Iraq still at war

Here in Canada, some US soldiers have deserted and are now asking for the refugee status. While they could be deported, some of them speak about what is happening in Iraq, and how the US army is fighting there.

This is an excerpt of “I can’t go back to Iraq”, a news story on The Dominion, where ex-solider Darrell Anderson talks about the procedure he had to follow:

At one point, he and a group of soldiers were stationed in front of a roadblock near an Iraqi police station. For several hours they sustained enemy fire. Several soldiers had died. Then, for a while, it was calm. Suddenly a car drove toward Anderson’s position. It had broken what soldiers call a “safety perimeter.” Also the car was emitting sparks, probably from bad brakes. Protocol in that situation is to shoot first and ask questions later, which is what Anderson’s fellow soldiers were yelling for him to do.

“It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s a family,” he yelled back.

Anderson held his fire. He had assumed the driver was confused, that he was trying to flee the city. He guessed right. Before the car sped away Anderson could make out two children sitting in the back seat. A boy and a girl, he thinks.

“Why didn’t you shoot?” some of the other soldiers asked him. “Next time you shoot,” they ordered.

“They got their procedures,” says Anderson. “Even if it is a family, you’re supposed to open fire, cause they broke the safety perimeter.”

Sad procedure.

It seems that beside the press releases, the occupying army is doing very little to convince Iraqis of their goodwill. I can understand why US soldiers are becoming paranoid with all these suicide bombings. But at the same time people living there who makes some missteps get killed by Americans, so it’s not so surprising many of them revolt and takes arms. How the situation is supposed get any better?

Anyway, his story gives more credibility to the continuing flow of reported atrocities commited in Iraq by coalition forces, like this one about people trying to escape fighting in Fallujah during the fight in November. From Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches weblog:

“The Americans shot every boat on the river because people were trying to escape Fallujah by the river. They shot all the sheep, any animal people owned was shot. Helicopters shot all the animals and anything that moved in all the villages surrounding Fallujah during the fighting.“

He said that none of the roads into Fallujah, or around Fallujah were passable because anyone on them was shot. “I know one family that were all killed. There are no signs on these roads that tell people not to use them — so people don’t know they aren’t supposed to use them. No signs in English or Arabic!”

What is missing is a reliable count of civilian casualties. Even something approximative would help us know the importance of this. But the United States refuse to release such numbers, while according to this other story from The Independant about humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka (now dead), US troops does compile such statistics.

According to the same story, the number of civilian victims in this war is estimated to 100,000.

Can anybody stop this war?