The Death of Abeer in Iraq: What We Know Now
First Published by Gail McGowan Mellor for The Women's Media Center.
Four U.S. soldiers have been tried and convicted in military court for the March 12, 2006 assault and murder of Abeer al-Janabi and her family. Now, in the federal court trial of the last man accused, former Pvt. 1st Class Steven Green, information has surfaced that explains more fully what happened that day. This is the first of a two-part report on the Paducah, Kentucky trial.
It is possible that the dying Muslim girl Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Jabani won what was, in her mind, the last and the main battle? Abeer, only 14, faced three U.S. soldiers alone, soldiers who were intent on raping her, with a fourth nearby. As all have testified, Pvt. 1st Class Jesse Spielman stood by during the attack. Tall and strong from work in her family's subsistence garden, she fought hard, sobbing, screaming, struggling, as three men in succession pried her legs apart and got between them. Brett Barrouquere, Associated Press [AP], reports that Specialist Promotable Paul Cortez and Specialist James Barker testified that they failed to get erections. The defense attorney for Pvt. 1st Class Steven Green, facing the death penalty, questioned whether his client penetrated. To Abeer, fighting with all her strength to hold them off, those facts would have mattered.
It does not make the attacks less heinous. Afterward, Green put a pillow on her face and shot her in the head. Soaking her in acrid-smelling flammable liquids, they lit her and fed the fire with blankets thrown onto her body, leaving her in a pool of charred debris. Green is in Paducah, Kentucky, federal court awaiting sentencing for the crimes in Iraq by a panel of nine women and three men, the first civilian jury to try a U.S. soldier for actions during military service.
The judging of Green, the last of the five perpetrators to stand trial for the murder of the civilian Iraqi al-Janabi family, is a triumph of a remarkably complex federal legal system, a small, determined group of reporters, including those from the Women's Media Center who since 2006 have worked to keep Abeer in the world's mind, and of bloggers throughout the world with the same intention.
The trial, however, re-opened that story in unexpected ways. Green was the lone shooter who murdered the entire family, so the previous trials of others involved focused exclusively on the gang-rape and arson leaving Green's actions vague. In his Paducah trial, details about Green and his victims -- Abeer and her sister Hadeel, their parents Qassim and Fakhriya -- have suddenly swum into view.
The information cleaves through many urban myths about the case. An authoritative rendering will be available in six months, a book by Jim Frederick of TIME. Until then, documents, recent trial testimony, Frederick's encyclopedic knowledge of the case (It's Yusufiyah, not Mamoudiyah....Cortez was not a sergeant, his papers had not gone through: he was a specialist promotable) and insight from Barrouquere who's been on the case for three years can clear up more than a few points. Neither, however, is responsible for anything I may have misconstrued.
Living with her family in a farmhouse outside the isolated hamlet of Yusufiyah, 25 k [15.5 m] southwest of Baghdad, Abeer at 14 was not strikingly beautiful, just a very tall teenager who sometimes breathed with difficulty because of asthma. Lanky, with big dark eyes, she was covered head-to-toe when she went out and stayed home when her two younger brothers went to school each day. Abeer's parents had wanted her to be "free." But since the U.S. invasion and the breakout of civil war, it was dangerous for girls to be in school -- or anywhere. She was afraid to pass the soldiers at the U.S. Army checkpoint near her house because they leered and flirted. The same soldiers watched her as she worked in the field and had even barged in through the door, poking through the house, checking for weapons. One had run his index finger down the side of her face, terrifying her.
Legally armed with an AK-47, Abeer's father Qassim perhaps believed that he could protect his daughter. Certainly he did not think that the U.S. occupation soldiers would go any farther than harassment because, he was heard to say, Abeer was so young. Consequently the family turned down the offer of an empty house farther from the checkpoint. Nevertheless, Fakhriya went to her husband's relatives, arranging for Abeer to spend nights with them. Neither parent thought that their sons -- Muhammed, 13, Ahmed, 10 -- or six-year-old Hadeel was in any danger.
