Iraq… four years after invasion
By Monther Hamad Zahi
Baghdad, March 19, (VOI) – Four years after the U.S.-led war on Iraq, analysts and politicians in the country have diagnosed some of the problems caused by U.S. forces there.
Hareth al-Ubaidi, a member of the Iraqi Parliament’s human rights committee, said “as far as human rights issues are concerned, we noticed that the U.S. forces have been the direct reason for several massacres, shelling of whole cities and killing of families.”
“U.S. forces do not care about human rights at all. Repeated detention of thousands of innocents without any legal charges against them has become a hallmark of the Iraqi street since the March 2003 occupation of Iraq,” said Ubaidi.
He added that the U.S. forces have also practiced the harshest kinds of physical torture and severe beating of Iraqi prisoners.
He said, “repeated cases of rape committed by U.S. soldiers, the most well known of which was that of the girl of al-Mahmoudiya, were monitored.”
The member of parliament pointed out, “one day the U.S. forces raided a house on the pretext of searching for unlicensed weapons. The patrol soldiers conducted a strip search of all the family members, including a 20-year old girl.”
“A U.S. soldier harassed the girl who had to slap him. The soldiers then severely beat the girl and took her to an unknown place,” added Ubaidi.
Human rights activist Ali al-Samawi demanded that U.S. soldiers be stripped of their immunity, accusing U.S. forces of “training outlaws inside detentions.”
“We tried over and again to inspect the condition of the detainees, to get to know their problems, but we were denied access in one way or another by U.S. forces,” said Samawi.
On the U.S. army flaws in dealing with acts of violence in the Iraqi street, Abdul-Wahid Rassoul, a former officer from the disbanded Iraqi army, blamed the U.S. military strategy, which he described as “wrong and incompatible with the Iraqi street.”
Rassoul said, “the intensive deployment of U.S. soldiers and their improper conduct inside residential sections have become a scary obsession for the local inhabitants.”
Inaccurate air strikes that have claimed the lives of innocent civilians have also drawn popular anger against the U.S. forces, he added.
This confusion has cost the Americans 3,207 soldiers so far, all of whom died in military confrontations, not to mention the large number of wounded servicemen and military losses incurred by U.S. forces in Iraq,” said Rassoul.
Political analyst Tawfiq al-Yasseri said “the U.S. troops imposed the language of weapons and have used excessive force without resorting to dialogue or understanding.”
Yasseri noted that some of the projects adopted by the U.S. administration were for sheer propaganda purposes only. The administration calls for deep dialogue among Iraqi political adversaries but at the same time does not adopt this in practical terms, he said.
AE/TP
Source: Baghdad-U.S. (Feature) Aswat al Iraq
Indexed under: Aswat Al Iraq Features, Children, Rape, Women and Children