TIME: Terrorists Home In
On Australians
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
By MICHAEL WARE
When Sabah Aziz trudged past the police officers at
the checkpoint outside Baghdad's al-Hamra hotel just
before 7 a.m. on Jan. 19, he brushed off their
invitation to stop for breakfast. Everyone in the
neighborhood knew Aziz. People said he'd gone insane
when his only son was executed for deserting Saddam
Hussein's army. He walked out on his wife and
daughter, roaming their suburb but never returning
home. Locals cared for him, leaving out food and
blankets. On this Wednesday morning, making his way
between the blast barriers and "dragon's teeth" road
spikes at the checkpoint, Aziz told the police
officers, "I want to walk." Turning left on the
four-lane road cutting through the capital's Jadriyah
district, he headed east in the direction of the
Australian embassy. In front of him a garbage truck
stopped, and its driver hopped out to collect the
rubbish bags left out on the pavement. This early,
the Jadriyah road was quiet. Shops were still
shuttered; a few pedestrians and the odd car went by.
The Australian soldiers in their nine-story barracks
- set up in the shell of a partly built apartment
block in front of the Australian embassy - peered out
as they do around the clock, scanning for potential
threats.
Just after seven, a semi-trailer truck, minus its
trailer, approached from the south at high speed. The
driver's face was shrouded in a traditional Arab
scarf, or yeshmargh. He flashed his lights and blared
his horn for a bus to get out of his way. "He
accelerated as he passed me," recalls the bus driver.
Just as Aziz was about to cross the street, and the
garbage collector was stepping back to his vehicle,
the truck reached the earth-filled blast barriers
around the barracks and embassy. According to an
Iraqi guard at a nearby compound, the driver jumped
from the cab of the truck, slipped into a waiting car
and sped off. But most witnesses say he drove
headlong into the defenses. When the truck hit, it
exploded.
The blast hurled concrete debris, bitumen wrenched
from the road and shrapnel from what appeared to be
artillery shells over a radius of three city blocks.
It gouged a 2-m-deep, 8-m-wide crater into the
street; the shock wave shattered windows streets
away, including all those on the al-Hamra hotel's
east side.
On the Jadriyah road, facing the embassy, the garbage
collector lay dead. Sabah's bloodied body was found
by soldiers and identified by one of the police
officers at the al-Hamra checkpoint. A hotel security
guard took his body to the morgue and collected
donations for his funeral. At least eight other
civilians were wounded, including a 10-year-old boy
who was rushed to hospital in the back of a police
car, his face and arm gushing crimson. Behind their
carefully positioned blast walls, sandbags and
bunkers, the Australians survived; two were slightly
wounded, but called home later to reassure their
families. The remains of the bomber have not been
found.
Some Australian government ministers asserted that
there was no indication that Australians had been
specifically targeted. But Foreign Minister Alexander
Downer said: "The vehicle was clearly directed toward
the apartment block ... which is adjacent to the
embassy ... So they were aiming at our embassy." In
fact, an attack like last week's was all but
inevitable. Australian soldiers and military
intelligence officers have been aware for some time
that insurgent reconnaissance teams were casing the
two-story embassy. Throughout last year, mortars and
rockets were intermittently fired into the area
around the embassy and the hotel opposite; the
insurgents who launched them clearly didn't care what
building they hit. On the afternoon of Oct. 17, a
line of 120-mm mortars marched across Jadriyah,
falling closer and closer to the embassy, as if the
mortarman were fine-tuning his coordinates. The final
mortar sailed over the Australians' heads and onto
the garage of a house opposite the embassy; nobody
was injured. A few hours later, lights in the houses
near the embassy blacked out when a car bomb exploded
at a roundabout 400 m down the road. It was the
second car bomb near the embassy in eight months: the
first went off near a small hotel less than 100 m
from the embassy, killing a young boy. On Oct. 26,
three Australian soldiers were wounded when their
light armored vehicles were hit by an improvised
roadside bomb at the same roundabout where the car
bomb had exploded nine days earlier.
Responsibility for the attack on the patrol was
quickly claimed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi's
al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group. Officials in
Canberra claimed the vehicles were not hit
specifically because they were Australian, but a post
boasting of the attack on a Zarqawi-linked website
noted the soldiers' nationality. Even if the
intention had been to strike U.S. or Iraqi troops,
the men who triggered the bomb by remote control
would have known they were about to hit Australians,
who wear distinctive camouflage fatigues and drive
different vehicles from the Americans. Several times,
when this Australian reporter has been interviewing
insurgents, they have pointed out passing Australian
patrols. Once, an Iraqi fighter gestured toward a
patrol and mimicked the sound of an explosion:
"Australian - boom!"
Hours after the embassy truck bombing, Zarqawi's
group was on the Web, taking responsibility for four
car bombings across Baghdad, including one "near the
Australian embassy." That the group would deem
Australians as fair game is hardly news; all those
who support democracy in Iraq - Iraqis and foreigners
alike - are targets of the insurgents. A document
Zarqawi's organization posted on the Web last April
left no doubt. Claiming that the burning and
mutilation of four American security contractors in
Fallujah was justified under Islamic law, it listed
Australians among "enemy" nationals: "Japan by
helping Americans they became a warrior state like
Britain, Spain, Australia and others and is seeking
for its bad fate," the statement said, adding:
"Mujahids (holy warriors) have the right to kill
their prisoners and behead them, no attention will be
brought for who is alleging that prisoners are
'civilians,' there is no such idiom in our
jurisdiction."
With the insurgency far from over, and no apparent
shortage of men prepared to die in the cause of holy
war, Australians and their interests will surely be
attacked again - and more innocents like Sabah Aziz
will pay the price.