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Thursday, March 29, 2007
When the clocks stopped in Tal Afar
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tal Afar, Iraq — Amid the rubble are clues that a sinister chapter of Iraqi history was written here just hours ago:
A red-and-white stuffed toy, lodged forcibly into a crevice.
Crimson tomatoes spilled onto the splintered bricks and crumpled corrugated metal of a storefront.
A tan rubber sandal that once slipped onto the left foot of a child.
Bulldozers remove slabs of concrete, mangled cars and twisted wreckage. People carry away whatever belongings they can salvage. They are still looking for loved ones they have not seen since the clocks stopped here at 4 p.m. Tuesday.
• Click here for photos of the tragedy in Tal Afar
That’s when a massive bomb exploded in this busy shopping area.
“They found another body,” a neighborhood man screams.
A torso of a woman is placed in the bed of a pickup truck. A turquoise wrap holds feet, arms and other body parts.
“They are still searching for her head,” the man says.
The stench of death is fresh in al-Wahada, a predominately Shiite neighborhood in Tal Afar, a town that sits 65 miles east of the Syrian border. What had been a place of relative peace now withers in fear.
“Where can we live after such an attack?” school teacher Khalil Ibrahim asks 2nd Lt. Ryan Swinford, a Florida National Guard soldier who helps train local security forces. “What about my children? There is no police. No life.”
Swinford tells the desperate man that he is sorry. The soldier has two young children himself at home in Tavares, Fla.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be an Iraqi solution,” he says.
It’s a sentence he utters a lot these days as the United States tries to stand up local authorities.
“Where is our government?” asks the man, pointing to his modest house, partially destroyed in the explosion.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Swinford says.
He doesn’t know either what the next few days or weeks will bring. No one can say yet whether the recent spate of violence — a suicide bombing Saturday night, two on Tuesday followed by a night of vicious revenge killings — portends more sectarian strife here.
Tal Afar has been largely spared the senseless sectarian killings that shake Iraq almost every day. So much so that President Bush a year ago touted Tal Afar as the nation’s model for security, calling it “a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq.”
This week, freedom is reduced to quick death. Hope is that a missing family member will still be found.
• • •
Tuesday afternoon, al-Wahada residents flocked to a truck carrying goods from a humanitarian organization, a magnet for poor people who had not seen such a shipment in months. The truck carried flour. It also carried a suicide bomber with 10,000 pounds of TNT.
The explosion looked like a mushroom cloud from nearby Forward Operating Base Sykes, the U.S. military post in Tal Afar. Even there, the earth trembled.
Minutes later, a second truck exploded in another, more mixed neighborhood. Police say that truck detonated prematurely before reaching the target area in al-Wahada.
At least 85 people died in the bombings; many were children. Another 200 were injured.
People in al-Wahada clawed through the destruction with their bare hands. Dust and flour combined to cover the dead with an eerie layer of white powder and streams of their own blood.
U.S. soldiers on the scene were sickened by what they saw. Some vomited.
The hallways and courtyards of Tal Afar General Hospital filled quickly. The victims were mostly Shiites.
Shiite anger against their Sunni neighbors erupted Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, and Shiite gunmen continued the carnage. They knocked on doors and asked the men in Sunni households to come out. The gunmen, some of whom were Shiite Iraqi policemen, told the Sunni men they were looking for information about the explosions.
Then they put pistols to their heads and pulled the triggers.
About 70 Sunni men were blindfolded, handcuffed and killed, execution style. The vengeful bloodletting did not stop until the Iraqi army intervened.
Tal Afar General Hospital filled again, this time with Sunnis.
• • •
Thursday morning, Hasina Mohammed Amin sits next to a white metal gurney at the hospital. The day before, it carried the limp bodies of victims.
Her family, from the Sunni Nadar tribe, owned two shops in al-Wahada — one sold women’s clothing; the other carried automotive spare parts. The latter was destroyed in the bombing.
The knock on the door came late that night. The intruders were wearing Iraqi police uniforms, she says; they threw 25 men in her extended family into one room and shot them. One was her husband.
