Next Door to Iraq, the Present Danger Is Anti-Americanism

On the morning he shot two American soldiers at point-blank range, Khaled Shimmiri got up early in the 12-room house he shares with his 17 sisters and brothers. He put on his Kuwaiti police uniform, threatened his wife and headed off to work.

“He pulled a bullet out of his gun belt, held it up to her and said, ‘I can kill you just with this,’ ” Shimmiri’s eldest brother, Saoud, recalled. “She just thought he was joking.”

After all, Saoud asserted, the whole family knew that Khaled had gone mad.

Then again, maybe not.

Maybe Shimmiri is an Al Qaeda sympathizer instead. Or maybe, as investigators fear, he was just reacting to images of Americans waging war on Afghanistan and of U.S. support for Israel.

Under questioning, the 20-year-old police officer told investigators that he “wanted to go to heaven, and this was a very short way to the martyrs’ paradise,” said a Kuwaiti source who asked not to be named.

At a recent closed hearing, Shimmiri was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation after he told the court that he “loved Americans” and did not know why he had committed the crime.

The question of whether the young police officer fired out of madness or calculated terror has fed fears about the safety of the more than 12,000 American military personnel on this vital training ground and strategic platform for possible military operations against Iraq. Those fears have intensified since Iraqi President Saddam Hussein recently applauded Kuwaiti attacks on American soldiers.

With the U.S. military occupying more than a quarter of Kuwait, the government is taking urgent stock of the extent of anti-Americanism and fundamentalist fervor within the ranks of its own police and military.

The shooting of two reserve Army sergeants last month was the latest in a series of attacks in this oil-rich nation, liberated 12 years ago by the U.S.

At least one of those assaults -- the fatal shooting of a U.S. Marine on an island off Kuwait in October -- was the work of a group associated with the Al Qaeda terrorist network, investigators say.

U.S. and Kuwaiti officials insist that the shootings are aberrations -- isolated incidents involving a rare radical here or a madman there in a grateful nation that overwhelmingly supports the growing U.S. force.

Most Kuwaitis say they view the American force as a comfort. Kuwaiti psychologists advise patients to go look at the U.S. military camps as therapy for what has become widespread anxiety about the possibility of another war.

Even some of Kuwait’s most fundamentalist Islamic leaders have condemned the attacks.

“If Kuwaitis were so anti-American, Kuwait would not be able to cede a third or a quarter of its territory to the U.S.,” said Shafeeq Ghabra, who heads Kuwait’s Center for Strategic and Future Studies, a government-funded think tank.

Still, neither the Kuwaitis nor the Americans are taking any chances.

Commanders at Camp Doha -- the U.S. Army headquarters in the capital’s warehouse district, which oversees more than half a dozen sprawling U.S. facilities -- have raised the threat-alert level. Military personnel now are required to travel in fours, in two-vehicle convoys, with a weapon and cell phone at all times. And Americans in uniform are no longer seen on city streets.

Kuwait’s official response has been profound: broad new measures designed to prevent future assaults and weed out potential assailants.

Interior Minister Sheik Mohammed Khaled al Hamad al Sabah, who oversees the police force, has promised a purge of his ranks and internal reforms so extensive that he called them “a powerful earthquake.” His ministry also put the nation’s police on full alert at the beginning of this month.

The government is going deeper still. It has appointed a member of the ruling royal family to head a committee that will review the curriculum in state and religious schools to determine whether Kuwaitis are being radicalized at young ages.

And the Kuwait Psychiatric Hospital, where the majority of registered patients are Kuwaiti police and soldiers, has appointed a separate committee to review its diagnostic protocols and its patient files.

In Kuwait’s welfare state, men in uniform receive broad privileges if they are determined to be suffering from mental illness, among them special leave, strong drugs and sharply reduced sentences if they commit crimes. Several psychologists said abuse of the system is commonplace.

“The easiest way to get these privileges is they go into the Psychiatric Hospital, get their certificate stating they have a mental problem and then they get everything,” said Jasem Hajia, a Kuwaiti psychologist. “The hospital needs new diagnostic protocols.”

But the Shimmiri family insists that Khaled was genuinely insane when he shot the Americans. His symptoms have come and gone since last May, when, his brother insisted, the young traffic policeman tried to kill himself during an acute psychotic episode.

“He was crying. He ripped off his clothes and put a spoon down his throat trying to choke himself,” said Saoud, a sergeant in the Kuwaiti army. “So we took him to Jordan for treatment.”

After Shimmiri’s condition was diagnosed, the family brought him home to a psychiatrist, Saoud asserted, and he took a two-month leave from work. Eventually, his brother added, the symptoms subsided.

Shimmiri returned to duty in July and handed his medical records over to his superior officer, who took away his service revolver and patrol car and gave him a desk job.

Then, having married in June, he returned to normal life, Saoud said. He planned to enroll in graduate school in Egypt in the coming term, although his first preference would have been to attend school in Texas.

But never, Saoud asserted, did his brother regularly attend sermons at the mosque, speak of politics or express anything but admiration for the United States.

Of Shimmiri, his brother added: “He generally admires American people for their development, culture and superiority in all fields. He also feels grateful for their liberation of Kuwait.”

That’s not how it appeared Nov. 21.

As his brother tells it, the patrolman’s supervisor was on vacation when Shimmiri reached the police station that day. He asked the assistant for his gun and patrol car. The assistant knew nothing of his illness and handed them over.

Shimmiri was soon speeding along a desert expressway on the outskirts of Kuwait City, chasing a civilian vehicle en route from Camp Doha to Arifjan, a massive new U.S. military base 35 miles south of the capital.

Here’s how Army Reserve Master Sgt. Larry Thomas, who was in civilian clothes at the wheel with Sgt. Charles Ellis in the passenger seat at the time, described what happened next from a hospital bed in Germany days later:

“The police officer pulled up on the left-hand side of me. When he got even with the car, we exchanged eye contact. He slowed down, got behind us and put his lights on.

“We pulled over to the side of the road. He got out of his car and came up to our car and asked if we had a driver’s license. I asked him, ‘What’s the problem, officer?’ He said, ‘You are speeding.’ I said, ‘No, sir, we are not speeding.’ I handed him the driver’s license.”

Shimmiri went back to the patrol car and returned moments later.

“It looked like he was going to leave the car to go back to his, but he made a step away, and I was looking at him, and he unsnapped his pistol. I was thinking just, ‘He may be holding the gun or something.’

“But he unsnapped his pistol, shot me right here in the chest. And at that time, my arm went numb, and I knew I had been hit. Then he released another shot and shot Sgt. Ellis. So I took my ... left arm and threw [the car] in gear because I did not want him to finish shooting us.”

The Americans managed to drive to Arifjan, where they were taken to a Kuwaiti military hospital by helicopter. Shimmiri sped off into the desert, to neighboring Saudi Arabia. He hid out there with cousins for a day before they turned him in to Saudi police, who turned him over to the Kuwaitis.

Shimmiri’s attorney, Nawaf Sary Mutery, said he is preparing an insanity defense for his client, who, if convicted on attempted murder charges, could face the death penalty or life imprisonment -- unless the court takes his mental illness into account.

“Obviously,” the lawyer added, “we’re hoping for an outright acquittal due to insanity. In that case, he would simply go free.”