The soldiers' 101st Airborne Division, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, Bravo Company, 1st Platoon staffed two traffic checkpoints and checked the area roads for improvised explosive devices [IEDs] -- homemade bombs. It was suicidal duty for young troops who wanted to live. Constantly assaulted by incoming rounds, they had endured the fear, rage and anguish of touching comrades who had just been blown to bits. Green had saved a sergeant under fire, throwing him onto the hood of a speeding jeep, and used his own body to hold him there, only to feel him die under him. An Iraqi whom they had regarded as a friend had walked up to a member of Green's company and, while shaking hands with the soldier, knifed him in the throat, killing him. They felt like sitting ducks.
Andrew Tilghman, a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, by chance interviewed Green after he had been in Iraq for four months, a month before the al-Janabi killings. He later described Green in the Washington Post as hospitable, friendly, thrill-seeking, at ease with both Americans and Iraqis. Also candid, Green said what Tilghman already knew many other soldiers felt: "I came over here because I wanted to kill people...I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it...I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.'...I just want to go home alive. I don't give a [expletive] about the whole Iraq thing. I don't care....See, this war is different from all the ones that our fathers and grandfathers fought. Those wars were for something. This war is for nothing."
Lt. Col. Karen Marrs testified that in 2006 she found his depleted, demoralized Bravo Company "combat incapable" and first platoon its weakest unit. A colonel had been alerted that Green was dangerously unstable, but nothing had been done beyond giving him sleeping pills -- in a company that was allowed only four hours of sleep a night.
In the 2006 military trials, Green was named as the ringleader, but more probably that was Barker, who suggested they target the al-Jabani family because it had only one man and one assault weapon. As Barker testified, his main aim had been to rape Abeer and kill the witnesses. He had made deals to accomplish it, involving Green by letting him be the trigger man, getting Cortez by promising that he could rape Abeer first.
While Abeer slept in safety at an uncle's house, the soldiers planned the crimes over canned Iraqi Army whiskey, playing golf. They opted to attack the parents and girls in broad daylight after the al-Jabani boys had left for school. Pvt. 1st Class Bryan Howard remained at the checkpoint, covering the radio, as a lookout. Spielman remained in uniform, but Green, Cortez and Barker put on dark Army-issue long underwear, which they saw as ninja clothes. Splitting into pairs and using wirecutters to get through a neighboring fence, they came at the house on two sides from the rear, capturing first little Hadeel with her dad in the garden, then Abeer and her mother in the kitchen. As Green herded Hadeel and her parents into the bedroom, where he killed them, in the front room Cortez and Barker battered and sexually assaulted Abeer. Green killed Abeer as he had killed little Hadeel, with their father's captured AK-47. Then the men set fire to both Abeer's body and anything flammable -- the house itself was not burning since it was not made of wood -- in order to hide the evidence. Changing their clothes, they threw the AK-47 in a canal and went back to the checkpoint as though nothing had happened.
It was March 12, 2006. The boys Muhammed and Ahmed came home from school to find white smoke billowing from their house, blood and brains on the walls. In the front room, Abeer was half nude and had been shot in the head. In the bedroom, bullet holes and red splatters peppered a corner. The right side of Qassim's head had been blown out by a shotgun, and he lay in a thick pool of blood. The body of Fakhriya looked broken. Little Hadeel had been killed, still clutching the stems of flowers from the garden, with a bullet through her right cheek. The boys stood outside the smoking building, holding hands and crying. Later they dropped out of school and "lost their futures."
Relatives at first thought insurgents had been responsible for the all this and ran to a U.S. checkpoint for help. "Investigating," Sergeant Anthony Yribe aided Cortez in suppressing evidence. Cortez, one of the men who had battered, assaulted and burned Abeer, threw up violently on entering the room where Green had shot Hadeel and her parents. Barker by contrast was having himself a barbecue of chicken wings. Steven Green was exultant, bouncing on his Army cot shouting, "That was awesome!"
Barrouquere, who has followed the case for three years, notes that Green seemed at first to be high then to come down hard. He confessed to Sergeant Yribe that night, taking full responsibility, not even mentioning the parts played by the other four.
Yribe reacted to defend the unit. Not reporting Green's confession to his superiors, he engineered for him an honorable discharge with "antisocial personality disorder," swiftly getting Green out of Iraq. The others involved remained mum. The story came out because that June, two 101st Airborne soldiers innocent of the al-Jabani crimes were kidnapped, tortured and beheaded. In the belief that their treatment was revenge for the murders, a soldier who had heard Green talk blurted out the story to an Army counselor. The Army Criminal Investigations Division arrested those perpetrators still in the military and contacted the FBI, which took Green into custody in North Carolina. Green had turned into skin and bones, so gaunt that Barrouquere, who saw him in July of that year, wondered if he would make it. When first arrested, the soldiers did not even know the al-Janabis' names.