“Why? Why?” she says, wailing to the doctors and U.S. soldiers at the hospital. “I have eight children. I need someone to protect me. Please.”
Then she stands up and whispers into a translator’s ear so Iraqi security forces standing nearby cannot hear.
“I am scared of the I.P.,” she says of the local Iraqi police.
Her back is to a window that opens out onto a small garden of red poppies and golden coreopsis. When the hospital ran out of room, staffers laid the dead atop the flowers.
The white lab coat of Dr. Ali Hussein Mustafa is stained with dried blood. He is horrified by the week’s events, not just as a doctor but also as a Sunni.
“If one terrorist is Sunni, we cannot say all Sunnis are bad,” he says, adding the same about Shiites.
Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006, sectarian violence has spiraled in this troubled land.
In Tal Afar, Shiites form 60 percent of the population and occupy neighborhoods mainly to the south of a medieval, hilltop castle. The Sunnis live to the north, though some neighborhoods are mixed.
Though Tal Afar has seen its share of bloodshed — the insurgency raged here until an American offensive quelled it in the fall of 2005 — it had been largely free of sectarian killing until now. Many of the city’s 250,000 residents who fled earlier fighting were starting to return home.
“We had the calm before the storm,” says Staff Sgt. George Kakaletris, of the 10th Psychological Operations Battalion, who was here in 2005 when the “violence was unbearable.”
Today, Kakaletris is trying to cull information from local Sunnis about the reprisal killings. When he walks outside, it is already afternoon. The winter chill is gone. “Warm weather,” he says. “The violence always gets worse when it gets warm.”
There is speculation, too, that with an increased U.S.-Iraqi military presence in Baghdad, the bloodshed is spreading outward from the capital.
U.S. soldiers working with Iraqi security forces here say the recent atrocities are a big step backward, especially because Iraqi policemen are implicated in the revenge killings.
Dr. Salih Haider, Tal Afar General Hospital’s administrator, says Sunni residents are frightened.
“It’s a very dangerous situation for us,” he tells American soldiers who are trying to decipher what steps to take next. Haider says 90 percent of the people here trust the Iraqi Army, made up of soldiers who hail from all parts of Iraq and represent various ethnic groups and religions. The police, he says, are mostly local Shiites who can be swayed easily by sectarian preferences.
“Nobody,” he says, “trusts the I.P.”
• • •
Late Thursday, Tal Afar remains under curfew. Shops are shuttered. Few people dare to walk the streets. Five mortar shells fell earlier on another Shiite district.
Policemen suspected of participating in the reprisal killings were released, though local authorities did not provide a reason. The provincial government of Ninevah, to which Tal Afar belongs, is considering reconciliation talks between the city’s Shiite and Sunni leaders.
Soldiers at FOB Sykes are on alert. Regular patrols head into the city to keep watch. Even Company H, 121st Infantry (ABN)(LRS), the Fort Gillem-based Georgia Army National Guard unit that specializes in long-range surveillance on the Syrian border, is sending soldiers into Tal Afar.
At al-Wahada, the cleanup continues. As do the prayers of people who say this: Everything is in Allah’s hands. How can anyone but God control such tragedy?
Swinford, the Florida reservist, is frustrated and weary from the chilling images around him.
“I feel helpless,” he says, standing before an entire block of houses destroyed by the truck bomb and trying to assess the madness. “I’m really hoping this is an isolated incident.”
In other words, this is not Baghdad. Yet.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Reports from Iraq
Raise survivor benefits for military families
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a recent article by Rush Limbaugh, it was stated that the survivors of those killed on 911 in Twin Towers receiving an average of $1.18 million ranging from a guarantee minimum of a quarter-million to $4.7 million.
And some are complaining that its not enough. The victims of the Oklahoma bombing are agitating for “equal entitlements.”
What are the entitlements for our service men and women who sacrificed their lives to ensure that such events do not happen again?
The answer is about $10,000 a year to a surviving spouse, so long as the spouse doesn’t remarry, and a few thousand dollars a year to children under 18.
When it comes to receiving entitlements our military is usually on the bottom of the list.
