Stumbling outside, Gatta found himself confronting dozens of U.S. soldiers engaged in a search for Iraqi guerillas. The Americans worked fast, separating the villagers into men and women. Before Gatta, 17, knew it, the Americans had slipped a hood over his head and cuffed his hands. “If you told them that the cuffs were hurting you, they would tighten them,” he says, holding out wrists that still bear the marks of captivity. “They kicked us and hit us.”
Even at that, Gatta was one of the lucky ones. He was released after nine uncomfortable days of incarceration in a U.S. Army prison, but 19 other men from his village of Al Bushnaydikh remain in custody six weeks after the raid. Their relatives have no idea where they’re being held, why they’ve been detained or how to get in touch with them. All that would be bad enough. But in Al Bushnaydikh, with its traditional rural economy, the absence of the men hasn’t only frightened and enraged the villagers left behind. It’s also made them poorer.
The tactics used by U.S. forces in places like Gatta’s village obviously aren’t winning friends among the Iraqi population. Plenty of media reports have made the point that the indignities suffered by locals caught up in the antiguerilla dragnet are helping to fuel widespread resentment of the U.S. presence in Iraq. What often escapes attention, though, is the extent to which the American counterinsurgency campaign has effects that go far beyond mere fear and loathing. In places inhabited by Iraqis like Gatta, security sweeps by U.S. troops also have consequences for local economies–fomenting instability and adding to the motives for resistance.
It’s easy to understand how Al Bushnaydikh, 40 miles to the north of Baghdad, could have become a target for American troops. The village is part of the rural district of Mishahdeh, which is bisected by the strategically vital highway connecting the Iraqi capital with the northern city of Mosul. The immense Coalition supply convoys moving along the road–fuel tankers and tractor-trailers with occasional Humvees riding shotgun–are prime targets for the guerillas. Earlier this week, Jawad Araq, 15, was tending his sheep in a field near Al Bushnaydikh, just a few hundred yards from the highway, when he heard an explosion. A remote-controlled bomb had detonated beneath a passing American truck. Araq saw smoke rising from the site where an American truck had been blown up by a booby trap, and he already knew what would happen next. “I knew that the Americans would take me,” says the teenager. “That’s what they always do.” He was relieved when the Americans detained him only briefly in order to find out whether he’d seen anything of the attack.
Plenty of other local men brandish “Enemy Prisoner of War Receipts” used by U.S. soldiers to tag detainees. It’s hard to say for sure, of course, but villagers in the area insist that they have nothing to do with the guerillas. Iraqi rural society, deeply traditional and largely unchanged by modern ways, has remained resistant to the spectacles of grand politics. “One system goes, the other one comes,” says villager Dhari Fener, 34. “We do not hold anything against the Americans or other countries. We just want them to leave us alone.” Fellow villagers insist that the search of their village produced no weapons beyond those allowed by the occupation authorities for the residents’ own security. “We do not know the reason for the raid,” says Fener. “Maybe someone who has a grudge”–a common occurrence in this feud-ridden society–“went to the Americans and informed on us.”
In Al Bushnaydikh, the effects of the July 13 raid remain vividly apparent. The Americans kicked in doors and broke furniture–a costly refrigerator, for example. Farming implements, like sickles used to bring in the harvest, were confiscated as potential weapons. In some cases, villagers claim, the raiders departed with cash. One man holds up the empty envelope where, he says, he was keeping $120. In their search for compromising documents, the raiders also confiscated the food-ration cards of several families, depriving them of the cooking oil, rice and sugar that are often the mainstay of ordinary Iraqis. In a village just down the road, a man shows the burned-out hulk of a Korean-made minibus that was, he alleges, shot up by passing American troops in apparent retaliation for a separate guerilla attack. In happier times, says the owner, the bus was part of a lucrative private shuttle service that ferried rural residents around the district. “There were 30 people who lived off that income,” he says. “Now they don’t know what to do.”
To hear the Iraqis talk, though, it’s the less-apparent results of American heavy-handedness that might ultimately prove the most devastating. In the Iraqi countryside, menfolk are the breadwinners for extended families that can range up to dozens of people. “All those 19 families have their fathers in custody,” says Fener. “If they take you away, who will support your children and feed them?” Madiha Mutlaq Faisal, 41, whose husband, Mahmud, is among the 19 remaining captives, is struggling to feed 12 children. “We are scarcely coping,” she says. It was her husband who used to drive to the store to buy daily necessities, but he’s in jail and the Americans took the car keys with him. “We are harvesting the green beans, living off what we can take out of the fields. The children are hungry. Some are dehydrated.”
All this drastically compounds the difficulties for people already struggling to cope with the turbulence of postwar Iraq. (The rural economy is reeling, for example, from the catastrophic lack of fuel used to operate farming equipment and irrigation systems.) And yet many of the villagers say that these material concerns are secondary. One elderly woman, Adawiya Massan, is waiting for two of her sons to return from captivity. “All I want now is to see my sons,” she insists. “I’m willing to eat dust rather than food so that I can see my children.” Pleads villager Fener, “We are innocent people. We just want to live.” Unfortunately, as long as the security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, it may be awhile before locals live like they once did.
