“What are you doing in my house?” screamed the furious Iraqi woman as she walked in on a group of American and Iraqi soldiers who were crashing around her living room after kicking down her front door.
“Get out, get out,” she shouted in broken English, shaking her fists in rage at the troops who had frozen as if caught in the act of doing something naughty.
Surveying the damage, the woman shrieked: “Are you happy now?”
American soldiers, and increasingly their Iraqi counterparts, have been conducting house-to-house searches since the invasion, checking neighbourhoods for weapons, insurgents, dead bodies and kidnap victims in a bid to quell the violence that has consumed Iraq.
Hoping to cause minimum inconvenience, the military has softened its approach, always knocking on the front door of a house and waiting to be shown in.
Many homes in dangerous areas, however, are empty after the occupants fled the escalating violence, leaving the soldiers with no option but to break open the front gate and bust down the front door, either with a boot or a crowbar.
Unfortunately on this occasion last Thursday during a search through Saydiyah, a flashpoint mixed Sunni and Shia neighbourhood in southern Baghdad, the owner of one rundown house that had appeared unoccupied showed up after her door had already been knocked in.
The woman, an English teacher who declined to give her name, had just returned with her elder daughter from spending the annual Muslim feast of Eid al-Atha with her husband and the rest of her children in a safer part of Baghdad. The majority of the family had left Saydiyah earlier in the year because of a rise in killings by al-Qaeda fighters and armed Shia gangs.
“Why did you break down my doors?” she demanded of the American soldiers who had stopped rummaging through the family’s belongings to explain themselves.
Lieutenant Ryan Harmon, aged 24, who was leading the patrol tried to reassure her that his men were just doing their job hunting for criminals and weapons caches.
“Yes your doors are broken and I am sorry, but up the road people are being killed,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. The previous day a similar patrol had found six dead bodies in a nearby street as well as a suicide vest, a kidnap victim and some bomb-making equipment.
“We are here to help. We are here to search for bad people,” said Lieutenant Harmon.
“The quicker people like you start to help us the better,” he said, adding: “We apologise and we will fix your door. You have my word. But you must try to help.”
As this exchange was going on, the 29-year-old daughter, a doctor at a university hospital in Baghdad, knelt in tears on the floor of her bedroom, which had been turned upside down.
“This is my work. I kept it here because I thought it would be safer than at the hospital,” she told me, staring in despair at an avalanche of documents and scattered files.
“Oh my god, oh my god,” she said, speaking in fairly fluent English, holding up three bottles of blood samples that were an important part of some research she was doing.
“I feel very angry. I want to kill everybody who did this. Feelings are not repaired by money.”
As I, who was embedded with the patrol, and the soldiers filed out of the front gate, which had not been broken, the teacher muttered in Arabic: “May God send all those people to hell.”
“Get out, get out,” she shouted in broken English, shaking her fists in rage at the troops who had frozen as if caught in the act of doing something naughty.
Surveying the damage, the woman shrieked: “Are you happy now?”
American soldiers, and increasingly their Iraqi counterparts, have been conducting house-to-house searches since the invasion, checking neighbourhoods for weapons, insurgents, dead bodies and kidnap victims in a bid to quell the violence that has consumed Iraq.
Hoping to cause minimum inconvenience, the military has softened its approach, always knocking on the front door of a house and waiting to be shown in.
Many homes in dangerous areas, however, are empty after the occupants fled the escalating violence, leaving the soldiers with no option but to break open the front gate and bust down the front door, either with a boot or a crowbar.
Unfortunately on this occasion last Thursday during a search through Saydiyah, a flashpoint mixed Sunni and Shia neighbourhood in southern Baghdad, the owner of one rundown house that had appeared unoccupied showed up after her door had already been knocked in.
The woman, an English teacher who declined to give her name, had just returned with her elder daughter from spending the annual Muslim feast of Eid al-Atha with her husband and the rest of her children in a safer part of Baghdad. The majority of the family had left Saydiyah earlier in the year because of a rise in killings by al-Qaeda fighters and armed Shia gangs.
“Why did you break down my doors?” she demanded of the American soldiers who had stopped rummaging through the family’s belongings to explain themselves.
Lieutenant Ryan Harmon, aged 24, who was leading the patrol tried to reassure her that his men were just doing their job hunting for criminals and weapons caches.
“Yes your doors are broken and I am sorry, but up the road people are being killed,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. The previous day a similar patrol had found six dead bodies in a nearby street as well as a suicide vest, a kidnap victim and some bomb-making equipment.
“We are here to help. We are here to search for bad people,” said Lieutenant Harmon.
“The quicker people like you start to help us the better,” he said, adding: “We apologise and we will fix your door. You have my word. But you must try to help.”
As this exchange was going on, the 29-year-old daughter, a doctor at a university hospital in Baghdad, knelt in tears on the floor of her bedroom, which had been turned upside down.
“This is my work. I kept it here because I thought it would be safer than at the hospital,” she told me, staring in despair at an avalanche of documents and scattered files.
“Oh my god, oh my god,” she said, speaking in fairly fluent English, holding up three bottles of blood samples that were an important part of some research she was doing.
“I feel very angry. I want to kill everybody who did this. Feelings are not repaired by money.”
As I, who was embedded with the patrol, and the soldiers filed out of the front gate, which had not been broken, the teacher muttered in Arabic: “May God send all those people to hell.”
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