Posted on 08/04/2003 7:12:31 AM PDT by dead
The thousands of Iraqis working for the US administration have been declared collaborators. When they're caught by the resistance, the punishment is unthinkable. Paul McGeough reports.
Sabah Kerbul's executioners were his father and his brother. Most were in their beds when he was killed. But all members of the 27-year-old's extended family, living in adjoining properties on this remote bend in the Tigris, 120 kilometres north of Baghdad, knew the hideous tribal drama unfolding in a corner of their orange grove when they heard five sharp shots being fired from AK47s shortly after 2am.
In the night, grief-stricken Salem Kerbul and another of his sons, Salah, were complying with an edict by the locals sheiks that Sabah must die to avenge the death of four people from the village of Dhuloyea during a US raid, which the villagers claimed had been prompted by information Sabah had given to the Americans in his role as an informer.
Tribal law demands that the entire village be told what happened in the orange grove - so that the dispute can be resolved. But under Iraq's general law the killing was murder, so on-the-record accounts of it stop short of accusing father and son of pulling the trigger.
According to the village version which is attributed to several witnesses, Sabah went quietly into the darkness. He stood, but two shots fired by his father brought him to the ground - one in the leg, another in the chest. Sabah was bleeding, but neither shot was a killer wound. His distraught father could not go on, and it was three shots from Salah's weapon that ended Sabah's life.
The villagers said that they have had one, maybe two, tribal killings a year. But the sheiks' demand that a father kill his son was unprecedented.
The US military and administrative operation in Iraq is utterly dependent on thousands of Iraqis who work as administrative assistants, informers, translators and as members of local councils and the fledgling Iraqi Governing Council.
All - especially the masked informers and the translators who work on the front line - have been declared collaborators and cited as legitimate targets by the resistance opposing the American occupation.
The military credits the informers with providing vital information that has led to thousands of arrests - including senior Baath Party members and officials of the former regime and their bodyguards - and the confiscation of a mountain of explosives and high-powered weapons, among them rocket-propelled grenades and missiles.
Last week, the voice on an audiotape believed to be the fugitive Saddam Hussein threatened an escalation of attacks on collaborators, and at Friday prayers, in the holy city of Kufa, the renegade Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr issued a calculated warning to all Iraqis that working in any capacity for the US was "against our principles and morals".
Thirty-three officials in the restive city of Falluja - the mayor, police officers and tribal chiefs - have received direct threats. Individuals in Baghdad have had warning notes slipped under their doors, and in the hard-bitten Adhamiyah district in Baghdad and up and down the Tigris Valley, death lists of translators and informers are being circulated.
The Herald was present when units under Lieutenant Colonel Bill Rabena, of the US 2nd Battalion, mounted a pre-dawn mission in the dark and dangerous alleyways of Adhamiyah about 10 days ago, to arrest one of the alleged authors of a new death list.
Rabena's briefing notes described Ahmed Naji as: "A fanatic; an active Wahabi/Fedayeen soldier; works closely with [others on this list]; known to have two RPKs and RPGs; openly brags about killing a lot of Americans and shooting a US soldier in the neck six weeks ago; drives a red and white Jawa motorcycle and wears 'good shoes' to run away from US forces."
They got their man and found a pair of smart Mega running shoes under his bed. The only weapon discovered in his family's home was an old rifle, but the US soldiers presumed that a bag of electrical fuses and switches were part of a bomb-making operation.
The Americans reveal little about their informer network. And in the wake of a lame decision to force the closure of Al Mustaqila, a newspaper that published an article under the headline "Death to all spies and those who co-operate with the US; killing them is religious duty", they concede they can do little to protect the informers and translators.
Translators get a salary of $US70 ($110) a week and American officers have admitted that some informers are paid for information. One of the interpreters, who, like the informants, are masked to prevent identification when they go on arrest missions, showed the Herald a pistol, which a sympathetic US officer had given to him after his name appeared on the death list said to have been prepared by Ahmed Naji.
Rabena conceded that many of the interpreters also provided information, effectively making them intelligence officers. "Many of them come from the neighbourhoods we target, and sometimes the information is held so tightly that merely by acting on it we identify the informer," he said.
Villages and towns in the Tigris Valley are seething as the US pours more men and machines into the search for Saddam and his supporters in the area of greater Tikrit.
In Dhuloeya yesterday, members of Sabah Kerbul's family insisted that they had no brief for Saddam - he had executed one of their uncles and jailed another for plotting to assassinate him in the 1980s - but argued that life was easier under the old regime than under the Americans.
Their anger was directed at a June raid on on the eastern flank of Dhuloeya, in which 600 men were arrested and detained for up to five days at a local air force base or in prison in Tikrit - the blame for which was placed on Sabah's shoulders by the rest of the village.
His cousin Salam al Jabourri said: "We were scared to death. It seemed they had a tank for every house and the helicopters were overhead. Four people were killed - one of them a boy. That is why everyone was so upset with Sabah."
A relative said that as a younger man, Sabah had been arrested by Iraqi security and tortured - his fingernails had been extracted. It was his mutilated fingers and a pair of distinctive yellow sandals that had convinced all of his identity. "We believe that Sabah was seeking revenge," he said. "He was co-operating with the US to get back at those who had mistreated him."
Another cousin, Hussein Tallef Abdullah, a lawyer, said: "The whole village was talking about what Sabah had done. The tribes were boiling for revenge - people were dead, our women had been shamed and the furniture in their homes had been broken.
"His father stood among three flames - pressure from the tribe, the US military and Sabah."
Several in the family said that Sabah had attempted to barter for his life by offering up the names of others in the village who had informed but that the sheiks had refused to listen because he had named some of their relatives.
Abdullah said: "They sent a messenger - they would not talk to us. They insisted that if the father did not kill the son, then they would kill the father.
"The darkness of life here now is like the 16th century. We accept the law, but the debt to the families of the others who were killed might have been settled with money, not blood."
And he explained the hopelessness of the family's position in pure tribal terms: "He was accused by very powerful sheiks and very powerful members of the community. We are a small family - we have few uncles and no fighters. So we had to accept what was to happen."
Sabah's father, Salem, is so distraught that he has gone 80 kilometres up the Tigris Valley to the home of one of his daughters in al-Alam village, a few kilometres from Tikrit. He has a haunted look and weeps. As he spoke he broke down and asked relatives to tell his story.
He defended his son's honour, insisting that he had been set up by the Americans to cause divisions in the village community.
Sabah had told him that he was working with the US, but only in a humanitarian capacity.
Flicking his worry beads and drawing deeply on an endless chain of cigarettes, he said: "I could not stop him, but I warned him about giving wrong information to the Americans.
"The village was so angry and threatening that we could not leave our home. I have my wife and my other children, what could I do? This is the most difficult period of my life - it will stay with me forever. I relive it every hour."
He dissolved into tears and a cousin continued: "Salem was put in a tight circle and the only exit was to kill Sabah. You must understand the feelings in this man's heart after killing his own boy.
"The dispute is resolved now. Everything is finished. He did as he was asked."
/sarcasm off/
Where are the fierceness and bloodlust that they keep harping on? Why are the sheiks still alive? Doesn't anyone in that village have the b@lls to start shooting at the sheiks?What is wrong with these people?
I think we should round up the sheiks and hang them in the town square. maybe field dress them....
Some people are just utterly hopeless. These are some of them.
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