Current WMC Iraq Series Exclusive

 

 

 

WMC Exclusive: The Casualties of War Crimes— Who Weeps for Abeer? by Helen Zia

March 12

Sandwiched between International Women’s Day on March 8 and the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19 is another date that marks a tragic nexus of the two: the day one year ago when 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi was stalked, gang-raped, shot in the head and her corpse burned in her own home in Mahmoudiya, Iraq. Four U.S. soldiers and one former soldier are charged with the crimes committed March 12, 2006.

Meeting Recruitment Quotas

Pfc. Steven D. Green, allegedly the ringleader in the attack on Abeer and her family, got in the military on a moral waiver. In 2006, so did 34,476 other recruits.

Of those, 8,129 were U.S. Army recruits like Green, but the Army isn’t the biggest user of moral waivers, granted to recruits with criminal records—for misdeeds that range from traffic and one-time drug offenses to felony convictions. The Marine Corp granted 20,750 moral waivers in 2006, according to Pentagon data obtained by the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. All together, branches of the U.S. military have issued over 125,000 moral waivers since 2003, or, roughly 30,000 per year. Of the Army’s share in 2006, 900, more than one in ten, were granted to individuals with felony convictions, more than double the number in 2003.
–Tamera Gugelmeyer

The soldiers were so confident of their abilities to achieve their intended crimes that they rounded up the Al-Janabi family from their daily chores in broad daylight. Pfc. Stephen Green allegedly shot Abeer’s parents and 5-year-old sister to death in the room next to where she was being raped by Sgt. Paul Cortez. His buddy, Pfc. James Barker held the struggling, crying teenager down while two other soldiers, Pfc. Jesse Spielman and Pfc. Bryan Howard, reportedly stood watch.

All this in the middle of the day under the hot afternoon sun, March 12, 2006.

Such are the unpleasantries of invasion, war and occupation. The medical journal Lancet estimated in 2004 that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed, more than half of them women and children. Today, in the absence of accurate figures, that number likely has been far surpassed. To Americans, far from Iraq, these are presented as the sanitized statistics of collateral damage. But the Al-Janabi rape and murders were too well documented to ignore, just as the souvenir photos taken by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib forced Americans to see the torture being committed by their own troops.

The U.S. government and military are prosecuting the five accused men—a sixth was charged with dereliction of duty—without an inquiry into the pressures and rules of engagement that lead “a really good kid,” as Sgt. Cortez was called during at his court martial, to commit war crimes against civilians. In his sworn testimony describing how he and the others planned and carried out the rape and murders at the Al Janabi home, Sgt. Cortez pointedly stated that he and his fellow defendants “weren’t the only soldiers who talked about having sex with Iraqi women.” In Islamic Iraq, ‘having sex’ in this context can only mean rape.

Numerous observers, including soldiers themselves, say that abuses of Iraqi civilians are not uncommon. A report by Code Pink and the Global Exchange describes incidents where U.S. soldiers tortured female detainees, among them young girls, in the form of sexual abuse and rape, including stripping them naked, then burning their skin or dousing them with water. Sometimes women were tortured in prison cells near their husbands so that their screams could be used to torture the Muslim male detainees.

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