Iraqi Militiaman's Fatal Error Offers Look into campaign

[MKSheppard]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... 3Sep3.html

'They Deal in Danger'
Iraqi Militiaman's Fatal Error Offers Look Into Anti-Occupation Campaign

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 4, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Sept. 3 -- Osama Ahmed Abdel-Rahim was the first to arrive at Noman Hospital, and the only one of three young men to make it alive. The blast of a bomb had blown off his legs, the left one above the shin, the right one at the kneecap. All but his back was burned so badly that flesh flaked off his arms.

When a doctor saw him, Abdel-Rahim was delirious. He screamed for water as medics bandaged his legs and inserted an IV. And with two hours left in his life of 20 years, he shouted the name of the man whom he, his family and neighbors blamed for the accidental explosion of a bomb that may have been prepared for soldiers of the U.S. occupation.

"Why, Abbas, why did you do it?" the young man was yelling over and over, recalled the doctor, Wael Fadhil. "Why, Abbas, why did you do it?"

The blast on Aug. 24, in the working-class Baghdad neighborhood of Waziriya, tore through the third floor of a housing project during what U.S. officials suspect was a failed attempt to build the improvised mines that have become a weapon of choice against U.S. forces. The explosion shattered windows two stories below and left a yawning crater in foot-thick concrete walls stained by rain, grime and age. The neglected garden in the back yard was, in a moment, transformed into a junkyard of shattered masonry.

Neighbors insist that Abdel-Rahim and two other victims, both 15, were innocent. But they tell a different story about a fourth victim, Abbas Sabri Dayikh, 20.

Dayikh's life and, perhaps more telling, his death provide a glimpse into the obscure world of the campaign against U.S. troops occupying Iraq -- of the interplay between crime and resistance, of the fear that still prevails in the parts of Baghdad where the U.S. presence and police are rarely seen, and of the anger that the lawlessness breeds.

A known criminal, suspected guerrilla and most likely both, Dayikh lived on the fringes of Baghdad's underworld, where residents say U.S. officials and their Iraqi allies are unprepared and ill-equipped to face resistance that has persisted for months.

With attacks against American forces averaging a dozen a day, U.S. officials have suggested that some of those strikes may be freelance operations, as loyalists of former president Saddam Hussein team up with outlaw networks that have shaken residents with increasingly bold kidnappings, carjackings and robberies. In an economic landscape becoming bleaker, they say, money is the common denominator. "In all probability, some of them may have linked up with former Baathists," said Col. Guy Shields, a military spokesman, referring to the Baath Party, which ruled Iraq under Hussein.

Added Baghdad police Capt. Sabah Nijm, who investigated the bombing: "There are people giving them money to prepare the bombs against the Americans, maybe the police or even other Iraqis. They are young, they have no work, so they deal in danger. Everything that is forbidden is lucrative."

'A Dirty, Filthy Person'

As residents recall, Dayikh was the neighborhood ne'er-do-well. He brawled a lot, stabbing a neighbor in the shoulder two months ago. Even his family

acknowledges he drank to excess. And he was notorious for brandishing his AK-47 assault rifle around the neighborhood, a gaggle of boxy, three-story apartments built in 1973 to house workers of a nearby state-owned factory.

"He was a dirty, filthy person," said Mohammed Salim, a relative of one of the victims. "You could smell his filthiness a long way away."

Enticed by money, residents said, Dayikh was drawn in 1998 to Saddam's Fedayeen, a Baath Party militia that celebrated its purported suicidal zeal. He was spotted in the neighborhood dressed in the militia's trademark black uniform, with the patch that listed its priorities: God, country and leader. Neighbors said he was moved to the Republican Guard, an elite force within the Iraqi army, in 2001 and sent to the western cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. He deserted, but neighbors quoted his mother as saying he rejoined the Fedayeen in Adhamiya, a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad, in the waning days of the U.S.-led invasion. The fighting there was some of the fiercest in the city.

"I was sure he was going to die," said Hussein Salim, another relative.

