I’ve been struggling for hours with this story, but I’m finding it terribly difficult to write about:
Fifteen-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza was afraid, her mother confided in a neighbor.
As pretty as she was young, the girl had attracted the unwelcome attention of U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint that the girl had to pass through almost daily in their village in the south-central city of Mahmudiyah, her mother told the neighbor.
Abeer told her mother again and again in her last days that the soldiers had made advances toward her, a neighbor, Omar Janabi, said this weekend, recounting a conversation he said he had with the girl’s mother, Fakhriyah, on March 10.
Fakhriyah feared that the Americans might come for her daughter at night, at their home. She asked her neighbor if Abeer might sleep at his house, with the women there.
Janabi said he agreed.
Then, “I tried to reassure her, remove some of her fear,” Janabi said. “I told her, the Americans would not do such a thing.”
Abeer did not live to take up the offer of shelter.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A 21-year-old former soldier has been arrested in Marion, North Carolina, and charged with killing four Iraqi civilians in March, when he was serving in Iraq.
[snip]
“The charges allege that on March 12, 2006, while stationed in Mahmoudiya, Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, Green and three other individuals went to a house in the vicinity of Traffic Control Point 1, near Mahmoudiya, to rape one of the adult females living there,” the Department of Justice said in a written statement.
“Green allegedly shot and killed an adult male, an adult female and a female child who were present in the house. The charges also allege that after participating in the rape of the second adult female, Green shot and killed her,” the statement said.
I’ve spent all afternoon in an attempt to voice my thoughts, and every approach has ended in an over-the-top rant. For now, suffice to say that I’m utterly outraged that American soldiers — who are overseas on behalf of my country — have effectively committed this crime in my name.
I’m unbelievably angry…
Too horrible to process quickly. I’m sorry for you and everybody else that had to hear such a story, myself included. Let me recommend some words from Steve Clemons. There are much harder words before it:
I know I will.
This clinches it. Time to LEAVE Iraq!