[lbo-talk] Patrick Cockburn's encounter with soldiers freaking out under liberation

Stephen Philion philion at hawaii.edu
Fri Jan 9 14:46:51 PST 2004


We had stopped so I could make a call on a Thuraya satellite phone to the Independent office in London. Somebody in the US party obviously thought I was using the phone to give away their position because half a dozen soldiers advanced on our car with their guns levelled at our chests screaming "hands up" and "get out of the car" in English.

One soldier shouted "put your hands on the hood" and another yelled "down on your knees". After some confusion they decided that we should get down on our knees and one snatched away the satellite phone. I said I was a journalist from a British newspaper. When our driver said something in Arabic a soldier screamed: "Shut the f*** up!"

After a few minutes the soldiers decided that we were harmless and the incident was over. But if we had been Iraqis who spoke no English it is difficult to understand how we would have known what was going on or what the edgy group of soldiers were telling us to do.

The road leading from Baghdad to towns on the Euphrates river to the west increasingly has the tense atmosphere of a war zone.

High chicken-wire fences are being built along the sides of bridges passing over the road to stop bombs being dropped on US soldiers passing underneath. There are frequent checkpoints. When we reached Fallujah, perhaps the most militantly anti-American town in Iraq, American troops had closed the main road to the city.

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