Now the world does.
Part II covers the trial outcome and the officers who got away.
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Why isn't this article on the front page? It's obviously buried and not enough people have read it, judging by the limited number of comments.
I can't imagine having a son, a husband or brother in Iraq who acts like this. I often wondered how our
guys did in Vietnam, I heard horror stories. I surely would not want to be married to one of them.
Where are they Christian values, oh wait, it is just a saying!
I would like to thank you for all of your reporting on this story. It had to be trying psychologically to cover, judging from how deeply unsettling it has been to read, but somehow it seems to capture the horror of war from many angles at once in a way few stories have done. The systematic dehumanization of "the enemy", which, it seems, is regarded as an essential aspect of violent conflict, is not limited to combatants, but spills over to include everyone. A family, brutalized by our troops, in their home, in broad daylight, with so little sense of the enormity of the violation by the perpetrators, cannot but knock the wind out of any civilized and compassionate reader. The fact that it was neatly covered up, as if all in a day's work, makes us assume that there are many more such stories, some of which may never emerge from the "fog of war" until, one night in an American home, another perpetrator wakes up screaming from the dream of a similarly brutal recollection. How many soldiers, returned to their own families in America, will be pursued by the avenging Furies? That is only a part of what awaits us as a society as the result of this dehumanizing debacle of war and occupation, undertaken under wholly false pretenses.
So tragically true.
Somehow you managed to compose this articulate, passionate comment for which I thank you. I can only gasp for air which seems never to arrive. The burden of American guilt for this unprovoked and illegal war will haunt us for a 100 years. And rightfully so. If for no other reason but this one, the crimes committed under the Bush/Cheney administration must all be brought to light and paid for even if it takes up all those 100 years.
Ms. Mellor's writing reaches a level of excellence rarely seen on Huffington Post. My deepest gratitude to her for this excruciating story vividly told.
It SHOULD haunt Americans for 100 years. But I very much doubt it will.
Are we still haunted by the American occupation of the Domincan Republic?
What about Nixon's assault into Cambodia?
What about all those Latin American dictators we propped up?
Few Americans who weren't alive during these actions are even aware they HAPPENED, nevermind be haunted by them.
Americans are not like elephants. We forget very easily, especially when it comes to our sins. And we are not a scholarly people who are well versed in history.
I doubt that in another generation or two many Americans will even know that we ever invaded Iraq. September 11th will be engrained in our national conciousness, sure. But probably not much about what came after.
Seems a bit odd that we vigourously prosecute heinous crimes committed on the other side of the planet but allow gang stalkers here in the USA to torture and murder with poison and radiation.
Perhaps we allow it because we can pretend nobody knows?
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"I came over here because I wanted to kill people...'
It literally nauseates me to think about how often the desire for a "licence to kill" is the motivation for joining the military. Equally sickening is the probability that the crimes of countless other psychopaths like Green are right now being covered up with quickie "honorable discharges," allowing them to move straight into jobs as "peace officers" in police departments across the nation. Be afraid, Be very afraid.
Amazing how quick the left condemns these soldiers after going through the "Hadeid" fiasco of a few years ago when Marines were brought to trial and it was finally revealed that the terorist sympathizers lied about their "eyewitness" accounts.
Somehow the glee in which this story is told makes me sick.
oh ok... the "glee" makes you sick eh? Not the brutal gang rape and murder of a CHILD? You do know that the guy admitted he did it, right? Disgusting.
Amazing is how could you have missed the detailed horrorific truth of this story? - deny deny deny til you beleive the lie...soun
The glee with which you deny the story is indeed nauseating.
And yet somehow Lieutenants Dan Choi and Victor J. Fehrenbach are considered a threat to unit cohesion in the United States Armed Forces? Not only that, but Mr. Green also recieved an honorable discharge in May, 2006. Truly sickening.
It's sad and so very telling that a great many signed up to kill for sport and are so gung ho to admit it. It was never about protecting the US but the freedom to murder in the name of sanctioned revenge.
