Letters from Iraq: From 'Charlie' to 'Haji'

Before the US soldiers climbed into their Bradley fighting vehicles and took off for a two-hour street patrol in southwestern Baghdad, US Army Sergeant First Class Robert Keith had something to tell them.

"You go into a lot of houses," Keith told the young men standing in the dusty gravel before him. "Sometimes you're on your own. I hope you do the right thing."

He took a short pause and surveyed his troops, making sure they understood the importance of what he was about to say.

"If you pull out a Koran and shoot at it," he told them, "I'll kill you."

Keith was reacting to the latest incident that US military commanders here fear may inflame the anti-American sentiment in Iraq: A soldier from Keith's own 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division, used the Koran for target practice this month in the predominantly Sunni Baghdad suburb of Radwaniyah.

The shooting of Islam's holy book was the latest publicized illustration of US forces' disregard of Iraqi, and Muslim, culture. The most infamous episode of disrespect during the five-year war saw US soldiers torture Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison.

But degrading treatment of Iraqis is commonplace among US troops, who typically refer to traditional dishdasha shirts as "man-dresses," and use the word "haji" as a derogatory term to refer to Iraqis the way US soldiers in Vietnam called Viet Cong fighters "Charlie."

On 18 May, top US commanders in Iraq launched a campaign to curb the fallout of the incident, which was unearthed when Iraqi police officers found the bullet-riddled holy book on a small-arms range near a police station.

Trying to preserve the fragile collaboration between the US forces and their Sunni allies, Major General Jeffery Hammond, the US commander in Baghdad, visited the angry Radwaniyah residents, and publicly asked their forgiveness. Another military official kissed a Koran and handed it to the tribal leaders. Military officials say the soldier who had fired at the Muslim holy book has been removed from Iraq, though ISN Security Watch was unable to confirm this independently.

And at the dusty combat outpost in Risala, where Bravo company of the 4-64 armor battalion is stationed, senior non-commissioned officers were launching a preventive campaign of their own.

After Keith spoke, Master Sergeant Joseph Kather, an Army reservists whose job is to help soldiers better understand the Iraqi culture, addressed those gathered.

"The more stupid shit we do, like shooting up the Koran, the longer we'll be in this country," he said. "Think about if this is your home and someone's coming into your house, how you wanna be treated."

"I'm not saying you're doing it wrong," he continued. "But [the Iraqis have] gotta start seeing us in a different light. You got people that just do stupid things without thinking. Think about it before you do it."

Kather, for whom this is a third deployment to Iraq since 2003, said he was mostly addressing soldiers who had never been to Iraq before.

Veterans of this war, he said, are "more attuned to the culture - but they're also hardened a little more, depending on which unit they are in, and how many people they've lost."

On the surface, at least, American soldiers serving in Baghdad now appear more familiar with the Iraqi culture than they were five, even three years ago. Many soldiers have learned basic phrases in Arabic. They do not shy away from the ceremonial kisses when they greet tribal sheikhs, and often press their right hand to their heart in a traditional Arabic greeting.

But the shooting of the Koran, which received a lot of attention in the Iraqi media and was reported by CNN, showed that US forces could be more than a little insensitive to things most Iraqis hold sacred.

"You don't have to believe in the religion to respect it," Kather said of the incident. "That little thing could have wiped out years of what we've been doing here."