Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

^{CHAPTER FOUR} FALLUJAH BEFORE BLACKWATER

LONG BEFORE Blackwater deployed in Iraq—more than a decade earlier, in fact—events beyond the control of Erik Prince and his colleagues were setting in motion the epic ambush that would take place on March 31, 2004, when Iraqi resistance fighters killed four Blackwater contractors in broad daylight in the center of Fallujah. The killing of those Americans would alter the course of the Iraq War, spark multiple U.S. sieges of Fallujah, and embolden the antioccupation resistance movement.

But to begin the story of what happened to the Blackwater men that day with the particular details surrounding the ambush of their convoy, or even the events of the immediate days and weeks preceding the killings, is to ignore more than a decade of history leading up to the incident. Some would say the story goes even further back, to Fallujah’s fierce resistance to the British occupation of 1920, when an antioccupation rebellion in the city took the lives of some one thousand British soldiers almost a century before the United States invaded Iraq. Regardless, there is little question that the city of Fallujah has suffered like no other in Iraq since the U.S. invasion began in 2003. On several occasions, U.S. forces have attacked the city, killing thousands and displacing tens of thousands, and occupation troops have fired on unarmed demonstrators several times. Since the invasion, U.S. officials have brutally sought to make an example of the rebellious city. In the U.S. press and among the punditry, policy-makers, and military commanders, Fallujah has been portrayed as a hotbed of pro-Saddam resistance and as the seat of foreign fighters angered at the regime’s overthrow and furious at the U.S. occupation. But that is a very narrow, incomplete, and misleading presentation of history that serves only Washington’s agenda. As Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid noted, “[Fallujah’s] historical links with the former government constituted only part of the story. It was also a region shaped by rural traditions and reflexive nationalism, stitched together by a fierce interpretation of Islam and the certainty it brought. This fundamental identity and its attendant values became even more important as the community sank deeper into the sense of disenfranchisement voiced so often in this swath of Sunni land.”¹ What is seldom acknowledged in the media is that before the first U.S. troops rolled into Iraq, before the Blackwater killings and the ensuing sieges of the city, before it became a symbol of Iraqi resistance, the people of Fallujah knew suffering at the hands of the United States and its allies.

During the 1991 Gulf War, Fallujah was the site of one of the single greatest massacres attributed to “errant” bombs during a war that was painted as the dawn of the age of “smart” weaponry. Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on the afternoon of February 13, 1991, allied warplanes thundered over the city, launching missiles at the massive steel bridge crossing the Euphrates River and connecting Fallujah to the main road to Baghdad.² Having failed to bring the bridge down, the planes returned to Fallujah an hour later. “I saw eight planes,” recalled an eyewitness. “Six of them were circling, as if they were covering. The other two carried out the attack.”³ British Tornado warplanes fired off several of the much-vaunted laser-guided “precision” missiles at the bridge. But at least three missed their supposed target, and one landed in a residential area some eight hundred yards from the bridge, smashing into a crowded apartment complex and slicing through a packed marketplace.⁴ In the end, local hospital officials said more than 130 people were killed that day and some 80 others were wounded.⁵ Many of the victims were children. An allied commander, Capt. David Henderson, said the planes’ laser system had malfunctioned. “As far as we were concerned, the bridge was a legitimate military target,” Henderson told reporters.⁶ “Unfortunately, it looks as though, despite our best efforts, bombs did land in the town.” He and other officials accused the Iraqi government of publicizing the “errant” bomb as part of a propaganda war, saying, “We should also remember the atrocities committed by Iraq against Iran with chemical warfare and against [its] own countrymen, the Kurds.”⁷ As rescue workers and survivors dug through the rubble of the apartment complex and neighboring shops, one Fallujan shouted at reporters, “Look what Bush did! For him Kuwait starts here.”⁸

