thousand Marines and two Iraqi battalions surrounded Fallujah, a city of about 350,000 people. U.S. forces positioned tanks, heavy machine guns, and armored Humvees at the major routes running in and out of the city. They set up blockades with concertina wire, effectively locking people in, and Marines set up “camps” for detainees. 1American forces commandeered the local radio station and began propaganda broadcasts telling people to cooperate with U.S. forces and to identify resistance fighters and positions. Iraqi police distributed leaflets to mosques in Fallujah announcing a weapons ban and a mandatory curfew from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. 2and passed out “Wanted” posters featuring pictures of men alleged to have been involved with the Blackwater attack. 3On the city’s outskirts, the Marines dug trenches near a Muslim cemetery as sharpshooters took up positions on the roof of a mosque. 4“The city is surrounded,” Lt. James Vanzant of the First Marine Expeditionary Force told reporters. “We are looking for the bad guys in town.” 5U.S. commanders announced their intent to conduct house-to-house raids inside Fallujah to find the killers of the four Blackwater contractors. “Those people are specially targeted to be captured or killed,” said Marine spokesman Lt. Eric Knapp. 6U.S. commanders sent their Iraqi proxies into the city to instruct Fallujans not to resist when U.S. forces entered their homes and to gather everyone in one room during a raid. 7If they wanted to speak with the invading troops, they must first raise their hands. 8Thousands of Fallujans fled the city ahead of the imminent American onslaught.

The next morning, the U.S. forces made their first incursions into Fallujah—first sending in special operators to hunt “high value targets.” Then came the full-on assault carried out by twenty-five hundred Marines from three battalions, backed up by tanks. 9U.S. forces soon found themselves in fierce gun battles with resistance fighters. As the fighting raged on, the Marines called in for air support. On April 7, an AH-1W Cobra attack helicopter attacked the Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque compound, which the U.S. said was housing resistance fighters who were attacking the invading forces. 10A Hellfire missile was launched at the base of the mosque’s minaret. 11Eventually, an F-16 warplane swooped in and dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on the mosque compound, 12an alleged violation of the Geneva Convention that prohibits the targeting of religious sites. The Marines issued a statement defending the attack, saying that because resistance fighters were inside it, “the mosque lost its protected status and therefore became a lawful military target.” 13Witnesses reported that as many as forty Iraqis were killed in the mosque attack, 14while a handful of American soldiers died in the fighting that day.

Meanwhile, the military had seized Fallujah’s main medical facility, preventing its use in treating the wounded. 15“U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault,” recalled journalist Rahul Mahajan, one of the few unembedded journalists to enter Fallujah at the time. “[F]or the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics.” 16Food supplies were running out in the city, and a local doctor said that sixteen children and eight women had been killed in an air strike on a neighborhood on April 6. 17The siege of Fallujah was under way. “We are solidly ensconced in the city, and my units are stiffening their grip,” said Marine commander Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne. 18If anyone resists, he said, “We will break their backs. We will drive them out.” 19Fallujah, Byrne said, had become a haven for resistance fighters and smugglers because “No one ever took the time to clean it out properly.” 20Byrne’s battalion “was the first to persuade the U.S. Army Psychological warfare teams to initiate scatological warfare,” recalled Bing West, a military author who was embedded with U.S. forces around Fallujah. 21Platoons “competed to dream up the filthiest insults for translators to scream over the loudspeakers. When enraged Iraqis rushed from a mosque blindly firing their AKs, the Marines shot them down. The tactic of insult-and-shoot spread along the lines. Soon the Marines were mocking the city as ‘Lalafallujah’ (after the popular stateside concert Lollapalooza) and cranking out ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses and ‘Hell’s Bells’ by AC/DC.” 22