Just another day in occupied Iraq
Bomb planted in Baghdad shopping district blows up U.S. Army vehicle and troops retaliate against neighborhood.

By Scott Fleming

Editor's note: Bay Guardian special correspondent Scott Fleming recently returned from a 10-day trip to Iraq, where he and other journalists witnessed the following event Aug. 7 in Baghdad.

AS WE LEFT our hotel, headed for the just-bombed Jordanian embassy, our eyes caught sight of a tall column of thick black smoke rising straight up into the windless sky. Abandoning our plans, we told our driver to speed toward the smoke. We were the first journalists to reach the scene.

The smoke was coming from the flattened skeleton of a U.S. Army humvee, burning pathetically in the street. I learned later that the humvee had been destroyed by a remote-controlled bomb (or "improvised explosive device," a term that is becoming increasingly familiar in Baghdad these days) that had been buried in a planter in the median strip on which the humvee had been parked.

The assault took place on Karada Street, a pleasant shopping district lined with stores selling appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners. We later learned that U.S. troops, to their misfortune, are fond of stopping their patrols there and going shopping for pornographic DVDs sold by street vendors. Karada is known as a safe place, even to Americans.

There were three remaining U.S. convoy vehicles on the median, another two humvees and a two-ton truck. The U.S. soldiers, numbering perhaps six, were helplessly taking cover behind the other vehicles and waiting for reinforcements to arrive.

As we watched from the sidewalk nearby, the ammunition in the burning humvee exploded, startling everyone to the ground with the sound of hundreds of rounds going off in the space of a few seconds. When it stopped, we ran across the street and took refuge in an air-conditioner shop. The proprietors offered us water and some cement columns to stand behind.

Eventually, the reinforcements showed up: Bradley fighting vehicles from the First Armored Division, infantry, and a military police unit, perhaps 200 troops in all. For reasons I do not know, the U.S. soldiers decided that the perpetrators of the attack were holed up in a three-story building housing a number of electronics shops and offices. We were about 150 meters back from the building, and the formerly barren street quickly filled with soldiers.

As the troops laid siege to the building with machine gun fire, the Bradleys unleashed their 25mm guns on its facade. These guns, cannons essentially, are incredibly loud. The sound alone must be terrifying to anyone in their sights. As the shells hit the building, flashes of light and clouds of dust rose out of the walls. I thought the building was going to go down, but it didn't. After a number of these volleys, the stone building caught fire and increasingly large flames shot up the sides.

As this assault took place, foot soldiers advanced, apparently using the gunfire as cover to enter and sweep the building. We could hear the sound of bullets whizzing down the streets in front of us, but it was impossible to tell whether it was the Americans firing or whether someone was shooting back. A good while after the assault, and well after the building had caught fire, several groups of civilians, totaling more than 20 and looking absolutely terrified, ran from the building with their hands up.

The driver of one of the Bradleys asked me to grab him a soft drink out of an abandoned sidewalk stand. It didn't seem like a good time to argue that stealing sodas is a bad way to go about winning hearts and minds, so I took out a drink, vainly looked for someone to pay, and gave it to the soldier.

The Americans stopped firing after they had swept the building, and they left the job of extinguishing the fire to the local fire brigade. Locals insisted that no one had fired from the building. An inspection of a charred second-floor office that appeared to have been the main target of the U.S. assault revealed eight-inch holes in solid brick walls (caused by the shelling) but no shell casings or other signs of military activity inside.

It is unclear whether this assault on an occupied commercial building resulted in the capture or death of the persons responsible for the attack on the Americans. U.S. Army spokesperson Specialist Nicole Thompson could not say whether the American shelling had netted any suspects, but she did say that three U.S. soldiers had been injured. Two local men said they saw an African American GI lose his legs in the blast; others said a soldier had been killed, but this was impossible to confirm.

At least one civilian was shot and killed by the Americans. BBC TV showed Iraqi civilians dragging the young man to safety, whom its reporters called an innocent bystander, in a hopeless attempt to save him. Deaths like his, which are an everyday occurrence in Baghdad, contribute to the rising hatred of the American presence here.

"An American soldier should be killed for what they did to my nephew," the dead man's uncle told the BBC.

Adding to the frustration, Ahmed al-Iqabi, the owner of a burned-out electronics shop, said the Americans destroyed $40,000 of his inventory.

Blackened freezers and generators were piled in the yard next to his store. The Americans say they are paying compensation for incidents involving negligence by the military, but nobody in the street believes them.

"Why fire here?" al-Iqabi asked. "I asked the Americans why they hit this place. They said they were hit from this building, but I was watching, and nobody fired at them."

As we left the scene, an old shopkeeper told us he knew this was going to happen sooner or later. The Americans, it seemed, were always stopping here to buy porn DVDs, which they take back to their bases to watch on laptop computers. Even though Muslims don't like the sale of porn, poverty is so bad that there is always someone willing to make the sale. These discs are sold in the open in front of women and children, and it makes the locals very angry.

Whatever the propriety of porn, or Muslim conceptions of women and sex, buying it doesn't seem like a smart move for soldiers trying to placate the frustrated citizens of an occupied country. We left and returned to the scene a couple of hours later. The soldiers were gone, probably because of concerns about self-preservation, and they had taken the humvee skeleton with them. A big crowd was milling about, uniformly happy about the U.S. casualties and angry about the attack on their neighborhood.

Lots of young people were dancing on the ashen hole in the ground where the humvee had been, and several young kids wanted me to take pictures of them holding pieces of U.S. debris. I don't understand Arabic, but I heard a lot of people, especially kids, enthusiastically saying, "Saddam."