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War in Iraq

CPT Report from Iraq
by Gene Stoltzfus
June 26, 2003

CPT team members Peggy Gish, Maureen Jack and Anne Montgomery travelled an hour north of Baghdad on the road to Tikrit to visit the uncle of a friend of the team who had recently been imprisoned.

At 6.00 am one morning he, his wife and five young children were awakened from sleep by a megaphone. Their house was surrounded by a number of army vehicles and two helicopters. The soldiers said that they were looking for a senior member of Saddam's regime, who they had been told was hiding there. The children saw them as they pointed their weapons; they were frightened and crying. The soldiers found and removed a significant sum of money. They handcuffed the owner of the house and two memb! ers of his extended family. They said that they would hold them for an hour and then release them; about a kilometer along the road they freed the other two, but they took the owner of the house to prison and held him there for twelve days.

In prison there were 80 men in the same room; they had blankets but no beds. There were two outside toilets, which seemed to be open, without walls. During the time in prison no one visited from outside the prison. After twelve days he was simply told that he could go and that they were sorry.

The money has still not been returned. When the owner visited the army recently to ask for it to be returned he came out of the building to find his car on fire; the Americans had accidentally shot at it!

On 21 June 2003 Gish and Jack visited a local church to inquire after the people there. The priest reported that one of their people had been killed during the fighting; he was a Saddam fedayeen. Several had been injured in bombing and a car crash on the Mosul road. Security was a concern: one woman who had been at mass the previous week had disappeared on her way home.

On 22 June Jack and Anne Montgomery accompanied a local man to the International Red Cross to inquire about his son, who had been detained by the US military. There they met by chance two former detainees who both reported that while in prison they had witnessed the killing by American soldiers of three Iraqi detainees. Members of the family of one of the men reported to have been killed (a young man of nineteen years, who had been married for four months) were also there seeking the return of their son's body. O! ne of the former detainees was clearly still distressed by what he had seen; he said that the soldiers opened fire when the detainees were shouting, 'Freedom!'

That afternoon the team met representatives from the Union of the Unemployed in Iraq, an organization with 15,000 members. The representatives asked CPT members to attend and participate in their nonviolent demonstrations and help link them with international workers unions. Arrangements were made for further links.

Team members attended evening mass at St Raphael's.

On 23 June, Jack and Gish visited Baghdad University, where Jack made contacts to link up library workers with Edinburgh University in Scotland which is launching a "Books for Baghdad" project, to help replace books lost in looting and burning of several university libraries. While there, they came upon a nonviolent student demonstration, protesting the U.S. military check point at the entrance to the University, and were able to talk to staff and students. Signs said, "We ask the coalition forces to get out our university and we don't need you to keep our security" and "Islamic religion don't like cheeking women." Nadia, a worker at the University, told Gish that "the U.S. military doesn't understand the people here. Iraqis have a different understanding of freedom. The soldiers don't realize the shame connected with having your house searched and searching women."

That afternoon Jack and Gish visited the home of the leader of a Christian congregation in Baghdad. In talking about the conditions after the war, he said that under Saddam Hussein, Christians and churches felt safe, and protected by law. Now there is chaos and insecurity. "Sometimes we wish Saddam Hussein came back," he added, "because there are so many problems now."

Later Jack and Gish attended the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq meeting, where, along with other agenda, a U.N. official reported that violent attacks on expatriates in Iraq had increased in number and sophistication, and they were now calling it "low intensity warfare."

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