One of Ours

...“When I came out I heard one of my friends telling another that Israa was dead. I can’t remember anything else until I woke up with the kids beside me and people crying all around. I can still hear the explosion in my ears. I didn’t see the mortar but I’m sure it was the Americans. They came to the house later and took away the shell pieces. They couldn’t say it wasn’t them that fired it.

“They told the owner of the house they will pay compensation if they prove it’s an American shell. But what could they have been aiming at? In my neighbourhood there is a hospital, a school, houses, an electricity plant. Do they want to attack those? I believe it was the Americans who fired it, but even if it wasn’t them, it’s because of them. Even if someone else fired it, it’s still because of the occupation.”...

...The other explosion that Israa’s sisters heard was around the corner, a mortar hitting the pavement outside the front of another residential house, killing a grandfather and a little girl, an hour or so after the explosion in the Chicken Market which killed twelve, maybe fourteen people and injured at least 35 more. The stories, the individual families, the overall numbers are important in themselves, as a record of what is happening to ordinary Iraqis now...

...Mohammed told me how they welcomed the Americans when they first arrived. “I gave them cigarettes. We thought anything would be better. Even Saddam at his worst was better than the Americans.”...

...“All we know is it was a US mortar,” Faisal said. “It had the markings on the shell pieces. We don’t know which direction it came from. It was calm and quiet that day. They bombed to try to provoke us so then they can kill us. There are no foreign fighters here. We don’t accept strangers here. They raid houses saying they’re looking for foreign fighters.

“All this trouble is because they closed a newspaper, because it exposed the truth about Bremer. Why didn’t they close the newspapers that exposed the scandal about Bill Clinton and Monica? We didn’t do anything to them. They drive through here on patrols all the time and there haven’t been any attacks from us because we are waiting for orders from Najaf.”

A vehement debate broke out over Sistani and Al-Sadr, over whose orders were to be followed. “Why do you differentiate between Sistani and Al-Sadr?” one demanded. “They are the same,” another insisted. They differed a bit over whether there were differences; they also differed over whether the Americans were unequivocally worse than Saddam. The latter, in his time, closed more newspapers, for example.

Still they were unanimous in wanting the Americans to leave now. “Immediately,” Hussein said. “They didn’t do anything for us. They only invaded. They only brought terrorism.” They talked about the impossibility of sleeping with helicopters constantly overhead, about the nightly house raids and arrests of young men, about the frequent explosions, mortars falling close to the hospital...

...“It was only a mortar,” Saad the security guard explained, but they heard the explosion from the hospital. People buy refilled gas canisters from flatbed vehicles or horse drawn carts which traipse around the city, the drivers hooting or banging a stick on a canister to advertise their arrival. The mortar hit one of those. “They found the driver’s head on the roof of the market.”

People are adamant that they didn’t hear any shooting before the explosion. Mayada Radhi was washing clothes at home, opposite the market, when she heard the explosion. Shell fragments blasted through the door. She went outside to look for her two children, didn’t find them and came back indoors and then saw the blood on her own body, felt the pain and passed out. Hamid, her brother-in-law, was woken up by the explosion, a boy in a football shirt and baseball cap, and came out of the house to see pieces of bodies lying in the street...