March 31, 2006

​​​​I first read that "Haji" was being used as a derogatory nickname for Iraqis by US troops in 2004, similar to the use of the word "gook" in Vietnam. According to former troops interviewed in this Newsnight documentary about an antiwar March to New Orleans (which you can still watch until this evening, I guess), the word is burned into the brains of troops by military higher-ups at all levels: they're not humans, they're just "hajis". Further: "the message was always: 'Islam is evil' and 'They hate us.' Most of the guys I was with believed it." "They basically jam into your head: 'This is hajji! This is hajji!' You totally take the human being out of it and make them into a video game."

This made it so much easier to kill: "if you start looking at them as humans, and stuff like that, then how are you going to kill them?"

And kill they do: "When IEDs would go off by the side of the road, the instructions were - or the practice was - to basically shoot up the landscape, anything that moved. And that kind of thing would happen a lot."

Further: "Well, I mean, I have seen innocent people being killed. IEDs go off and you just zap any farmer that is close to you. You know, those people were out there trying to make a living, but on the other hand, you get hit by four or five of those IEDs and you get pretty tired of that, too."

Killing was easy, too: "you could basically kill whoever you wanted - it was that easy. You did not even have to get off and dig a hole or anything. All you had to do was have some kind of picture. You're driving down the road at three in the morning. There's a guy on the side of the road, you shoot him ... you throw a shovel off." The point being that you throw a shovel or perhaps an AK next to someone you've just shot and make it look like they were aiming a weapon or planting a device.

And there's this endearing tendency for guys named George to say you shouldn't talk about this, because it's lowering troop morale and placing people in danger: "I scraped dead bodies off the pavements with a shovel and threw them in trash bags and left them there on the side of the road. And I really don't think the anti-war movement is what is infuriating people."

The day after the March to New Orleans began, the US raided a house in Abu Sifa, and - according to various forensic evidence, several witnesses and Iraqi police officials - bound and shot the eleven occupants, including five children, through the head. In fact, there are reports that the bodies had multiple shot wounds. Because they were hajis.