The Sunni side of Tikrit
The Sunni side of Tikrit: progress in Iraq
Where people are turning to the Coalition for protection
The man nervously smoothed his beard. No one was in any doubt he was putting his life on the line. He told us he had a son in the CLCs, an uncle who had been kidnapped by the insurgents; he was from a different tribe to the insurgent leader. Even with all that, I asked him, why was he was prepared to run this huge risk. ‘For my children,’ he said simply.
The Americans left, happy with their valuable new intelligence. As their column reached the crest of a hill, a white Volvo came into sight, travelling fast. The top gunner on our Humvee fired a warning shot with the 50-calibre machine gun, a terrifyingly loud sound. Still the car kept coming. The gunner fired a second shot, into the engine. The car fish-tailed on to the side of the road. Two middle-aged men got out, hands above their heads, the red dots of the Americans’ laser sights dancing on their chests.
‘I am sorry, very, very sorry,’ said one of the men over and over again, explaining that he had been dashing to hospital, where his sister had just been taken. The sergeant in charge of our vehicle told the top-gunner. ‘You waited too long. If that had been a vee-bed [car bomb], they’d be pickin’ our teeth up in Baghdad right now. I’d ’ave lit ’em up. Next time, you wax ’em.’
The risk to the Coalition from car bombs is real but such incidents show why there will always be recruits for the insurgency. And it only takes a few to cause a lot of trouble. The following afternoon the patrol was out in town. It was a nice day. True, there was some graffiti on the walls â” ‘Beware of traitors. Death to infidels. US out’ â” but small children were playing in the street, the sun was shining, birds were singing.
It was the kind of quiet, peaceful scene in which, if this had been in a Hollywood movie, you’d know something bad was coming. Sure enough, there was a loud crack: a sniper. A soldier standing at the front right corner of the Humvee crumpled without uttering a sound. (He had been shot through the leg but he survived.) Another crack and the vehicle’s tyre deflated. For some of the young soldiers on the patrol, just 18 or 19 years old, it was their first time under fire. One or two panicked.
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