Whether or not it was an “errant” bomb, for the decade that followed that attack, it was remembered in Iraq as a massacre and would shape the way Fallujans later viewed the invading U.S. forces under the command of yet another President Bush.⁹ Already, the overwhelmingly Sunni population of Fallujah was one of Saddam Hussein’s most loyal populations within Iraq and the home of many of his elite Revolutionary Guard soldiers.¹⁰ “Even though Saddam Hussein regarded Fallujah as a city that had supported his regime, the Iraqi government couldn’t insulate Fallujah’s hospitals and clinics from the devastating effects of US-led economic sanctions,” recalled veteran human rights activist Kathy Kelly, founder of Voices in the Wilderness. ¹¹ “We visited hospital wards before the invasion in Fallujah that were like ‘death rows’ for infants because of shortages caused by the sanctions.” Kelly has been to Iraq scores of times since first traveling there during the 1991 Gulf War. In a visit to Fallujah before the 2003 invasion, she said she and some British activists went to the city in an effort to acknowledge U.S./U.K. culpability in the marketplace bombing of 1991 and to interview survivors. Kelly got separated from the group and recalled, “One man began to shout at me, in English: ‘You Americans, you Europeans, you come to my home and I’ll show you water you wouldn’t give your animals to drink. And this is all that we have. Now, you want to kill our children again. You cannot kill my son. My son, he was killed in the first Bush war.’” After shouting at her, Kelly recalled, the man calmed down and offered her tea at his home. To her, that was evidence that “even in Fallujah, there might have been a chance to build fair and friendly relations, in spite of the suffering inflicted on ordinary Iraqis. But those chances were increasingly squandered by maintenance of economic sanctions and eventual bombing of the no-fly zones.” When U.S. Forces rolled into Iraq in April 2003, it didn’t take long for them to pour gasoline on the already volatile anti-American rage born in Fallujah at least twelve years earlier.

U.S. Special Forces took Fallujah in April, early on in the invasion, but soon left the city.¹² Local Iraqis said they agreed to surrender the conservative Sunni city without a fight on the condition that U.S. troops would not occupy it for more than two days.¹³ As in many Iraqi communities, the people of Fallujah began to organize themselves and to take stock of the consequences of the earth-moving developments in their country. They even assembled a new city council.¹⁴ As the occupation spread and various U.S. commanders fanned out to different regions in Iraq, the Eighty-second Airborne Division ultimately moved into Fallujah.¹⁵ Like their countrymen elsewhere, the people of Fallujah did not immediately resist the occupying forces. Instead they watched and waited. It didn’t take long for resentment to build, as the Americans would speed up and down the streets in their Humvees; checkpoints humiliated local people and invaded their privacy, and some complained the soldiers were staring at local women inappropriately. ¹⁶ There were also allegations that soldiers were urinating on the streets.¹⁷ A clear consensus was building in Fallujah that the Americans should at least withdraw to the city limits.¹⁸ It took only days before the situation in the city took a decisive and bloody turn for the worse. Hundreds of troops from the Eighty-second quickly spread out across Fallujah, and on Friday, April 25, a few days before the birthday of Saddam Hussein, they occupied Al Qaed (The Leader’s) School on Hay Nazzal Street, converting the two-story compound into an occupation headquarters in Fallujah.¹⁹

The takeover of the school, attended by both primary and high school students, immediately sparked anger in the city for a number of reasons. Among them, parents and teachers were trying to return their children to some semblance of normalcy, and school was viewed as central to that. But also, rumors were rampant that the U.S. soldiers were using their night vision goggles to peer through windows at Iraqi women from the roof of the school and that troops were gawking at women without head coverings in the privacy of their own backyards.²⁰ Local Iraqi leaders met with U.S. soldiers throughout the weekend, urging them to leave the school. The weekend passed, and on Monday, April 28, Saddam Hussein’s 66th birthday, some 150 soldiers continued to occupy the school.²¹

