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September 19, 2005
You Know You Are Occupied When...
You cannot arrest people who shoot at your policemen, and keep them under arrest. A foreign army bulldozes the walls of your prison, takes away their countrymen, allowing about 150 other prisoners to escape.
In a dramatic show of force, British soldiers used tanks to break down the walls of the central jail in this southern city Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen, witnesses said....
About 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled as British commandos stormed inside and rescued their comrades, said Aquil Jabbar, an Iraqi television cameraman who lives across the street from the jail. Earlier Monday, demonstrators hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks, and at least four people were killed.
The fighting in the oil city of Basra, 340 miles south of the capital, erupted after British armor encircled the jail where the two Britons were being held. During the melee one British soldier could be seen in a photograph scrambling for his life from a burning tank and the rock-throwing mob.
Oh, I'm sure someone will say that Iraqi justice system is not fair, not reliable, people cannot be left in their hands, etc. All of that may well be true and I certainly am not one to somehow think if someone is under arrest, that's that and nothing can be questioned. But that does not answer for those alleged British soldiers under arrest: after all they were not abducted from Britain while they were minding their own business. They were in Iraq, armed, "undercover," shooting at people in the street.
According to Iraqi authorities, these men fired at Iraqi policeman at a checkpoint, and that sounds very feasible to me. After all, which Iraqi has the right to ask the western Man to stop at a checkpoint? None, of course, and if they are so bold as to make such a demand, you must shoot back.
Of course, these men were apparently also undercover, dressed in Arabic garb.
In a statement released in London, Reid did not say why the two had been taken into custody. But the Iraqi official, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity, said their arrests stemmed from an incident earlier in the day.The official said two unknown gunmen in full Arabic dress began firing on civilians in central Basra, wounding several, including a traffic police officer. There were no fatalities, the official said.
The two gunmen fled the scene but were captured and taken in for questioning, admitting they were British marines carrying out a "special security task," the official said.
But, still the Iraqis on the scene should have just sensed that these were Western Military Man on a "special security task" and stayed cleared of them. Don't they know better, these natives?
Posted by zeynep at September 19, 2005 09:09 PM
Comments
Maybe they thought the people they were firing on were Brazilians? Open season on them, as we know.
Posted by: rootlesscosmo at September 19, 2005 11:21 PM