![]() Determining what went wrong has proved exceedingly difficult the case is still being debated in review boards and appellate courts, and truth has become obscured by rumor and apocrypha. Like the 2005 massacre at Haditha-when, in a near-spontaneous response to the death of an American soldier, marines killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians-the killings that occurred during Operation Iron Triangle suggested a grave problem within the chain of command. Steele thought for a moment, and said, “They must have had the blindfolds on when they got shot.”īy the end of the day, it had become apparent that members of Steele’s brigade had fatally shot eight Iraqi men, all of them apparently unarmed, and that they might have killed more had some soldiers not disobeyed a platoon leader’s orders to gun down farmers digging in a field and men gathered near a gas station. Steele’s intelligence officer asked, “Why would we shoot somebody, and then put a blindfold on them?” The brigade had been conducting the operation with members of the Iraqi Army, and the officer wondered if there was a ritual significance to the blindfolds. A few soldiers, seeing the bodies, sensed that something had gone wrong. Using a pocketknife, Steele removed the tape from the face of a corpse, so that it could be properly photographed. Helicopters were landing nearby, and wind kicked up by their blades caused the unzipped body bags to flap wildly. Their remains had been disfigured by bullet wounds, and engineering tape had been loosely wrapped around their eyes, to blindfold them around their wrists were severed black plastic zip ties-used by American soldiers to handcuff detainees. None of them were known militants, either. ![]() These contained the bodies of Akhmed Farhim Hamid al-Jemi-a thin, bearded man wearing a green dishdasha-and two boys, whose tags indicated that they were under sixteen years old. About an hour later, three more body bags arrived by helicopter. A tag attached to the body bag indicated that the man’s name was Jasim Hassan Komar-Abdullah, and that he was seventy years old. Steele asked another officer to photograph the corpse for intelligence purposes. He personified the motto that his brigade, numbering nearly four thousand men, had adopted during the war: “We give the enemy the maximum opportunity to give his life for his country.” Steele had memorized the faces of dozens of high-value targets in the region-Al Qaeda operatives and other militants-and he inspected the bodies of people his soldiers killed, looking for tattoos and other identifying marks. He arrived with a clear sense of purpose: to subdue violence with violence, to hunt down and kill insurgents in a region of roughly ten thousand square miles within Salah ad Din province, which includes the cities of Samarra, Tikrit, and Bayji. When he landed in Iraq, in 2005, Steele was the only brigade commander there to have experienced sustained urban warfare before 9/11. (Nobody has since managed to win it.) Within the Army, he was best known for his actions in Somalia, where, in 1993, he commanded a company of Rangers that engaged in a fifteen-hour gunfight in Mogadishu. He played college football as a walk-on offensive lineman, at the University of Georgia, and eventually earned an athletic scholarship there, practicing so relentlessly that his coach named an award for perfect attendance after him. Forty-five years old, with an angular face and cropped graying hair, Steele had grown up on a farm near Athens, Georgia. The colonel, Michael Dane Steele, was a man of daunting physical stature and reputation. A pair of dentures, loosened from his gums, protruded from his jaw. ![]() The colonel, looking at the corpse, saw that it was that of an old man who had been shot in the chest-he was unshaved but not bearded, and a white dishdasha that clothed his body was blood-soaked. Farmers and herders began occupying the surrounding villages, and after Saddam’s overthrow, in 2003, they were joined by Al Qaeda fighters, who came to the remote area to train or hide. military had sealed the bunkers with concrete. After the Gulf War, soldiers working for the United Nations and the U.S. The soldiers had been hunting for militants in nearby villages and crumbling Baathist-era buildings, some of which had been constructed by Saddam Hussein to serve the Al Muthanna chemical-weapons complex-a series of dirt-covered bunkers that rise from the desert like Babylonian temples. Inside were the remains of a man who had just been killed by soldiers in the colonel’s brigade, which was engaged in a vast air-assault mission called Operation Iron Triangle. Army colonel knelt over a dust-caked body bag. ![]() Three years ago, at a hastily built command center in the Iraqi desert, near Samarra, a U.S. ![]()
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