That night, with tensions rising in the city over the presence of the troops, a local imam preached against the U.S. occupation from the pulpit in his mosque during evening prayers and decried the continued occupation of the school.²² In the face of the heavy U.S. presence in their city, local clerics had been reminding people of the adage “Better to be strong than weak.”²³ After the prayers ended, people began to assemble in what would become the first organized demonstration against the United States since troops moved into Fallujah.²⁴ A week earlier, U.S. forces had killed ten demonstrators in the northern city of Mosul, but that did not deter the people of Fallujah. At around 6:30 the evening of April 28, people began to gather outside the former Baath Party headquarters, which had also been commandeered by U.S. forces and converted into a command post. Next door was the U.S.-backed mayor’s office, where the local U.S. commander was holding a meeting.²⁵ The crowd chanted slogans like “God is great! Muhammad is his prophet!” as well as “No to Saddam! No to the U.S.!”²⁶ Military officials claim that some in the crowd were firing weapons in the air, a common practice at Iraqi demonstrations. Local residents say that is untrue, and many Iraqi witnesses contend that no weapons were fired.²⁷ The U.S. commander in Fallujah, Lt. Col. Eric Nantz, said his forces warned the protesters to disperse, announcing, he claims, in Arabic through a loudspeaker that the demonstration “could be considered a hostile act and would be engaged with deadly force.”²⁸ The crowd moved from the mayor’s office and made its way through the streets of Fallujah gathering momentum and size. By the time it reached the school, there were hundreds of people. In the crowd, someone held a large picture of Saddam, which residents say was the clearest symbol of opposition to the occupying forces.²⁹ “There is no God but Allah, and America is the enemy of Allah,” demonstrators chanted on Hay Nazzal Street, as Americans looked down from sniper positions on the roof of the school. “We don’t want Saddam and we don’t want Bush,” said Mohamed Abdallah, a retired accountant. “The Americans have done their job and they must go.”³⁰

What happened that night is a matter of great dispute between the U.S. occupation forces and local Fallujans. According to scores of Iraqis interviewed by major media outlets at the time, no Iraqis fired on the school or at U.S. forces. Some locals describe random shots fired into the air, while others deny that any Iraqis in the crowd fired guns; and Iraqi witnesses categorically deny that shots were fired at U.S. forces. Every Iraqi witness and demonstrator subsequently interviewed by Human Rights Watch said no one in the demonstration had arms. Several said there was shooting in other Fallujah neighborhoods, but not near the school. Nantz claimed that as the demonstration went on, the crowd was “hostile, throwing rocks, and occasionally firing a number of weapons into the air.”³¹ A U.S. soldier, Nantz said, was hit by a rock. Then, he says, the school came under attack from gunmen within the crowd. Iraqis there that night say that is not true. U.S. commanders say their troops threw smoke grenades and were then given orders to respond with fire.³² Within moments, bullets were raining into the crowd. The Americans say they wore night-vision goggles and fired only at muzzle flashes.³³ Iraqis say the shooting was unprovoked and uncontrolled. “We were shouting, ‘There’s no god but Allah,’” recalled Fallujah resident Ahmed Karim, who was shot in the thigh. “We arrived at the school building and were hoping to talk to the soldiers when they began shooting at us randomly. I think they knew we were unarmed but wanted a show of force to stop us from demonstrating.”³⁴

“We had one picture of Saddam, only one,” said nineteen-year-old Hassan. “We were not armed and nothing was thrown. There had been some shooting in the air in the vicinity, but that was a long way off. I don’t know why the Americans started shooting. When they began to fire, we just ran.”³⁵ A fifteen-year-old boy, Ahmed al-Essawi, who was shot in both the arm and leg said, “All of us were trying to run away. They shot at us directly. The soldiers were very scared. There were no warning shots, and I heard no announcements on the loudspeakers.”³⁶

