McClatchy: GIs in Sadr City under fire from friends and foes

[babylonsister]

GIs in Sadr City under fire from friends and foes
By Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Friday, April 18, 2008



BAGHDAD — Three weeks after U.S. troops were ordered into the sprawling Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City to stop rockets from raining down on the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad's Green Zone, they're caught in crossfire between Shiite militiamen and the mostly Shiite Iraqi army.

American soldiers who try to move around this urban area, even in the U.S. Army's state-of-the-art Stryker armored vehicles, risk being ambushed. The soldiers in a platoon from the 25th Infantry Division quickly learned that holding a position puts them in the line of fire from both the Mahdi Army militia and the U.S.-backed Iraqi forces.

The American soldiers can't go on the offensive from the run-down two-story house they commandeered in south Sadr City, but must hunker down and wait to get shot at.

An Iraqi family evacuated the house just before the fighting started. It has rats and clogged toilets but no electricity or hot water, and no air conditioning or heating. The American soldiers have had one shower and barely a change of clothes since they got here.

Things got a lot worse last weekend, when bullets started flying at the house, targeting soldiers on the rooftop and in the rooms on the second floor.

"Where's it coming from?" the soldiers on the roof shouted to one another.

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/34185.html

[TomInTib]

1. "Tell him to stop coming here"

Just one more example of how screwed up this is.


from the article:

The next day, the shooting died down and a bald-headed Iraqi dressed in a dishdasha, a long flowing gray robe, bravely walked up to the door of the house and called out to the U.S. soldiers with the only English word he knew.

"Mister!" he said.

Through an interpreter, the man, who said his name was Abu Youssef, told the soldiers that this was his home and he wanted to return.

"Joe, tell him we aren't leaving until the area is safe," Bowen told his interpreter.

The man looked confused. He'd split his family among three homes just before the fighting began March 25.

"Will you leave tomorrow?" he asked.

"My daughters are in school; they need to study; can I get their books?" he said. The soldiers asked the interpreter, nicknamed "Joe," to go through the house and give Abu Youssef books. Joe handed them over in a plastic bag through a crack in the door, barring the man from his home.

"Please watch the cigarettes," Abu Youssef said, referring to his little store, which the Americans called Wal-Mart. "I have no money."

He returned one more time and asked to take the cigarettes to sell and support his family until he could come home.

"Tell him to stop coming here," Bowen said.

Bowen said he didn't feel bad for seizing Abu Youssef's home. "They have the power to stop this shit and no one does. The power is in the people; it's always been with the people, but no one wants to stand up."