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★阿修羅♪
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「我々はイラクの政権と闘うためにここにいるのであって、市民と戦うためにいるの
ではない。しかし私は私の部下を救わなければならなかった。」
ロバート・フィスク
ドウラ、バクダット
2003年4月11日
ハイウェイ８でなにか恐ろしいことが起きた。何百人もの市民が死んだ、と言う人も
いる。一方で、4、50人の男や女子供が共和国防衛隊の待ち伏せを受けた第三歩英師
団タスク・フォース315の隊員の戦車砲撃によってバラバラにちぎれてしまった、と
思っている人たちもいる。死体のほとんどは焼け焦げた車の中で腐りはじめたままに
なっていて、焼けて裸になった若い女が後部座席でばったりそうつぶせに倒れてお
り、そのとなりには半身だけ残った男の死体が運転席のドアからぶら下がっている。
そこから数メートル離れたところには火葬された子供や死んだ市民が積み重なり、毛
布をかけられている。米軍の戦車の砲撃で半分になった赤い車の左前輪の横には人間
の脚の下半分だけが黒い靴を履いたまま転がっている。
ここで米軍が待ち伏せ攻撃をうけたのか、それとも水曜の夜に戦闘はすでにおわって
いたのか、議論しようと思う者はいない。高架道路で私は征服を着た共和
国防衛隊兵士の死体を見つけた。血が排水溝に流出し、足はもう片方の足にのってお
り、頭部を撃たれている。数百メートル先では老いた市民が車のシャーシの下で死ん
でいる。野原には2台の燃料補給車が放置され、一台はまだ燃えている。車道の横に
は真っ黒焦げになったバスが一台。何百人ものイラク人がハンカチを顔にあて、生者
と死者の間を飛び回るハエを追い払いながら死体を眺めている。
10台の戦車と4台のブラッドレー戦闘車両が高架道路を掌握している。その第315ブラ
ボー中隊を指揮しているダン・ハバード大尉が私に向かって、まだ市民の車が車道を
移動しているとき、どんな風に、彼の隊員が「360度全ての方向から」ロケット榴弾
（RPG）やAK-47の一斉射撃に襲われたかを説明した。
「我々はイラクの政権と闘うためにここにいるのであって、市民と戦うためにいるの
ではない。」彼は言った。「我々が待ち伏せ攻撃を受けたときには車がまだ道を走っ
ていて、我々は彼らを止めようとその上方を二、三度撃った。9割の車がその警告で
引き返していった。」ここで大尉はすこし言葉を止めた。「そんなときには人は頭の
中で一度にたくさんのことを考える。」彼は言った。「たくさんの車がスピードを上
げた。私は部下を守らなくてはいけない。市民の負傷や死亡はできるだけ少なくしな
くてはいけない。私は私の兵士達を守らなければいけなかった。それが爆発物やRPG
（ロケット榴弾）を満載した車かもしれないから。これから我々が車をかたづける。
死体の処理もする。」
ハバード大尉は思慮深い男の34歳でテネシー出身、「私がこれまでにあった中で最も
タフな女」である妻の名前、ロンダ・デニスと彼の戦車を名づけた。しかしハイ
ウェイ８における惨劇に彼の妻がどう反応するか考えることには関係がない。この戦
闘で二人の米軍兵士が殺され、30人が負傷した。2台の戦車を含む6台の米軍車両が破
壊された。たくさんの家族が親族をさがしにここにやってきて死体を埋葬したが、女性を含
む少なくとも16の死体と死体の一部がまだその高速道路には放置されていた。
そして当然のことだがこの殺戮の荒野はいまや周知の疑問を浮かび上がらせる。アメ
リカ人が市民を戦車で砲撃した。市民の死体は未だに兵士の死体と一緒に転がってい
て、未だにだれもそれを埋葬していない。アメリカ人が市民を殺そうと思っていな
かったというのはたぶんそうだろう。しかしブッシュが彼らの国を侵略しろと命令さ
えしなければ、彼らはみな生きていたのだ。
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=396044
'We're here to fight the regime, not civilians, but I had to save my men'
By Robert Fisk in Doura, Baghdad
11 April 2003
Something terrible happened on Highway 8. Some say a hundred civilians died
there. Others believe that only 40 or 50 men, women and children were cut to
pieces by American tank fire when members of the 3rd Infantry Division's
Task Force 315 were ambushed by the Republican Guard.
Many of their corpses still lie rotting in their incinerated cars, a young
woman, burnt naked, slumped face down over the rear seat on the Hillah
flyover bridge next to half of a male corpse that is hanging out of the
driver's door. Blankets cover a pile of civilian dead, including a cremated
child, a few metres away. A red car, shot in half by an American tank shell,
lies on its side with the lower half of a human leg, still in a black shoe,
beside the left front wheel.
No one disputes that the American troops were ambushed here - or that the
battle only ended late on Wednesday afternoon. On the flyover, I found a
dead Iraqi Republican Guard in uniform, his blood draining into the gutter,
one foot over the other, shot in the head. A hundred metres away lay a car
with an elderly civilian man dead under the chassis. Two fuel trucks - one
of them still burning - lay in a field. An incinerated passenger bus stood
beside the motorway.
Hundreds of Iraqis stared at the corpses in horror, most of them holding
handkerchiefs to their faces and swatting the flies that moved between the
living and the dead.
