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We all remember those boys gloating over the burning corpses of Americans in Falluja. And these, exulting over flesh strung from a telephone cable. Journalists saw that "…boys yanked a smoldering body into the street and ripped it apart." Some pounded the charred corpse with their shoes. As the "…bodies were dragged through the streets…" "…children cheered and danced." "….manic with glee at the barbarity inflicted" on the dead Americans in the heart of the Sunni Triangle.
These kids are demonstrating in support of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who ordered the Shi'ite uprising last weekend…children chanting slogans of solidarity…parading with swords at the ready. "It's just amazing," an American lieutenant told the WASHINGTON POST, "… the kids I talked with two, three days ago are the same ones that are throwing the rocks at us as hard as they can."
When the Americans arrived in the Shiite section of Baghdad last year, the people who had suffered under Saddam Hussein shook hands with them and smiled. That was then. Now, they see their liberator in the militant young mullah Sadr. "Terrorize your enemy." He commands…and they do. A story from the news agency Reuters quotes another cleric: "When the order comes for a holy war, there will not be one American left in the street." You can believe he means it. An American captain says these holy warriors willing to die for a cause "…just stand up in the open, fire from the hip, and stand there until they kill or are killed."
What drives such fury? Many things, including decades of Saddam Hussein's propaganda, which blamed Americans and Jews for everything wrong in Iraq. Last week, one of those mutilated American corpses was dragged down the street by a car displaying a picture of the Palestinian Hamas leader who had been assassinated days before by Israel on orders of Ariel Sharon; America got blamed for that. And those mutilated corpses - good riddance, some Iraqis said, to CIA spies and mercenaries. Revenge, said others, for Iraqi deaths at the hands of Americans. The fog of war produces its own toxin. These mourners at a funeral procession for two children killed by a rocket last month; say Americans did it, though no one has yet proved it. As the battles this week raged through poor crowded slums, ordinary people got caught in the crossfire; American troops entering houses and mosques looking for insurgents fired at furtive shadows, gunships and Apache choppers leveled houses not knowing who was really inside…..Among the victims: a ten-year-old….and a man in his sixties, the father of twelve.
"There is no more confusing moment in a man's life than when he's being shot at," a general in Iraq told a journalist. Unless it's a moment like this: Army Major Douglas Babb, 4th Infantry Division, warning children away from his convoy. Give the kids nothing, the troops are told; take nothing from them -- any exchange could be lethal. Friend or foe, you can't be sure, there is in war no tender age.
Earlier this week the radio reported that some American troops were advancing with fixed bayonets. And you have to wonder: Who is more terrified -- the young American soldiers ordered forward, or the kids….the children…the boys…waiting for them….martyrs in the making…
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