Highways Marked by Tension and Risk

Intisar Kadhum tried to shield her son Ahmed, cradling the 7-year-old in her arms as they rode in the rear seat of a taxi.

Her maternal instincts could not spare either of them from the fury of a machine gun unleashed on the Chevrolet Caprice as it navigated a stretch of highway Jan. 3. Mother and son, along with the driver and another passenger, were killed, their sedan riddled with more than three dozen bullets.

Civilians die almost daily in Iraq at the hands of assorted gunmen and bombers, few of whom are identified or caught. But in this case, evidence suggests that the shooting was by a U.S. soldier in a military convoy. The U.S. Army is investigating allegations that the soldier fired without provocation.

The incident has served to underscore the tensions on Iraq’s heavily trafficked roads, which are lined with convoys rumbling back and forth with troops and materiel. The convoys vary from two or three Humvees to mile-long processions of assorted vehicles, including tanks and 28-wheel tractor-trailers.

Passing the slow-moving convoys can be risky business. In a country where roadside ambushes and bombings cause U.S. casualties virtually every day, soldiers are wary that approaching vehicles might be carrying attackers.

Often, civilian drivers attempt hand signals or eye contact with U.S. personnel to ascertain when it’s safe to pass. But a false move can mean death.

The taxi shooting has inflamed passions in this troubled swath of the nation’s Sunni Muslim heartland, where resentment of U.S. forces is already high. Military authorities say their investigation will thoroughly probe allegations by the victims’ families, Iraqi police and the sole survivor that a soldier fired indiscriminately at the vehicle. “I don’t think anyone’s taking this as a wild accusation. Absolutely not,” said Lt. Col. Daniel Williams, an Army spokesman in Baghdad. “This has gone up to the highest level for us.”

Privately, Army officials acknowledged that a U.S. gunner on a convoy probably was responsible for the shooting. “If there was evidence to the contrary, we would be promoting that evidence,” said one officer familiar with the investigation.

The Army inquiry has shown that no passing convoy reported firing on a suspicious vehicle at that time and place, although all such shootings must be reported up the command chain, Williams said. Investigators are poring over convoy schedules to determine who may have been involved, the spokesman said.

If a U.S. soldier is found to have fired on the taxi, he or she could face disciplinary action for not reporting it. The shooter could face more serious punishment if it is determined that the shots were fired in the absence of a threat.

If the shooting is found to be unjustified, the victims’ families could be entitled to compensation. The U.S. has paid more than $2 million in response to more than 10,000 claims for property and personal losses in Iraq. The average payout for a loss of life has been $2,500, the Army said.

Relatives of the dead say they want justice, not money.

“I would like to ask the Americans: What did my wife and my boy do to deserve this?” said Jawad Kadhum, a burly truck driver, as he sat on his living room carpet among male visitors, his eyes sunken and red from days without sleep.

From the adjoining room came the cries of mourning women.

Kadhum and his wife had seven children. Fourteen years ago, the family moved from the southern city of Basra to the gloomy refinery hub of Bayji in the north, where Kadhum found work transporting gas cylinders.

“My wife and son were not terrorists,” he said in his ground-floor apartment amid a block of flats housing petrochemical workers. “They were not harming anyone. They were civilians, a mother and her boy.”

Speaking from his hospital bed in Tikrit, Ibrahim Alawi, a 31-year-old passenger in the taxi who was the sole survivor, said the occupants did nothing to provoke the gunfire.

“We were simply passing the convoy,” he said. “It was morning and it was bright. The Americans could see clearly that we represented no threat to them.”

Alawi, whose right lung was punctured by a bullet, wheezed slightly.

The trip, according to Alawi and police, began about 8:30 a.m. in Samarra. Four passengers, strangers to one another except for the mother and son, boarded the unmarked cab and headed for Bayji, about 50 miles north.

It was a private taxi service operated by the driver, Rashid Hamoudi Taha, 41. Each passenger paid about a dollar for the trip.

Alawi, an office worker for a petrochemical company, was in the front passenger seat. He said that as the cab was passing Tikrit, about halfway through the trip, it slowed behind a convoy traveling in the left lane, as the convoys sometimes do.

The gunner in the rear vehicle signaled the taxi to pass on the right, Alawi said. The taxi proceeded and overtook four vehicles in the convoy without incident, Alawi said.

As the taxi approached the fifth -- and lead -- vehicle, Alawi said, the gunner atop the cab of the truck opened fire without warning from a mounted machine gun, repeatedly hitting the taxi from about 20 yards.

The driver slumped over and the car veered to the left, passing through a gap between the first and second U.S. trucks, Alawi said. The taxi crossed over two oncoming lanes and came to rest in a field. The convoy continued rolling northward, never stopping, Iraqi police said.

“When I heard the shooting, I was sure I was going to die and I began to pray: “There is no God but Allah! There is no God but Allah!” Alawi recalled.

Iraqi police say a farmer who witnessed the events corroborated Alawi’s account.

Alawi said he passed out briefly and that when he came to, he was stunned to find he had survived.

A motorist stopped, lifted Alawi into his pickup truck and drove him to the hospital in Tikrit. Despite the hail of gunfire, Alawi was hit only once, by a bullet that entered and exited his torso. He was operated on for the punctured lung and three broken ribs.

Police and U.S. soldiers discovered the four dead occupants when they reached the scene. The other passenger was Abdullah Hamud, a refinery worker in Bayji.

U.S. officials visited Alawi in the hospital, showing him photographs of U.S. military vehicles.

The bullet-riddled taxi remains on the grounds of the heavily barricaded police station in Tikrit, its mangled interior testament to the damage a high-powered machine gun can inflict.

Kadhum said that when he came home from work shortly after 5 p.m., he was surprised to find that his wife and youngest son had not returned from Samarra, where they had gone to visit a sick relative.

He took a taxi to Samarra and stopped at the taxi garage and the hospital to ask about them. But there was no information on the pair. The next day, he and his eldest son, Zuheir, 28, went to Tikrit to visit the city’s Teaching Hospital, formerly Saddam Hussein Hospital. A staff member on duty broke the news that a woman and child who fit Kadhum’s description were in the hospital morgue.

“Prepare yourself,” the hospital worker said. “They are terribly disfigured.”

Kadhum and his son identified what remained of their loved ones.

Ahmed, being the youngest, had been beloved and spoiled, relatives said. His mother was described as the glue that held the family together.

After their deaths, a teenage daughter was hospitalized with shock. Zuheir appeared dazed a week afterward, as the family received visitors from as far away as Basra.

The tradition of seven days of mourning -- and feeding guests three meals a day -- had stretched the family’s scant resources. No U.S. or police official had come to speak with them, Kadhum said.

The Army and Tikrit police said no weapons were found in the car. No evidence suggested any of the occupants were planning an attack.

“I’m afraid this will only raise hostilities against the Americans,” said Tikrit police Col. Osama Adham Abdul-Ghaffar, who said a U.S. commander apologized to him for the incident. “There is no question that these people were civilians and the American soldier fired on them for no reason.... There are bad soldiers in every army.”

Convoys from dozens of U.S. units daily traverse the strategic stretch of highway where the shots were fired. Overall responsibility for the tense region rests with the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, which has been engaged in a difficult, dual-edged battle: taking down a well-armed insurgent force while trying to win over an antagonistic populace.

“We know it wasn’t one of our people” who fired at the taxi, said Master Sgt. Robert Cargie, spokesman for the division, which has determined that none of its units was responsible. “This involved the loss of apparently innocent civilian life. Whenever that happens, there’s a moral duty to discover what went on.”