Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, an Iraqi vegetable farmer, walked down to the ramshackle pump house along the banks of the Euphrates. Each day at midmorning, he would start the seven-horsepower pump to water his crops. What happened after that?
Three snipers with exemplary military records from the 1st Battalion of the 25th Infantry Division's 501st Regiment were charged in Khudair's killing. They were tried by the military judicial system in Iraq beginning in 2007.
The killing of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi took place on May 11, and it was the final kill for which snipers were prosecuted. But Khudair was, in fact, at least the fourth unarmed Iraqi the snipers had killed in the short time since Hensley took over leadership of the sniper section in March 2007. Each incident illustrates the ways in which the rules of engagement, the pressure to produce, the mysterious extra equipment, and the inherent difficulties of their jobs landed the snipers in court.
The first incident occurred on April 7, 2007. Sgt. Anthony Murphy's sniper team was hiding in a shallow ravine. Through his rifle scope, Murphy watched a lone Iraqi man approaching through some bushes, his figure distorted by a heat mirage. The man appeared and then disappeared again, winding through nearby ravines. Soon, he was 50 meters away and Murphy was sure the man had spotted the team's satellite communications gear through the brush.
In another court, a military jury convicted an Army sniper of murder and sentenced him to 10 years in prison for killing an Iraqi civilian who wandered into the hiding place where six soldiers were sleeping.
U.S. Army Sgt. Evan Vela in Baghdad, Iraq, on Feb. 10, 2008.
Sgt. Evan Vela, 24, was found guilty of murder without premeditation, of aiding and abetting in planting an AK-47 on the dead man's body and of lying to military investigators about the shooting. He had faced a possible life sentence.
Vela showed no emotion when the verdict was read, but he asked the jury for mercy before it broke to decide his sentence. He apologized to the court, the Army and one of the sons of Genei Nasir al-Janabi, the man he shot with a pistol in May.
"When I came to Iraq, I didn't come to do anything wrong," Vela said, reading from a handwritten statement. "I failed my standards, your standards and the standards of the Army. All I can say is I'm sorry and ask for mercy."
But the most important question raised by his death remains unanswered. Why would these elite American soldiers kill an unarmed prisoner in cold blood?
The answer: pressure from their commanding officers to pump up a statistic straight out of America's last long war against an intractable insurgency.
A review of thousands of pages of documents from the legal proceedings obtained by Salon shows that in the months prior to Khudair's death, the young snipers, already frustrated by guerrilla tactics, were pressed to their physical limits and pushed by officers to stretch the bounds of the laws of war in order to increase the enemy body count. When the United States wallowed in Vietnam's counterinsurgency quagmire decades ago, the same pressure placed on soldiers resulted in some of the worst atrocities of that war. A paratrooper who remembered the insidious influence of body counts in Vietnam warned Salon in 2005 that the practice could also ensnare good soldiers in Iraq. "The problem is that in Iraq, we are in a guerrilla war," said Dennis Stout. "How do you keep score? How do you prove you are winning?"
The pressure from above for more bodies was also toxic in Iraq, where the isolated, outnumbered and outgunned snipers of the 1st Battalion had to make split-second life-or-death decisions. When those decisions landed them in a military court, it was the lowest-ranking soldiers, not the brass, who paid the price, and a sergeant who said he was pushed into taking a fatal shot who wound up with a long prison sentence. It was battalion commander Lt. Col Robert Balcavage, who pushed for a higher body count, who initiated the prosecution of three of the battalion's snipers. "Yes, the chain of command deserves to burn in hell," one sniper who served with the unit wrote Salon in an e-mail. "But I am not going on record saying that, well, cause I am still in the fucking Army."
The body-count pressure on the 1st Battalion's sniper section began to build in early 2007. In an insurgency like Vietnam or Iraq, it's hard to point to achievement of a military objective or conquest of a town or region as success. Instead, commanders find themselves relying on numbers, which is how body counts began to creep into the Iraq war, despite their explicit disavowal by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 ("We don't do body counts"). In need of a positive metric, commanders of the 1st Battalion reached for body counts, since the metrics they did have were moving in the wrong direction. At the time, U.S. casualties from invisible roadside bombs were mounting. In the six months before the snipers arrived in country from Alaska in late October 2006, 426 U.S. service members had died in Iraq. In the six months between the 1st Battalion's arrival and the day Khudair was killed, May 11, 2007, nearly 590 service members died in Iraq. It was one of the bloodiest periods of the Iraq war. At the time there was a new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, who was talking about winning hearts and minds. The snipers' commanders were talking about bodies. The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Balcavage, and top noncommissioned officer Command Sgt. Maj. Bernie Knight sent a clear message to the battalion's snipers. Spc. Alexander Flores, a sniper, described it this way in a hearing: "Get more bodies. Raise the morale of the battalion."
The snipers remained nervous because, at best, the guidelines they were getting from their commanders were nebulous. The snipers felt they were being pressured to interpret "hostile intent" loosely to justify kills. During testimony, sniper Spc. Joshua Michaud said that Lt. Col. Balcavage and Command Sgt. Maj. Knight "constantly pushed for 'If you feel threatened, you know, obviously eliminate the threat.' But they kind of said it in a manner in which a lot of us took it like, 'Hey, you need to go out there and you guys gotta start getting kills.'"
At worst, the rules explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances, a particularly dicey concept given an enemy that does not wear a uniform and hides among civilians. Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights. The chain of command was particularly frustrated by insurgents fleeing after attacks from roadside bombs, called improvised explosive devices. The notes from Army agents who later investigated the shootings said the battalion leaders, Balcavage and Knight, worried that the snipers had "let a lot of guys go after IED explosions." The snipers called these fleeing, sometimes unarmed Iraqis "squirters." Of course, it's not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.The bullet-riddled Qur'an was found with graffiti inside the cover on a small-arms range near a police station in the village of Radwaniya.(AMSI photo)
In the latest event, an American soldier has been removed from Iraq after using a copy of the Qur'an as a target in a shooting practice, riddling the Muslim holy book with bullets. The soldier, who remained unnamed, was sent home for using the Qur'an for target practice in a predominantly Sunni area west of Baghdad. The action, which happened on May 9, was discovered two days later when Iraqi police found the bullet-riddled Qur'an with graffiti inside the cover on a small-arms range near a police station in the village of Radwaniya.
The apologetic American commanders were met by hundreds of angry Iraqi protestors.
"Yes, yes to the Qur'an" and "America out, out," the demonstrators chanted as they carried banners and slogans condemning the American troops.
In a speech on behalf of Radhwaniya tribal leaders, Sheikh Hamadi al-Qirtani called the incident "aggression against the entire Islamic world."
Sunni preachers on Friday denounced the shooting of a Quran, by a U.S. sniper in Iraq despite a series of apologies by American commanders and U.S. President George W. Bush.
The use of Islam's holy book for target practice has triggered an angry response in Iraq and protests in Afghanistan even as U.S.-led forces are working to maintain their alliance with Sunni Arabs who have turned against al-Qaida in Iraq.
"The enemies of Islam have launched their campaign against Islam and the Prophet Muhammed and recently against the holy Koran," said Sheik Omar Mohammed during his sermon at a Sunni mosque in Baghdad."A bullet that might have shot at an Iraqi believer, was directed toward the holy Koran instead," Mohammed said. "Do not think this is a defeat for us, but it will crate enthusiasm to stand up more for this religion."
Is this the way you are proofing winning the war in Iraq by shooting the Holy Quran?
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