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US soldier kicked islamic flag { August 14 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55761-2003Aug13.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55761-2003Aug13.html
Flag Is Flash Point In a Baghdad Slum
Perceived Insult Ignites Anti-U.S. Unrest
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 14, 2003; Page A11
BAGHDAD, Aug. 13 -- The U.S. military helicopter flew low over Baghdad's largest slum today, about an hour before noon prayers. For a while, it hovered near a transmission tower. Then, Sheik Ahmed Zarjawi said, a U.S. soldier tried to kick the black flag that fluttered atop the tower, inscribed in white letters with the name of one of Shiite Islam's most revered figures.
"How can we sleep at night when we see this?" he recalled asking.
There followed a day of anger and fervor in a Shiite neighborhood already on edge. Protesters incensed at what they saw as a religious insult poured out of houses and shops. In some of the worst unrest since Baghdad fell to U.S.-led forces on April 9, clashes erupted with an American patrol, killing one Iraqi and wounding at least three others.
Into a sweltering evening, hundreds of demonstrators waving religious banners and rallied by neighborhood clergy moved across streets awash in sewage, calling for a day of reckoning with U.S. troops, who they said they no longer wanted to enter their neighborhood.
"When the Americans came, we welcomed them and received them," said Jabbar Qassem, 20. "But this is our faith. This flag, it represents our faith. Why would they do this? Now we will allow no American to wander through here."
The U.S. military said the flag was inadvertently knocked over by gusts from the low-flying helicopter. Suggestions of any intent are "totally bogus, totally untrue," said Staff Sgt. J.J. Johnson, a military spokesman.
But by nightfall, in a city where truth and falsehood often fall by the wayside of rumor, the damage was already done, underscoring the perilous divide of religion and culture that separates occupier and occupied.
The regions of Iraq populated by Shiite Muslims, who form the country's majority and were relentlessly repressed by Saddam Hussein's government, have remained largely quiet since the war's end. Even the most militant clerics, such as Moqtada Sadr, a young firebrand whose faction enjoys broad popular support in poorer parts of Baghdad and the southern city of Basra, have stopped short of a call to arms.
But discontent over the pace of restoring basic services has echoed through much of Iraq, and shortages of gasoline and electricity unleashed two days of protests and violence over the weekend in and around Basra. In the Baghdad neighborhood renamed after Sadr's revered father, an ayatollah believed killed by Hussein's government in 1999, it took no more than a possible miscalculation by a helicopter.
When it ended, clergy had issued a manifesto demanding an apology and giving U.S. forces a day to withdraw from Sadr City.
"We are not responsible for the reaction of people if they enter the city again," said Sheik Hadi Darraji, a leading cleric.
Witnesses offered a series of accounts of the helicopter's path near the red-and-white, six-story transmission tower. Some said it approached once, and a female soldier leaned out and tried to tear down the flag with a knife. Other accounts said it approached twice, with a soldier pointing a gun at a youth who climbed the tower and tried to fend off the helicopter with a metal bar.
Johnson dismissed the idea of a soldier leaning out of the helicopter. "There's no way anybody could do that," he said.
Footage of the incident aired by the satellite news channel Al-Arabiya clearly showed a helicopter hovering for several seconds near the flag, which bore an inscription of a 9th century descendant of the prophet Muhammad known as the Mahdi.
Soon after, Johnson said, a crowd that began at 100 swelled to 3,000. When U.S. military vehicles later came down a main street, he said, some in the crowd attacked them with small arms and a rocket-propelled grenade. Residents dismissed that, saying that people in the crowd, many of them teenagers, were only throwing rocks and that U.S. soldiers opened fire randomly.
Residents said that the fatality was a boy between 10 and 11 years old. Johnson said four people were wounded. But doctors at the nearby Thawra Hospital put the figure at three. One of them was a 12-year-old boy shot in the face, said Wisam Jassim, a physician there.
Within hours, youths had climbed the transmission tower, bedecking it in red, green, white and black flags, colors symbolic of suffering and martyrdom and resonant in Shiite Islam. Most bore the inscription of the Mahdi, and youths waved the flags past sunset.
On a fire station below, others had scrawled "Down USA" in English, and "Down with America, Down with Israel" in Arabic. Some carried Iraqi flags or portraits of the elder Sadr, whose following was especially loyal in the neighborhood that now bears his name. Banners read, "No, no to arrogance, yes, yes to the Hawza," a centuries-old Shiite seminary.
At one point, gunshots fired into the air echoed across streets filled with hundreds of protesters.
The helicopter incident was carried out "to provoke the Shiites," said Ali Karim, 30, standing amid a group of mostly young protesters. "Until now we haven't done anything to the Americans. We are warning them not to come inside here again."
Thumbing worry beads, Ali Naif interrupted. The warning, he said, wasn't strong enough. "If we catch the Americans, we will slaughter them, okay? Why did they commit this aggression against us?"
Some U.S. officials have become increasingly worried about the influence of Sadr, a junior cleric who has little religious standing but heads an organization that enjoys support among the poorest and most disenfranchised in some Shiite cities.
Over the past month, he has railed against the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, calling it a tool of the occupation that should be dissolved. He has repeatedly urged the creation of a militia known as "The Army of the Mahdi," albeit unarmed.
After the clash, his clerical followers staged a rally atop a fire station near the transmission tower, with a crowd of hundreds waving banners below. The boy said to have fended off the helicopter was introduced.
Darraji, one of Sadr's followers, then delivered their demands: The Americans must stage a "complete and comprehensive withdrawal" within a day, issue an apology, provide compensation to the families of the dead and wounded and deliver their written agreement in English and Arabic.
"We give them one night to implement these demands without any maneuvers or delays," Darraji said.
At times in the speech, the crowd broke into chants. "Today, today is peaceful, tomorrow, tomorrow is war," one went, as the sun set over the neighborhood. "We are preparing your army, Mahdi," another intoned.
"The Americans want to provoke the people. They have a plan," said Qassem Khusaf, 33, as he watched the protest, which dispersed by nightfall. "They are provoking us to see whether we will fight or not."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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