Within moments, the demonstration on Hay Nazzal Street turned into a bloodbath. Many people described a horrifying scene of wounded people—among them children—lying in the streets and U.S. forces firing on people attempting to rescue them.³⁷ “They suddenly started shooting at us,” remembered Falah Nawwar Dhahir, whose brother was killed that day. “There was continuous shooting until people fled. They shot at people when they came out to get the wounded. Then there was individual shooting, like from snipers.”³⁸ Mu’taz Fahd al-Dulaimi saw his cousin Samir Ali al-Dulaimi shot by U.S. forces: “There were four [U.S. soldiers] on the roof—I saw them with my own eyes. There was a heavy machine gun. It was full automatic shooting for ten minutes. Some of the people fell to the ground. When they stood up, they shot again.” Ambulance drivers also report being told to “Go away!” by U.S. forces.³⁹

“We were sitting in our house. When the shooting started, my husband tried to close the door to keep the children in, and he was shot,” said thirty-seven-year-old Edtesam Shamsudeim, who lives near the school and was herself shot in the leg.⁴⁰ More than seventy-five people were injured that night, and at least thirteen were killed. Among the dead were six children.⁴¹ “The engagement was sharp and precise,” said Nantz. Soldiers, he said, “returned fire with those firing at them, and if others were wounded, that is regrettable.”⁴² Almost immediately, the U.S. version of the events came under serious scrutiny when journalists toured the area. In a dispatch from Fallujah, correspondent Phil Reeves of The Independent of London, wrote:

In its on-the-ground investigation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that “the physical evidence at the school does not support claims of an effective attack on the building as described by U.S. troops.”⁴⁴ This, HRW’s researchers asserted, “contrasts sharply” with the homes across the street from the school, which bore “the marks of more than 100 rounds—smaller caliber shots as well as heavy caliber machine gun rounds—shot by U.S. soldiers. The facades and perimeter walls of seven of the nine homes across from the school had significant bullet damage, including six homes that had been hit with more than a dozen rounds each…. No bullet marks were found on the upper levels of the houses, despite U.S. soldiers’ claims that they had targeted gunmen on the roofs across the street.”⁴⁵

Any hopes the United States had about its “winning hearts and minds” rhetoric resonating in Fallujah were obliterated that blood-soaked night. The morning after the shooting, funerals were held for the dead in accordance with Islamic tradition. A bloodied Iraqi flag hung outside the emergency room at a local hospital,⁴⁶ which was struggling to treat the wounded as word was spreading fast across Fallujah and the country about the massacre. “We won’t remain quiet over this,” said Ahmad Hussein, as he sat in a Fallujah hospital with his eighteen-year-old son, who doctors predicted would die from the gunshot wound to his stomach. “Either they leave Fallujah or we will make them leave.”⁴⁷ Some in the international press were comparing it to the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of 1972, when British troops opened fire on Irish Catholic protesters, killing thirteen, an event that helped popularize and mobilize the Irish Republican Army.⁴⁸

On the Wednesday morning after the killings, as many as a thousand people poured into the streets of Fallujah to protest the massacre and to demand that the U.S. troops leave the city. They assembled in front of the old Baath Party headquarters, which—like the school—had been taken over by the Americans. UPI reported that “the street scene was chaotic, with U.S. troops aiming weapons into the crowd from buildings the United States has been using as a base camp, while a pair of Apache attack helicopters circled overhead training their guns on the gathered crowd throughout the morning.”⁴⁹ Once again, the protest ended in bloodshed, as U.S. forces shot and killed four people and injured at least fifteen others.⁵⁰ As with the incident at the school, U.S. commanders claimed their forces acted in self-defense. But journalists from mainstream news organizations on the scene contradicted this account. The UPI correspondent in Fallujah, P. Mitchell Prothero, reported that “none of the dead and wounded in Wednesday’s incident appeared to have been armed, and none of the gathered protesters displayed weapons of any kind. In over a dozen interviews with witnesses of the shooting, the Iraqis denied any shots were fired at U.S. troops. The only shell casings found within the vicinity were 5.56 mm rounds used by U.S. forces, not 7.62 mm rounds commonly used in AK-47s, the Iraqi weapon of choice.”⁵¹

