It was a moment Prince had long resisted. Before that warm October day in Washington in 2007, he had shunned the spotlight, and his people were known to stifle journalists’ attempts at taking his picture. When Prince did appear in public, it was almost exclusively at military conferences, where his role was to extol the virtues of his company and its work for the U.S. government, which consisted, in part, of keeping alive the most hated officials in Iraq. Since September 11, Blackwater had risen to a position of extraordinary prominence in the “war on terror” apparatus, and its contracts with the federal government had grown to more than $1 billion. On this day, the man in control of a force at the vanguard of the Bush administration’s offensive war in Iraq would be on the defensive.
Shortly after 10 a.m. on October 2, Prince was sworn in as the star witness in a hearing of Representative Henry Waxman’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The muscular, clean-shaven ex-Navy SEAL wore a smartly tailored blue suit—more CEO than cowboy contractor. On the desk in front of Prince’s chair was a simple paper sign that read, “Mr. Prince.” The Republicans attempted to adjourn the meeting in protest before it started, but the measure was defeated. In classic Waxman fashion, the advertised title of the event was generic and understated: “Hearing on Private Security Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.” But the reason for Prince’s appearance on Capitol Hill that day was very specific and politically charged. Two weeks earlier, his Blackwater forces had been at the center of the deadliest mercenary action in Iraq since the start of the occupation, an incident one senior U.S. military official said could have an impact “worse than Abu Ghraib.” It was a massacre some had dubbed “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday.”
INTRODUCTION
BAGHDAD’S BLOODY SUNDAY
SEPTEMBER 16, 2007,
approximately 12:08 p.m., Nisour Square, Baghdad, Iraq
:
It was a steamy hot day, with temperatures reaching 100 degrees. The heavily armed Blackwater convoy entered the congested intersection in the Mansour district of the Iraqi capital. The once upscale section of Baghdad was still lined with boutiques, cafes, and art galleries dating back to better days. The ominous caravan consisted of four large South African-made “Mamba” armored vehicles with 7.62-millimeter machine guns mounted on top.
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For Iraqi police, it had become a standard part of their workday in occupied Iraq to stop traffic to make room for U.S. VIPs, protected by heavily armed private soldiers, to blaze through. Ask U.S. officials and they’ll say the reason was to prevent an insurgent attack on U.S. convoys. More often, though, the Iraqi police did this for the safety of Iraqi civilians who risked being gunned down merely for getting too close to the most highly valued lives in their country—those of foreign occupation officials.
As the Blackwater convoy was entering the square that day, a young Iraqi medical student named Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie was driving his mother, Mahasin, in the family’s white Opal sedan. They had just dropped off Ahmed’s father, Jawad, a successful pathologist, near the hospital where he worked. They then had gone on their way to run errands, including picking up college applications for Ahmed’s sister. The plan was to finish up and return later to pick up Jawad. As fate would have it, they found themselves stuck near Nisour Square. The Rubaies were devout Muslims and were fasting in observance of the holy month of Ramadan. Ahmed was multilingual, a soccer fan, and was in his third year of medical school, where he was training to become a surgeon. Medicine was in his DNA. Like his father, Ahmed’s passenger that day, his mother, was also a doctor—an allergist. Jawad says the family could have left Iraq, but they believed they were needed in the country. “I feel pain when I see doctors leaving Iraq,” he said.
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Ali Khalaf Salman, an Iraqi traffic cop on duty in Nisour Square that day, remembers vividly the moment when the Blackwater convoy entered the intersection, spurring him and his colleagues to scramble to stop traffic. But as the Mambas entered the square, the convoy suddenly made a surprise U-turn and proceeded to drive the wrong way on a one-way street.
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As Khalaf watched, the convoy came to an abrupt halt. He says a large white man with a mustache, positioned atop the third vehicle in the Blackwater convoy, began to fire his weapon “randomly.”
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Khalaf looked in the direction of the shots, on Yarmouk Road, and heard a woman screaming, “My son! My son!”
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The police officer sprinted toward the voice and found a middle-aged woman inside a vehicle holding a twenty-year-old man who had been shot in the forehead and was covered in blood. “I tried to help the young man, but his mother was holding him so tight,” Khalaf recalled.
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Another Iraqi policeman, Sarhan Thiab, also ran to the car. “We tried to help him,” Thiab said. “I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was crying out, ‘My son, my son! Help me, help me!’”
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Officer Khalaf recalled looking toward the Blackwater shooters: “I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting.”
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He says he thought the men would cease fire, given that he was a clearly identified police officer.
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The young man’s body was still in the driver’s seat of the automatic vehicle and, as Khalaf and Thiab stood there, it began to roll forward, perhaps because the dead man’s foot remained on the accelerator.
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Blackwater guards later said they initially opened fire on the vehicle because it was speeding and would not stop, a claim disputed by scores of witnesses.
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Aerial photos of the scene later showed that the car had not even entered the traffic circle when it was fired upon by Blackwater,
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while the
New York Times
reported, “The car in which the first people were killed did not begin to closely approach the Blackwater convoy until the Iraqi driver had been shot in the head and lost control of his vehicle.”
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Thiab explained, “I tried to use hand signals to make the Blackwater people understand that the car was moving on its own and we were trying to stop it. We were trying to get the woman out but had to run for cover.”
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“Don’t shoot, please!” Khalaf recalled yelling.
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But as he stood with his hand raised, Khalaf says, a gunman from the fourth Blackwater vehicle opened fire on the mother gripping her son and shot her dead before Khalaf’s and Thiab’s eyes.
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“I saw parts of the woman’s head flying in front of me, blow up,” Thiab said. “They immediately opened heavy fire at us.”
