'We have been silent about many crimes but we will not stand rape'

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in MahmoudiyaFriday October 20, 2006The Guardian
The only picture of Abeer Hamza Qasim is the one that appeared on her Iraqi ID card, a black and white passport size photograph taken when she was maybe eight or nine, black hair, round face and big black eyes.
A few years after the picture was taken, when she was 14, Abeer was gang-raped and killed, along with three members of her family. Then her body was set on fire. On Wednesday the Pentagon announced that four soldiers of the 101st Airborne division are to be court martialled over what has become one of the most emotive atrocities committed during the US-led occupation of Iraq. A fifth soldier allegedly involved in the rape has since been discharged.
Today Ahmad Qassim, Abeer's uncle, is describing for the first time the moment he first heard what had happened to his brother's family on March 12. He is a tall, thin farmer with mud-covered toes protruding from his sandals and a grey moustache.
"They called me at eight in the evening, the night when it happened," he says. "First they just told me there has been a shoot-out and your brother has been killed. I couldn't come until the next day. When I arrived the Americans were blocking the main road. I told them my brother is dead but they shouted back something in English and pointed their guns at me. I wanted to run through their checkpoint but people held me back and told me, are you crazy? We had to go through a back road."
Later he takes me, via the same back road, once more to avoid the Americans, to his brother's home in this town 20 miles south of Baghdad. It is a typical Iraqi farmhouse surrounded by palm and fig trees. "When I arrived that morning there was still a smell of burning plastic," Ahmad recalls. Inside the modest house, the walls and ceiling are covered with soot at the far right end of the room. Under the window sill, the wall and part of the floor are covered with a thick layer of burned grease, and next to it the corner wall is stained with an arc of spattered blood.
"Abeer, was lying there," gestures Ahmad. "Part of her body was burned." In an adjacent room, he points at another blood-stained wall: "My brother was sitting there, his head slumped down. His wife was here by the door. And in the middle of the room was the little girl."
While we are looking round the house, a woman wearing a shapeless black dress and a black hijab comes in with her 13-year-old son, Omar. Omar explains how he was outside the house showing his bicycle to Ahmad's brother, Hamza [Abeer's father] in the yard next door when he heard noises.
"I told him: I think the Americans have gone into your house." Hamza went to see what was happening. About half an hour later, the boy said he heard a sound, "like beating a tin barrel with a stick few times". He went outside and saw five Americans leaving. One carried two guns.
His mother takes up the story: "We went to the house and shouted through the door, are you OK? Are you OK? No one answered, then we saw the smoke coming from that window. I went to the street screaming for help, the young men from the street came in and we broke the door down.
"The poor girl, she was so beautiful she lay there, one leg was stretched and the other was bended and her dress was lifted to her neck."
American troops returned a few days later. "They stayed in the house all day, they had even men on the roof," recalls her son.
Blue rubber gloves apparently left by an investigating team are still scattered around the house. There are a number of one inch-wide holes in the floor tiles of the room where Abeer was found.
Earlier Ahmad explained to me why locals had not reported the incident. "We knew about the rape all along, but in the tribes if you can't do anything about it better to shut your mouth. No one will say our daughter was raped and we can't do anything."
Iraqi tribal society is deeply patriarchal. Honour and reputation are valued much more highly than property. Shame can only be wiped clean by blood and there is no worse shame for a family than rape.
Shifting his weight uneasily and drinking his tea in a single gulp, Ahmad went on: "If we knew the soldier we would kill him but who is he? They all look the same."
He dismissed claims by Sunni insurgent groups that the kidnapping and killing of two US soldiers in an area near the scene of the rape was in retaliation for the attack on Abeer.
He said his brother asked him a week before the incident if he could bring his family to stay in Ahmad's house. He complained that the Americans were harassing his daughter as she came in and out of the house.
He said he had little faith in a US court martial. "They should hand the criminals to us to an Iraqi court, we don't trust their justice, they should be tried in Iraq and be executed here."
Adnan Janabi, the leader of the Janabi tribe, echoed his view: "A murder can be solved in a tribal council by money but rape can only be solved by killing the perpetrator."
"As a tribe, we the Janabis don't recognise their court. The crime will not be forgotten until the criminal pays with his life.
"The Iraqis have been shouldering lots of murders and crimes by the Americans and have been silent. But they will not stand the crime of rape."