Witnesses said one man was shot in the face and chest. His friends said the man was the father of four children.⁵² People interviewed by the Washington Post described U.S. forces in Fallujah patrolling neighborhoods and “firing with little regard for civilian life.”⁵³ “This is exactly like what’s happening in Palestine,” geography professor Ahmed Jaber Saab, whose two nephews were wounded by U.S. forces, told the paper. “I didn’t believe it until I saw it myself.”⁵⁴ As he prepared a body for burial after the killings, Sunni cleric Sheik Talid Alesawi mocked U.S. rhetoric. “We understood freedom by making demonstrations,” he said. “But the shooting that greeted us was not freedom. Are there two types of freedom, one for you and one for us?”⁵⁵ That sentiment was widespread in the city. “Is this Bush’s freedom and liberation?” asked Fallujah resident Faleh Ibrahim as he marched with hundreds of others to a cemetery with the coffins of two of the dead. “We don’t want Bush, and we don’t want to be liberated. The Iraqis will bring their own liberation.”⁵⁶

A few hours after the second round of killings happened in Fallujah, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld landed at the Basra airport, at the time making him the most senior U.S. official to visit Iraq.⁵⁷ “What is significant is that large numbers of human beings, intelligent, energetic, have been liberated,” Rumsfeld declared. “They are out from under the heel of a truly brutal vicious regime and that’s a good thing.”⁵⁸ In Fallujah, U.S. soldiers abandoned Al Qaed School, consolidating their headquarters in the former Baath Party offices in Fallujah. Nearby, someone hung a banner that read: “Sooner or later, U.S. killers, we’ll kick you out.”⁵⁹

That day as well, a letter from Saddam—at the time still underground—was published, calling on Iraqis to “forget everything and resist the occupation,” declaring, “There are no priorities other than driving out the infidel, criminal, cowardly occupier. No honorable hand is held out to shake his, but, rather, the hand of traitors and collaborators.”⁶⁰ The White House, meanwhile, announced that President Bush would, the following day, declare an end to major combat operations in Iraq aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—his infamous “Mission Accomplished” moment. In reality, though, the real war was just beginning, and the events of the previous forty-eight hours would play a decisive role. That night, a grenade was thrown into the new U.S. headquarters in Fallujah, wounding seven American soldiers.⁶¹ After meeting with U.S. representatives in an effort to avert further bloodshed, Imam Jamal Shaqir Mahmood, of the Grand Fallujah Mosque, said the Americans argued that the troops were needed to provide security, “but the people of Fallujah told them we already have security.”⁶² To Fallujans, their city was now officially occupied. “After the massacre, we don’t believe the Americans came to free us, but to occupy and take our wealth and kill us,” said local leader Mohammed Farhan.⁶³

It didn’t take long for the story of the U.S. massacres in Fallujah to spread across Iraq and the Arab world. Within a few weeks, folk songs appeared on the radio, praising the people of Fallujah for bravely confronting the occupation forces.⁶⁴ DVDs went on the market with footage of the aftermath of the massacres interwoven with images of resistance attacks against U.S. patrols and scenes of epic Arab movies. In one DVD, footage from the movie Black Hawk Down depicting the slaughter of U.S. forces in Somalia is accompanied by the voice of Fallujan singer Sabeh al-Hashem, who sings: “Fallujah, attack their troops and no one will be able to save their injured soldiers. Who brought you to Fallujah, Bush? We will serve you the drink of death.”⁶⁵ In another song, Hashem declares, “The people of Fallujah are like wolves when they attack the enemy.”⁶⁶

All of this would prove eerily prophetic in less than a year’s time, when four Blackwater soldiers found themselves driving through the center of Fallujah. In the meantime, back in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., a neoconservative “terror expert,” L. Paul Bremer, was preparing to head for Baghdad, where he would direct the occupation for the Bush administration. Erik Prince would soon ready his private soldiers to serve as the elite personal bodyguards for Bush’s man in Iraq.