And revenge against people who didn't do a damn thing to us. But this is the nature of our deeply racist and ignorant society. One A-rab is indistinguishable from another. Iran, Iraq.... same dif. - even though Iranians, Afghans and Pakistanis are not even arab.
It doesn't matter. 9-11 is a license for any and all retribution.
As repulisve as the actions of these soldiers are, what disturbs me MOST is that after he confessed to the crime but before it was realized he didn't act alone, Green was HONERABLY DISCHARGED and was sent home.
In the book; "Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military for better or for worse" the book details time and time again that the army actively covered up crimes against women, from rape to murder, and in more cases than not did not even discharge the soldier who commited them.
In the US military, SMOKING VIOLATIONS are more commonly acted upon that sexual assault against female military personel when it comes to disciplinary actions.
I say this as the military wife of a wonderful man. He was a Lt who went to Iraq, and before he went there were a couple men under him who he felt were dangerously psychologically unfit to serve, he saw them as a danger, and he reported it to his superiors. Nothing happened, and they were sent with him to Iraq, and he told me about how he was as worried about danger from some of his OWN MEN as he was about enemy combatants. One of these men ended up defying orders in a combat zone, and though no one was killed, his actions put the lives of dozens of people at risk, and several people were injured. He was only then discharged.
The military knowingly allows monsters to walk among us, and this is indefensible.
"The Assault and Death of Abeer" or "The Rape and Murder of Abeer"?
Quit playing word games say it like it is.
Journalists need to brush up on NLP (neuro linguistics programing) for sure.
Barbaric behavior,d
http://www
Plenty of blame to go around, but yrs. of Islamophobic rhetoric & Arab-bashing by many news pundits, comedians, scenarios in Hollywood films & major American novels lead to a de-humanization of all Arab & Muslim culture. Even Bill O'R., in his selection a few days ago of scenes from the top funniest TV programs ever, chose guess who from MASH & probably the only scene from yrs. of apolitical "I Love Lucy" episodes that might be construed as a spoof at Muslim women. Coincidence?
Blame Bush, Rummie and their crusades!
yea, this story really makes me feel nauseated. and extremely sad.
...and it's probably a lie just as Hadeitha was.
You can keep repeating this but you'll never make it true
You might wish it were all a lie, but it is not. All who seek to expunge it with cheap denials should have the incident hung around their necks, like Molly Ivins used to recommend be done with a chicken carcass and a chicken killing dog.
..and we wonder why we are hated!! Right-wing nuts think that it's just the terrorist way to hate America, or, Americans.
I'm a vet of the first Gulf war, and the men I served with would never do this, but we heard rumors, even of similar acts against fellow female soldiers..
What the service men did was reprehensible and horrific and they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
BUT let's see as much of an in depth report on the murder of young teen age girls by the clerics in Iran AND Iraq and other countries.
Expose them all.
Why? For some false equivalence to make us feel not so bad? Who cares what anyone else does or did? We went into their country on a supposed mission to make their lives better and these soldiers committed rape and murder. Face up to it.
One thing at a time. There are a lot of atrocities going on around the world as we speak, but this was an act committed by members of the UNITED STATES ARMY. We can deal with the clerics tomorrow. Today, let's try to achieve some justice for Abeer and her family.
God rest her soul. I'm so angry that she had to go through this.
If we demonized the actions by Iran and Iraq, and we conduct similar actions...
And it's more likely this story is a lie.
We need to take responsibility for what WE did to the Iraqis when we invaded them.
This is the kind of thing that makes my stomach churn with nausea.
My America, my beautiful America that I love with all my heart and didn't realize it for 99% of my life, don't take my new found patriotism away from me and leave me in the cold of apathy and cynicism that I languished in for an eternity. I was 14 once and I still remember what it was like to be an innocent child. MY country did this to her and many many others. Cry to heaven and redeem yourself, America. Investigate and prosecute EVERYONE NOW. I will not relent until this happens.
Well said...my heart is breaking.
"Investigate and prosecute EVERYONE NOW"
Then there will not be a single American left out of Prosecution.
If I am in any way to blame for Abeer's death, then please throw me in jail as well. Life in jail is nothing compared to what she had to endure in the last moments of her life.
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