When Dayikh returned to Waziriya after Baghdad fell in April, he bragged of his exploits -- of blowing up tanks and armored vehicles, of fighting until he ran out of ammunition. Residents said they dismissed the crowing as bluster, but noticed a dramatic change in his life in ensuing weeks. He had money. While Baghdad reeled in postwar chaos, he bought new clothes and ate well, residents said. They spotted a new satellite dish at his apartment. And they suspected he was trading in weapons.

"His family has no money to eat," Hussein Salim said. "He had no job, no work. Where did he get the money from?"

As the guerrilla campaign against U.S. forces mounted in the capital, Dayikh did little to dispel the rumors.

With a slight build disproportionate to his swagger, he boasted of ties to the Fedayeen, still believed to operate in parts of Baghdad, neighbors said. He talked about easy access to weapons. In a neighborhood where everyone is related or knows one another, strangers often came to visit him, sometimes on a motorcycle. Two months ago, neighbors saw him writing, in red paint on a wall, "Long live Saddam Hussein." The slogan is now painted over in black.

"For money, he would do anything," Mohammed Salim said.

Collecting Arms and Legs

At 11 p.m. on a Sunday, the on-again, off-again electricity had returned to Dayikh's neighborhood.

As he did every few hours, Ibrahim Salim went through his apartment, turning on the television and fans and plugging in the refrigerator. Ten minutes later, his son

Haider left, saying he would eat dinner -- eggs and potatoes -- when he returned.

Down the hall, as the hour grew late, Hoda Mohammed Amr sent her son Osama to fetch his brother Emad, who was in the stairwell with Dayikh.

At 11:20 p.m., the four young men were together, gathered at the top of the stairwell that led to the roof, when a powerful blast blew in doorways down the hall.

"When I heard the explosion, I jumped up," said Nasir Salim, 42, whose 16-year-old daughter remains paralyzed with a broken back. "The noise was so loud."

Body parts littered a floor awash in rubble and blood. Still in a daze, with smoke and debris in the air, neighbors pulled out tattered blankets and started collecting arms and legs, trying to match them with three torsos. "We found limbs and we didn't know how to put them all together," said Salah Hamza, 40, a neighbor. "Whatever we found, we put them in the blankets."

Ibrahim Salim said he didn't see his son. His corpse -- legs and arms gone -- was in the hallway, but his face was turned to the ground.

"I was dizzy," he said, sitting under a tent last week, where friends and relatives came to pay their respects over tea and cigarettes. "I went downstairs for looking for my son. I went in the street. I kept shouting, 'Did you see my son? Did you see Haider?' "

As he wandered in the street for half an hour, neighbors took Osama, still half-conscious, to Noman Hospital in a blue car. He was transferred to a better-equipped hospital, where he died at 1 a.m. In a gray minivan, others took the bodies of Haider and Dayikh, who was recognizable only by his orange shirt and tan shorts, to the hospital's morgue. Emad, still alive, was taken to overcrowded Kindi Hospital, which at first turned him away. Neighbors said he fell off the stretcher begging for water. He died two days later, with burns over most of his body.

Around midnight, about 40 minutes after the blast, an ambulance arrived at the site. Inside was Ziad Mijbel, a physician who had heard the explosion from a hospital three miles away and came to treat the wounded. He stayed for an hour, he said, overwhelmed by the pandemonium outside and taken aback by the smoke and smell of burning flesh. Salim returned to the hospital with Mijbel and went to the morgue.

"The first one I saw was Abbas, Abbas the criminal," Salim recalled angrily. "The second one I saw was my son."

Under the funeral tent last week, as incense burned and the wail of Koranic verses played on a ramshackle stereo, Salim started crying. His body convulsed, and his fleshy face, with several days' growth of salt-and-pepper stubble, twisted in the contortions of memories too vivid. "Why couldn't I have died instead of him?" he said. "God have mercy on him! God have mercy on him!"

His sobs became louder, and his relatives tried to comfort him. "I'm losing my mind!" he shouted.