Captain Dan Hubbard, commanding the 315th's Bravo Company whose 10 tanks and
four Bradley Fighting Vehicles hold the flyover bridge, described to me how
his men came under fire "from 360 degrees" with rocket-propelled grenades
and AK-47 rifles at 7am when civilian traffic was moving along the motorway.
"We're here to fight the Iraqi regime, not the civilians," he said. "There
were cars on the road when we were ambushed and we fired over their heads
two or three times to get them to stop. Ninety per cent of the vehicles
turned away after a warning shot." Here the captain paused for a moment. "A
lot of things go on in people's heads at such times," he said. "A lot of
people speed up ... I had to protect my men. We tried our very best to
minimise any kind of injuries and death to civilians. I have got to protect
my soldiers because we don't know if it's a car-load of explosives or RPGs
[rocket- propelled grenades]. We'll have the cars removed. The bodies will
be taken care of."
Captain Hubbard was a thoughtful man, a 34-year-old from Tennessee who named
his tank Rhonda Denise after his wife, who is "the toughest woman I've ever
met" - though what she would make of the civilian horror on Highway 8
doesn't bear thinking about.
Clearly the Iraqi Republican Guard also have a responsibility for this
carnage since they started their ambush knowing full well that civilians
would be on the motorway.
Two American soldiers were killed in the battle and up to 30 wounded. Six US
vehicles were destroyed, including two tanks. Many families had come to find
their dead relatives and bury them but I counted at least 16 civilian
bodies - and parts of bodies - still on the highway, several of them women.
And of course, this killing field raised a now familiar question. Americans
fired tank shells at civilian motorists. Still their bodies lay beside the
road - with the dead soldier - and still no one had buried them. Sure, the
Americans tried not to kill civilians. But all would have been alive today
had President George Bush not ordered his army to invade their country.
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=396051
Robert Fisk: Baghdad: the day after
Arson, anarchy, fear, hatred, hysteria, looting, revenge, savagery,
suspicion and a suicide bombing
11 April 2003
It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled the
ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag - flung
into a puddle of water outside the visa section - as a mob of middle-aged
men, women in chadors and screaming children rifled through the consul's
office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper
window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later.
At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve the
lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves
stormed the building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of each other
and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates
and nutrition across the floors.
The Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad but the tens of
thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks
and cars searching for booty - seem to have a different idea what liberation
means.
American control of the city is, at best, tenuous - a fact underlined after
several marines were killed last night by a suicide bomber close to the
square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down on Wednesday, in the
most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima.
Throughout the day, American forces had fought gun battles with Saddam
loyalists, said to be fighters from other Arab countries. And, for more than
four hours, marines were in firefights at the Imam al-Adham mosque in the
Aadhamiya district of central Baghdad after rumours, later proved untrue,
that Saddam Hussein and senior members of his regime had taken flight there.
As the occupying power, America is responsible for protecting embassies and
UN offices in their area of control but, yesterday, its troops were driving
past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the
front gate.
It is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania that American
troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection of the city, I saw US
Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the streets
for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters - two of them
driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators - blocked the
highway beneath.
Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the unshaven,
sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn't worth visiting because
"we've already taken everything". Understandably, the poor and the oppressed
took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam's regime who have
impoverished and destroyed their lives, sometimes quite literally, for more
than two decades.
I watched whole families search through the Tigris-bank home of Ibrahim
al-Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former minister of interior, of a
former defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security
advisers, of Ali Hussein Majid - "Chemical" Ali who gassed the Kurds and was
killed last week in Basra - and of Abed Moud, Saddam's private secretary.
They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and carts pulled by ill-fed
donkeys to make off with the contents of these massive villas.
It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior
Baath party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and richly
embroidered chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so
heavy it took three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside the gutted home
of one former minister of interior, a fat man was parading in a stolen top
hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters
outside.
On the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen
goods at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and
still lay dead at the wheel.
But there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed his
hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw
no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy
worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out
the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while
children were used to unscrew door hinges and - in the UN offices - to
remove light fittings. One even stood on the ambassador's desk to take a
light bulb from its socket in the ceiling.
On the other side of the Saddam bridge, an even more surreal sight could be
observed. A truck loaded down with chairs also had the two white hunting
dogs that belonged to Saddam's son Qusay tethered by two white ropes,
galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I caught a glimpse of
four of Saddam's horses - including the white stallion he had used in some
presidential portraits - being loaded on to a trailer. Tariq Aziz's villa
was also looted, right down to the books in his library.
Every government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files,
computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans
have turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no
intention of preventing the "liberation" of this property. One can hardly be
moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government
of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's
property has been so comprehensively looted? And what is one to make of the
scene on the Hillah road yesterday where I found the owner of a grain silo
and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying
to steal his lorries. This desperate and armed attempt to preserve the very
basis of Baghdad's bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away
by eight soldiers of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their
tanks - doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown are 200
metres from a US Marine checkpoint.
And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army of
occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a
motorway bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US soldiers
to raise his shirt and lower his trousers - in front of other civilians,
including women - to prove they were not suicide bombers.
After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American
Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians,
including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt - then shot and killed
a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of the firing.
Within minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of another car and
wounded two more passengers in that vehicle, including a young woman. A crew
from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place.
Meanwhile, in the suburb of Daura, bodies of Iraqi civilians - many of them
killed by US troops in battle earlier in the week - lay rotting in their
still-smouldering cars. And yesterday was just Day Two of the "liberation"
of Baghdad.
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。