When our daughters turn sixteen, it is a threshold to woman hood. There's a saying that reflects the innocence of children up to that age. It goes:
"Sixteen and never been kissed"
For Abeer Qassim Hamza the reality is, Never sixteen and so sorely missed. This is the day Abeer would have been sixteen-years-old. But we've forgotten already.
"Abeer's Uncle Bassem was right when he said "People will read about this crime. And they will forget."
Abeer was raped, and with her parents and sister, murdered on March 12, 2005 by American soldiers in a state of rage.
Here, retired Army Col. Dan Smith sees a common thread to most of the abuse cases: the killing and wounding of US troops by roadside bombs, the greatest single cause of American casualties in Iraq.
"There is pure frustration, pure anger, pure rage because there is no one who is the obvious perpetrator," says Colonel Smith, a military analyst with the Friends Committee on National Legislation who fought in Vietnam and later taught philosophy at West Point.
"Soldiers soon decide they can trust no one except their comrades ... and quickly the indigenous people – all of them – become inferiors," he says. "Being inferior, they are less than human and deserve less respect, at which point one has entered the slippery slope that can end with a war crime." "
Abeer's intuition was sparked before the incident. She was frightened by the attention paid to her by the American soldiers. Her father tried to sooth her fears saying the Americans wouldn't do anything to her.
BAGHDAD, July 2
"BAGHDAD, July 2 -- Fifteen-year-old [sic, since determined she was 14] Abeer Qasim Hamza was afraid, her mother confided in a neighbor.
As pretty as she was young, the girl had attracted the unwelcome attention of U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint that the girl had to pass through almost daily in their village in the south-central city of Mahmudiyah, her mother told the neighbor.
Abeer told her mother again and again in her last days that the soldiers had made advances toward her, a neighbor, Omar Janabi, said this weekend, recounting a conversation he said he had with the girl's mother, Fakhriyah, on March 10.
Fakhriyah feared that the Americans might come for her daughter at night, at their home. She asked her neighbor if Abeer might sleep at his house, with the women there.
Janabi said he agreed.
Then, "I tried to reassure her, remove some of her fear," Janabi said. "I told her, the Americans would not do such a thing."
Abeer did not live to take up the offer of shelter."
No instead, American soldiers visited death upon her and family..Soldiers who were gripped with a rage they projected onto a civilian family. Even Abeer's five year old sister was cut down with the same AK-47 used to kill Abeer's mother and father.
After their bodies were found, our military blamed insurgents, but then Pfc Justin Watt came forward:
"On March 12, in the midst of the platoon's hard-luck tour, the bodies of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, 14; her 5-year-old sister, Hadeel; their mother, Fikhriya Taha; and their father, Qassim Hamza, were found in their Mahmoudiya home. The Army initially blamed the assault on insurgents.
Three months after the Iraqi family was found slaughtered, the 1st Platoon suffered a devastating attack. Insurgents overran a checkpoint in Youssifiyah on June 16, killing Spc. David Babineau, 25, of Springfield, Mass., and capturing Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and Pfc. Thomas Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore. Watt was close friends with Tucker and Menchaca, who were later found tortured and killed.
Watt says he could barely sleep after the kidnappings. When he did, he had nightmares about dead Iraqi children or slain comrades, talking to or staring at him. The bodies of Tucker and Menchaca were discovered June 19.
What he learned
Shortly after the kidnappings, Watt spoke with another Bravo Company friend, Sgt. Anthony Yribe, 22. According to testimony Watt later gave in court, reported by a small group of journalists allowed inside the hearing, Yribe disclosed a terrible secret: He suspected that 1st Platoon soldiers had attacked the Iraqi family March 12.
Shaken, Watt later approached another soldier in 1st Platoon, Pfc. Bryan Howard, 19. Howard, Watt testified, told him a gruesome story. The details emerged during a so-called Article 32 hearing held in Baghdad last month. In such hearings, an investigator listens to evidence and decides whether to recommend a court-martial."
Here are Abeer and her family's attackers:
Spc. James P. Barker, has been sentenced to 100 years for rape/murder.
Sgt. Paul Cortez, sentenced to 90 years
Private Jesse Spielman, sentenced to 110 years.
Private Steven Green, dishonorably discharged for a personality disorder, is being tried in civilian court. From the testimony of the other soldiers, it is alleged Green was the mastermind of the attack and the most viscious.
Here's a quote from Green:"
"Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "
In addition:
Private Brian Howard, was sentenced to 27 months (he heard about the crime and didn't report it.)
kossack blogger, amad, wrote about the sentencing of the soldiers in this case on August 7, 2007 and pointed out:
"While the papers and news tickers are screaming "Soldier sentenced to 100 years in prison", the truth in fact is that all three could be free on parole in only 10 years!"
There are a mass of links at this website, about the massacre of Abeer and her family.
It is truly sad that there is very little about Abeer herself, except what she went through in the last moments of her life, gleaned through the eyes of her attackers.. There's not even a picture beyond the image of her on her identity papers in which she is 3 or 4 years old.
Here is a tiny speculative snapshot of Abeer's family:
"One story is still untold: that of the last few moments of Abeer’s life, and those of her mother, father and sister. The little we are able to piece together from the accounts of their killers raises still more questions.
The family lived on their small farm while Qassim supplemented their meager farming income with an additional $3 a day from work in a Baghdad factory. Had he perhaps just come in from work, or was he just leaving, when the soldiers arrived at his home in broad daylight? What had he and his youngest daughter been doing outside the house—perhaps farm chores? Were Abeer and Fikhriya preparing a family meal, or doing some other household work in the kitchen? When Fikhriya, along with her husband and Hadeel, was forced into the bedroom, she knew that Abeer was out there alone with soldiers who had been eyeing her for weeks. Fikhriya’s cousin, who found the bodies, suggested that Fikhriya’s arms had been broken. Could she have been forced, as Cortez’s prosecutors described, to watch helplessly as her seven-year-old child and husband were shot?
Abeer must have died knowing what was happening to her family. While Cortez and Barker raped her, she probably heard screams and may have noted a sharp silence after the last gunshots were fired. After Green entered
the room, presumably with her family’s blood on him, there can have been little doubt. We can hope that her terror prevented her from focusing on these details, or from feeling, however wrongly, that it was her fault that her parents and her sister had been killed so the soldiers might get to her. Perhaps she had a moment to thank Allah that her two younger brothers were away at school. They were later found crying by the burning house, where they could look inside and see the bodies.
We can’t be sure, of course. Key witnesses are dead. But this is what a war crime looks like. "
I could not find anything about what happened to Abeer's brothers, left as orphans. It would be a wonderful 16th birthday gift for Abeer to make sure her brothers are safe. But where do I begin looking?
cross posted at Choice Changes..