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Within moments, Khalaf says, so many shots had been fired at the car from “big machine guns” that it exploded, engulfing the bodies inside in flames, melting their flesh into one.
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“Each of their four vehicles opened heavy fire in all directions, they shot and killed everyone in cars facing them and people standing on the street,” Thiab recalled. “When it was over we were looking around and about fifteen cars had been destroyed, the bodies of the killed were strewn on the pavements and road.”
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When later asked by U.S. investigators why he never fired at the Blackwater men, Khalaf told them, “I am not authorized to shoot, and my job is to look after the traffic.”
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The victims were later identified as Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie and his mother, Mahasin. Ahmed’s father, Jawad, has a brother, Raad, who worked in a nearby hospital where victims of the shooting were being taken. “He heard the shots,” Jawad recalls. “It was a battle, a fight, a war. And, of course, it didn’t occur to him that my wife and my son were the victims—among the victims of the incident.”
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Raad “went to the morgue, and the person who was responsible for the morgue told him that they received sixteen bodies as casualties from the incident that day. They were all identified, identifiable, except for two. Two bodies completely burnt. . . . They were put in black plastic bags.”
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Raad suspected that it could be Ahmed and Mahasin but, he said, “my heart didn’t want to believe it.”
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He and his wife drove to Nisour Square and found a badly burnt white sedan. The license plate was not on the vehicle, but Raad’s wife found an imprint of the numbers in the sand. Raad called Jawad and began reading the numbers on the vehicle and confirmed his worst fears.
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Jawad raced to the morgue, where he viewed the charred bodies. He identified his wife through her dental bridge and his son by the remains of one of his shoes.
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In all, Jawad says, there were some forty bullet holes in their vehicle.
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He said he never returned to claim the vehicle because he wanted “it to be a memorial to the painful event caused by people who, supposedly, came to protect us.”
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That attack on Ahmed and Mahasin’s vehicle spiraled into a shooting spree that would leave seventeen Iraqis dead and more than twenty wounded.
After Ahmed and Mahasin’s vehicle exploded, sustained gunfire rang out in Nisour Square as people fled for their lives. In addition to the Blackwater shooters in the four Mambas, witnesses say gunfire came from Blackwater’s Little Bird helicopters. “The helicopters began shooting on the cars,” Khalaf said. “The helicopters shot and killed the driver of a Volkswagen and wounded a passenger” who escaped by “rolling out of the car into the street,” he said.
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Witnesses described a terrifying scene of indiscriminate shooting by the Blackwater guards. “It was a horror movie,” said Khalaf.
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“It was catastrophic,” said Zina Fadhil, a twenty-one-year-old pharmacist who survived the attack. “So many innocent people were killed.”
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Another Iraqi officer on the scene, Hussam Abdul Rahman, said that people who attempted to flee their vehicles were targeted. “Whoever stepped out of his car was shot at immediately,” he said.
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“I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot,” said Iraqi lawyer Hassan Jabar Salman, who was shot four times in the back during the incident. “But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about ten leaping in fear from a minibus—he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him. She jumped out after him, and she was killed.”
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Salman says as he entered the square that day he was driving behind the Blackwater convoy when it stopped. Witnesses said some sort of explosion had gone off in the distance, too far away to have been perceived as a threat. He said Blackwater guards ordered him to turn his vehicle around and leave the scene. Shortly after, the shooting began. “Why had they opened fire?” he asked. “I do not know. No one—I repeat, no one—had fired at them. The foreigners had asked us to go back, and I was going back in my car, so there was no reason for them to shoot.”
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In all, he says, his car was hit twelve times, including the four bullets that pierced his back.
Mohammed Abdul Razzaq and his nine-year-old son, Ali, were in a vehicle immediately behind Ahmed and Mahasin, the first victims that day. “We were six persons in the car—me, my son, my sister, and her three sons. The four children were in the back seat,” Razzaq said.
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He recalled that the Blackwater forces had “gestured stop, so we all stopped. . . . It’s a secure area, so we thought it will be the usual: we would stop for a bit as convoys pass. Shortly after that they opened heavy fire randomly at the cars with no exception.”
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He said his vehicle “was hit by about thirty bullets. Everything was damaged: the engine, the windshield, the back windshield, and the tires.
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“When the shooting started, I told everybody to get their heads down. I could hear the children screaming in fear. When the shooting stopped, I raised my head and heard my nephew shouting at me, ‘Ali is dead, Ali is dead!’”
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“My son was sitting behind me,” he said. “He was shot in the head and his brains were all over the back of the car.”
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Razzaq remembered, “When I held him, his head was badly wounded, but his heart was still beating. I thought there was a chance and I rushed him to the hospital. The doctor told me that he was clinically dead and the chance of his survival was very slim. One hour later, Ali died.”
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Razzaq, who survived the shooting, later returned to the scene and gathered the pieces of his son’s skull and brain with his hands, wrapped them in cloth, and took them to be buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. “I can still smell the blood, my son’s blood, on my fingers,” Razzaq said two weeks after his son died.
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In all, the melee reportedly lasted about fifteen minutes.
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In an indication of how out of control the situation quickly became, U.S. officials report that “one or more” Blackwater guards called on their colleagues to stop shooting.
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The word “cease-fire” “was supposedly called out several times,” a senior official told the
New York Times
. “They had an on-site difference of opinion.”
43
At one point a Blackwater guard allegedly drew his gun on another. “It was a Mexican standoff,” said one contractor.
44
According to Salman, the Iraqi lawyer who was in the square that day, the Blackwater guard screamed at his colleague, “No! No! No!” The lawyer was shot in the back as he tried to flee.
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