Unwilling Iraqis tell of being shot by own officers


By Dexter Filkins
The New York Times

DIWANIYA, Iraq -- The aftermath of the firefight was a tableau of twisted Iraqi corpses, tins of unopened food and the dirty mattresses where they had spent their final hours.

But the Iraqi private with a bullet wound in the back of his head suggested something unusually grim. Up and down the 200-mile stretch of desert where the American and British forces have advanced, one Iraqi prisoner after another has told a similar tale: that many Iraqi soldiers were fighting at gunpoint, threatened with death by hard-core loyalists of President Saddam Hussein.

Here, according to American doctors and Iraqi prisoners, appeared to be the confirmation. The wounded Iraqi, whose life was ebbing away outside an American field hospital, had been shot during the firefight Tuesday night with American troops.

It was a small-caliber bullet, most likely from a pistol, fired at close range. Iraqi prisoners taken after the battle said their officers had been firing at them, pushing them into battle.

"The officers threatened to shoot us unless we fought," said a wounded Iraqi from his bed in the American field hospital here. "They took out their guns and pointed them and told us to fight."

As the American medics patched up the wounds of three other Iraqi soldiers, they said there was little they could do for the one who had been shot in the head. Much of his skull had come apart, and the medics labeled him "expectant," which meant he was expected to die. They gave him morphine, wrapped him in a green blanket and put him on a stretcher outside their tent.

"We think he was shot by his own," said Dr. Wade Wilde, a Marine surgeon. "If he had been hit by an M-16, it would have taken his whole head off. It seems like it was an Iraqi gun."

As Wilde spoke, his eyes drifted to the Iraqi soldier, still clinging to life, on the stretcher.

"We've tried to make him as comfortable as possible," Wilde said, "and let the wound run its course."

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How ironic,
an american soldier trying to save the lives of Iraqis shot by their own 'people'. the scariest part is that these thugs are killing
people because saddam told them to...