US arrests schoolchildren in Iraq for protesting

“Two days ago there was a demonstration after school finished, against the coalition and for Saddam. Yesterday the American army came and surrounded the whole block. They just crashed into the school, 6, 7, 8 into every classroom with their guns. They took the name of every student and matched the names to the photos they got from the day before and then arrested the students. They actually dragged them by their shirts onto the floor and out of the class.”

They wouldn’t give their names. The children at Adnan Kheiralla Boys’ School in the Ameriya district of Baghdad were still scared, still seething with rage. Another boy, Hakim Hamid Naji, was taken today. “They were kicking him,” one of the pupils said. A car pulled up and a tall, thin boy ran into the school, talked briefly with staff and left again. The kids said the soldiers had come looking for this boy too.

The headmaster, too, was reluctant to speak. No, he said, looking down at the desk, there were no guns. But Ahmed, an English teacher, followed the soldiers on the raid. “The translators had masks or scarves because maybe they are from this area. They came and they chose several students and they took them. The demonstration started after school on Tuesday. I advised them not to do it because I am their teacher and the Americans don’t care. The children had pictures of Saddam Hussein from their text books and that’s all, so they demonstrated and just said we want Saddam Hussein.

“There were no leaders, this wasn’t an arranged demonstration. It comes honestly, some of the students say, we love Saddam Hussein. Some of the students say no, we hate Saddam Hussein. I told them, it’s OK, let them love him and let them hate him, we can all express our opinions. There are no weapons, there is no bombing.”

“The American soldiers came with tanks and stopped the demonstration and the kids sat in front of the tanks. They took pictures of the students and they had some spy maybe, I’m not sure, maybe students in the school. I begged the soldiers to leave these students because they are naïve, they just believe this is a civilian demonstration, but the soldiers were very rude to the students and treated them like soldiers. They are kids, they are teenagers, so I begged the officer, but he didn’t care.

“I told them, just calm down, but they said no, they are not kids. In Abu Ghraib we have 16 year olds shooting at us. I said yes, but these are in school. They have books, not weapons. And they took pictures of us, what is your name, stand here. I am not a criminal, I am a teacher. They took pictures of most of the teachers.

“I told them you have to educate people about freedom, not punish them, but they brought tanks and helicopters. Yesterday they surrounded the school and came in with weapons everywhere, soldiers everywhere and used tear gas on the students. They fired guns to scare them, above their heads. One student got a broken arm because of the beating. They had some sticks, electric sticks and they hit the students. Some of them were vomiting, some of them were crying and they were very afraid.”

All the other teachers and students who talked to us backed Ahmed’s version over the headmaster’s: the soldiers were armed when they came into the classrooms. One of the arrested boys decided he trusted Ahmed enough to talk to the people that Ahmed told him were safe, as long as he wasn’t recorded and we promised not to identify him in any way. He wouldn’t give his name or age.

“The soldiers pointed at me and I was grabbed by about 8 of them and dragged out by my clothes and my collar. They threw me on the ground and searched me and cocked their guns on me. We were held in chicken cages, about two metres by a metre and a half with criss cross wire. They were swearing at us a lot. They didn’t beat us but they accused us of having relations with Saddam Hussein, asking who organized the demonstration, telling us anyone who is against our American interests will be arrested.

“They offered us some food but more curses. They didn’t inform our parents at all. The headmaster came with three of the fathers. Most of us were held between 7 and 10 hours but one student is not Iraqi and he was held for much longer and they questioned him for two hours and made him stand outside from 10pm till 2am in the freezing cold. The youngest was 14.”

The school is named after a brother-in-law of Saddam’s who was popular with both Sunni and Shia people. For this he was killed by Saddam and, when the statues of former regime figures were being destroyed after the invasion, both of his monuments, in Baghdad and Basra, were protected by local people. The pupils have painted over the sign at the school’s entrance, renaming it Saddam’s School. The depiction of Saddam on TV in American hands seems to have made him a heroic symbol even to many who disliked him.

One of the boys told me, “Only 40 kids out of all of us were on the first demonstration but after the raid, we will all go out on Saturday after school and demonstrate against the occupation. They have turned us all against the American soldiers. We don’t care about their tanks, we don’t care about their machine guns, we don’t care about their prisons any more.”

Outside the school, Rana asked me, “Did you see the bodies in Adamiya? There were bodies in the street, Americans and Iraqis. They stopped an ambulance, threw in 5 bodies and said go, just go. It is a war zone. They don’t want to give the bodies to the families. Even my neighbour, he was killed by the Americans a few days ago and they didn’t receive his body yet. When they went to the hospital the doctors said you have to go to the Americans, bring permission from them and we will give you your son’s body.”

Wasef, one of the Iraq Indymedia members, was shot in the foot while filming the demonstration in Adamiya yesterday. He’s OK, still smiling, doesn’t know who fired the bullet that hit him.

In the Abu Ghraib hospital while I was visiting someone, there was a noise, something more than a groan but weaker than a shout, broken by short in-breaths, aah, aah, aah: a man with a gunshot wound, a crowd of men trying to lift him from the trolley to the bed. Outside was exploding at frequent intervals. In the doorway they were loading a coffin onto a pick up. A woman with a full pregnant belly told us her two children were playing in the garden when a rocket landed in the flower bed. Another one landed in the street outside.

The petrol queues are now about 2-3km long, two cars wide in places. Billboards and leaflets declare the new penalty of 3 to 10 years in jail – yes, it does say years – for buying or selling black market petrol. They, like the posters advertising rewards for information, are plastered with paint, red or black.

I have to apologise to Hamsa and Khalid – I misunderstood. Hamsa said, “Now you are in handcuffs, the bastards,” not “you bastard” about Saddam – a small but significant linguistic cock-up on my part, and Khalid said they will make him crawl over nails not that they should. I’m sorry.

http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/56/index.php