'Not a Lot That We Can Do'

As Mijbel searched for wounded, Nijm, the police captain, arrived from the station a few miles away. Electricity was out again, and he climbed the stairs with a

flashlight to survey the scene. His work ended soon after with a visit to Noman Hospital.

Pulling open a grimy blue folder last week, the gray-haired Nijm read the report he had written, its pages bound by a safety pin. Four dead and two wounded. Extensive damage to the third floor. Pending hospital reports, case closed.

"As an investigator for 20 years, I can say they were trying to build a bomb," he said.

U.S. forces arrived that night and returned in the morning to search at least one apartment. But most residents said they were not interviewed. Nor were doctors at Noman Hospital, which received three of the young men, including Dayikh.

The U.S. report on the incident called the blast "a possible IED factory on the top floor of the building," using the initials for an improvised explosive device. But a U.S. military spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that because the explosion involved no U.S. casualties, there probably would not be much more follow-up. He said soldiers are already inundated by reports, sometimes a dozen a night.

"There's really not a lot that we can do on something like that," he said. "It would be more of a police matter."

Nijm, the police captain, said he believed the blast was caused by a block of explosives or a grenade that accidentally detonated, setting off as many as five others possibly stored in an empty tin of vegetable oil. In parts of Baghdad, he said, opponents of the U.S. occupation were increasingly resorting to homemade explosives -- grenades, artillery shells or mortar rounds hooked up to wire, timers or remote-control devices. The individual parts are easier to smuggle across the city, he said, and they are easier to hide inside buildings.

In places like Waziriya, Nijm said, even families who live there don't know what's going on behind closed doors. "No one can monitor them, no one can watch them," he said from behind his battered gray desk.

A Swirl of Rumors

The family of Dayikh had gathered under another funeral tent, just 100 yards from where Salim's family mourned along a sprawling asphalt parking lot strewn with

plastic bags, trash and pools of sewage. With the detachment of doctors, they chatted on and on about his body -- how the blast had disfigured his head so that it was unrecognizable, how they had found a piece of his jaw in the garden the day before, how they found flesh from what they believed was his leg in the hallway before that.

But when the conversation turned to what he was doing that night, they had few words to offer. "I swear to God, nobody knows," said his brother-in-law, Bassim Shamkhi, sipping sweet tea. "It's a mystery. It was a total surprise."

The rest of the neighborhood had little doubt. They insisted Dayikh was keeping the explosives for an attack, either by him or others. As was his habit, he was showing off to the other young men. They said he was drunk and made a mistake. Before he died, Emad told relatives that Dayikh was trying to set a timer.

Rumors swirled through the apartments and the funeral tents as residents pieced together the past few weeks.

The mother of Osama and Emad said neighbors saw Dayikh trying to put explosives in the trunk of a car the afternoon of the explosion. When he knew he had been spotted, she said, he moved the explosives to the roof. Mohammed Salim, an uncle of Haider, said he saw three people visiting Dayikh after dusk, hours before the blast tore through the building.

Several residents insisted that Dayikh was the man responsible for blowing a foot-wide hole in the water main in nearby Adhamiya last month, which cut supplies to hundreds of thousands of residents and formed a four-foot-deep pool along a six-lane section of a busy underpass.

No one said they would have been willing to inform on Dayikh to the police, much less go to the Americans.

In conversation after conversation, they insisted the Americans were unresponsive, and they were resentful. Even worse, they said, the police were corrupt. While police at the nearby station denied taking bribes, Saad Nusayif, an uncle of Osama and Emad, said they demanded 500 Iraqi dinars, about 30 cents, just to get through the front door. It cost almost $40, he said, to file a complaint.

"The people are too scared to inform," he said. "Someone can kill you over a pack of cigarettes."

Besides, who would have protected them from Dayikh?

"Everyone is looking after themselves, that's it," said Hamza, the neighbor. "Maybe he'll find out that we were talking about him. Maybe he'll kill us. People just avoided him. They avoided dealing with him."