'This makes us love Saddam, not America'

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday March 24, 2003 13:48 by what CNN won't tell you ....

So much for the 'liberation' fantasisers ....

34 die as US missiles hit wrong target Luke harding in Halabja, northern Iraq Monday March 24, 2003 The last thing that Omar Mohammed Saeed heard was the sound of the American missile plunging through the roof of his dormitory. It was 12.30 at night, and Mr Saeed and his fellow peshmerga fighters had been fast asleep. The laser-guided bomb reduced the compound where Mr Saeed had been staying into a tomb of pulverised concrete and metal. There was no chance of escape. "We don't understand. Why did America do this? My uncle was a kind man who would never have hurt anybody," his nephew, Sadar Mohammed, said yesterday. "This makes us love Saddam Hussein rather than America," he added.

The last thing that Omar Mohammed Saeed heard was the sound of the American missile plunging through the roof of his dormitory. It was 12.30 at night, and Mr Saeed and his fellow peshmerga fighters had been fast asleep.
The laser-guided bomb reduced the compound where Mr Saeed had been staying into a tomb of pulverised concrete and metal. There was no chance of escape.

"We don't understand. Why did America do this? My uncle was a kind man who would never have hurt anybody," his nephew, Sadar Mohammed, said yesterday. "This makes us love Saddam Hussein rather than America," he added.

Mr Saeed was killed in a US missile strike against Iraq in the early hours of Saturday. Over the weekend the US fired more than 70 missiles at territory in north-east Iraq controlled by Ansar al-Islam, a radical Islamist group linked by the Bush administration to al-Qaida.

It was Mr Saeed's misfortune that on the night the missiles fell from the sky he was sleeping in the next-door village. Most of the missiles landed on Ansar's tiny mountainous enclave, close to the town of Halabja and the Iranian border.

But four missiles hit Khormal, a large neighbouring village, and the headquarters of another Islamic group, Komala.

Komala's military garrison was also hit, killing Mr Saeed and at least 33 other people. As volunteers pulled corpses and body parts from the smouldering ruins of the compound yesterday, Mr Saeed's widow Aisha and 10 children wanted to know only one thing: why had America killed him?

"There is no excuse for doing this," said his nephew, Mr Mohammed. "We were happy when the US promised to get rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime. But this is replacing Saddam with another form of tyranny."

"We simply don't understand," said another relative, Star Rafor.

Refugees who poured out of Khormal yesterday also wanted to know why a superpower that prided itself on the accuracy of its weaponry appeared to have got it wrong. "The US has committed an injustice. It needs to be more careful about civilians," Tafir Abdulla said, as he fled town in a lorry loaded with his belongings.

Mr Saeed's relatives buried him in an unmarked plot in Halabja's bleak cemetery on Saturday morning. Afterwards they produced his photo, showing a middle-aged man wearing traditional Kurdish clothes, standing in his leafy back garden. He was 50, and had died of massive internal injuries, they said.

It was not clear last night whether the Americans had hit his garrison in error or had been fed wrong information by the main Kurdish faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which has been trying to wipe out Ansar al-Islam for 18 months.

Ansar's guerrillas have been expecting an American attack since late January, when the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, told the UN that the group had links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. Its fighters took to the mountains long ago, and appear to have survived the bombardment largely unscathed.

Mr Saeed and his comrades, by contrast, were not thought to be on any US target list. They have no known connection with al-Qaida or with Baghdad. They have spent most of their life fighting Saddam Hussein.

Their group, Komala, run by the bearded warlord Ali Bapir, is part of the Iraqi opposition, and has been at pains to distinguish itself from its fundamentalist neighbours. Mr Bapir fled to Iran last week, leaving his fighters behind.

"The reason so many people died is because they were not expecting to be attacked," Mr Mohammed said.

Kurdish officials say at least 150 people were killed by US bombing over the weekend in northern Iraq - while others say around 60 have died. Either way the human cost of the coalition's war to get rid of Saddam Hussein is now becoming grimly visible. The phrase collateral damage has a hollow ring.

Savage reply

Ansar al-Islam's reply to America's missile attack was swift and characteristically savage. On Saturday afternoon an Ansar guerrilla drove up to a PUK checkpoint in a taxi packed with explosives. He blew himself up, killing an Australian cameraman, Paul Moran, 39, who had been filming a few feet away, and three Kurdish PUK fighters.

US warplanes were in action again yesterday against Ansar targets, dropping four bombs at around 4am. "The vibrations shook all the doors and windows and woke everybody up," said Mahmud Sangawi, a PUK official.

The PUK is now expected to launch a ground assault on Ansar's positions, possibly with the help of US special forces, who are now pouring into the Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq in large numbers.

PUK's regional prime minister, Barham Salih, claimed that the Islamic group that bore the brunt of the weekend bombing had failed to distinguish itself clearly enough from Ansar al-Islam and had paid the price.

"Obviously civilian casualties are a major concern to us," he said. "But we have told these guys to stay away from Ansar. They have nobody to blame but themselves."

Ansar guerrillas had been moving freely across Komala's territory, he added. But the inevitable suspicion remains that as the US gets further embroiled in Iraq, Iraqi factions will exploit their relationship with the US military to settle scores with local rivals.

This happened during America's last war in Afghanistan, and appears to be happening again now.

Mr Saeed's family yesterday took consolation from the fact that they were at least able to extricate his body from the rubble. Many other Komala fighters were vapourised.

"When Saddam oppressed us there was a reason," Mr Mohammed said, after his uncle's funeral. "We revolted against him and killed his soldiers. But we haven't done anything to the Americans for them to treat us like this."

Who did he now prefer? "We prefer Saddam," he said.