Two bursts of automatic gunfire rang out across a busy street in west Baghdad, echoing off the walls of the Australian embassy and one of the city’s major hotels. A few seconds later, a three-vehicle convoy belonging to a private security company, transporting a foreigner working to facilitate Iraq’s parliamentary elections, began to drive away from the scene.
Askew in the centre of the street sat a civilian car, a neat line of bullet holes piercing its hood and windscreen. The driver lay some five metres away, wounded in the side and stomach, and going into shock. Later that day, he died in hospital. Another motorist, who was driving with his two children in the car, stood dazed in the street, his head lightly grazed by a bullet.
Scenes such as this, witnessed by FT correspondent Awadh al-Taee on January 23, repeats itself time and again across Iraq. This Baghdad neighbourhood of Kerrada alone, according to local police, sees one fatal shooting a week by either private security companies or the military.
Under constant threat from suicide attackers driving explosive-rigged cars, coalition soldiers and contractors follow combat zone rules of engagement to protect themselves: warn drivers who stray too close, but if that fails, shoot. With procedures designed to protect the identities of anyone who might be singled out for retaliation, the victim’s families may never know what happened, let alone obtain justice.
In this case, the situation was eventually resolved to the satisfaction of the victim’s family after negotiation with the security company. However, it is not clear if the parties would have found each other had foreign journalists not been involved.
While scores of Iraqi lives are claimed every month in this way, it took the killing of a westerner for the world to take notice the brutal reality on Baghdad’s streets. On March 4, the shooting of Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, escorting a recently released hostage to freedom, provoked a storm of international revulsion and a rethink by US commanders of their rules of engagement in Iraq. Calipari was killed by US troops who mistakenly opened fire on his vehicle, under still-disputed circumstances.
The unarmed victim of the January 23 shooting was Abd al-Naser Abbas al-Dulaimi, age 29. Unmarried, he worked in the power station across the river to support his mother, two sisters, and the two children of an older brother who went missing in the 1991 Kuwait war. When he was shot, say police, he was out looking for petrol, which most Iraqis are forced to buy on the black market because of a recent shortage at the pumps. They found no weapons on his body, nor in his car.