Do you think survivor benefits should be raised? What should they be?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Kenneth Hutnick
Staying in touch by sending packages
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What better way to let your soldier know you’re thinking of him than to send him a care package?
My local postal workers know me by name because I’m at the post office several times a week mailing a package, card or letter to my husband.
I use those wonderful flat rate priority mail boxes and pack it full of coffee, magazines, toiletries, photos or anything my husband has requested.
Even when he doesn’t need anything, I’m compelled to send a package because it makes me feel as if I’m still taking care of him in some small way even though he’s gone. I can’t make him dinner, clean up after him or even give him a hug at the end of bad day, but I can at least provide him with reminders of home.
I was in line at the post office one day when an older gentleman behind me saw the APO address on the box. He was prior military so we chatted for a bit.
He handed me the money to pay for the shipping, which I refused until he asked me to take it as a small token of his appreciation for the soldiers. He wanted them to know that they have the full support of many people back home even though it doesn’t seem like it at times.
This simple act of kindness touched me deeply, and I want that gentleman to know how much military families appreciate those that do support our soldiers.
What items does your soldier like to receive?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Andie Heffernan
Homecoming: A dose of reality
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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| Elissa Eubanks / AJC |
| When Dr. Guy Gober returned from a four-month tour in Iraq, his next challenge was adjusting to changes on the homefront. |
When you hear that a man had a four-month tour in Iraq, you think, “Well, at least he didn’t have to serve a year.”
Dr. Guy Gober went early in the war as a combat physician with the 214th Field Artillery of the Georgia National Guard. Before he left, he too was comforted by the phrase four-month tour. He figured he’d do his stint as a battalion surgeon then, God willing, come back safe and sound to his wife, six kids and their home in the Blue Ridge mountains of Tiger. How much could really change while he was gone?
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| Elissa Eubanks/AJC |
| Gober and his daughter, Georgia, 13, reconnect by playing golf in Clayton. |
Gober did come back safe and sound, still soft spoken with an easy smile. Now the war has been going on four years, and the current troop increase means there’s a good chance the 55-year-old colonel could be sent back to Iraq. Of course, he’d go willingly because he believes in the Army. But there is a price for sacrifice. He’s reminded of what can happen while you’re away:
Your 16- and 15-year-old sons learn how to chop wood on their own to help keep the house warm.
• • •
As the oldest male in the house, the 16-year-old assumes the authoritarian role. When you return, he does not want to give it up. It is hard for him to become just a boy again. It is hard for you to realize he’ll never again be just a boy.
• • •
Your wife essentially becomes a single parent in charge of a brood ages 3 to 16. When she can, she helps out at your urology practice with bookkeeping and such to make sure the business stays afloat. When she’s feeling overwhelmed, your daughters learn to comfort her.
• • •
Your 11-year-old daughter takes on a 4-H project making care packages to send to Iraq. She realizes that the busier she stays with sports and friends — willing herself to think of anything but the war — the less she likely she is to worry about you.
• • •
The oldest daughter becomes more quiet and introspective. She seems to feel her mother’s sadness the deepest of all.
• • •
The youngest child’s love for puppies and Daddy grows stronger.
• • •
Your second-oldest son writes you a letter recounting all the things you taught him that he’s thankful for, such as how to throw a ball, how to ride a bike. He writes, “Thanks Dad.” Reading it in Iraq, you realize for the first time that your children know they may never see you again.
• • •
Three birthdays and Christmas come and go. You look forward to the next year when, you tell yourself, you’ll be home to celebrate.
• • •
There’s a glee in your kids’ voices when they hear yours on the other end of the phone in Iraq. They’ve never sounded quite like that.
• • •
Some of your children become anti-military. Some can’t support it enough.
• • •
You begin to feel that the men and women who serve for a year or more are just plain stronger than you are.
• • •
You vow to listen more carefully, to your kids, your wife but also to the Army. Before you left Iraq, the Army sat you down along with other returning soldiers. You were told that the world at home would be changed when you got back, that there would be a new order at the house. They told you this through speakers, in questionnaires and on videos.
You didn’t pay attention. You believed you’d already survived the real storm.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Reports from the Homefront
