Blackwater

Additionally, I would like to thank Eric Stoner who provided research assistance in the paperback updates of this book. I also wish to alert the reader to the fact that Blackwater refused to grant me interviews with company executives. A spokesperson did write to "thank" me for my "interest in Blackwater" but said that the company was "unable to accommodate" my request for interviews with the men who run Blackwater. I am indebted to the solid reporting of Jay Price and Joseph Neff of the Raleigh News & Observer and Bill Sizemore and Joanne Kimberlin of the Virginian-Pilot newspapers. These reporters and their groundbreaking work have done the public a great service in chronicling the Blackwater story and the explosive growth of the private military industry. Special thanks also to T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times and Anthony Shadid and Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post, as well as authors P. W. Singer and Robert Young Pelton. I would encourage readers to read the acknowledgments at the end of this book for a more comprehensive understanding of the number of people who contributed to this process.

As the Blackwater convoy was entering the square that day, a young Iraqi medical student named Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie was driving his mother, Mahasin, in the family's white Opal sedan. They had just dropped off Ahmed's father, Jawad, a successful pathologist, near the hospital where he worked. They then had gone on their way to run errands, including picking up college applications for Ahmed's sister. The plan was to finish up and return later to pick up Jawad. As fate would have it, they found themselves stuck near Nisour Square. The Rubaies were devout Muslims and were fasting in observance of the holy month of Ramadan. Ahmed was multilingual, a soccer fan, and was in his third year of medical school, where he was training to become a surgeon. Medicine was in his DNA. Like his father, Ahmed's passenger that day, his mother, was also a doctor—an allergist. Jawad says the family could have left Iraq, but they believed they were needed in the country. "I feel pain when I see doctors leaving Iraq," he said.²

Ali Khalaf Salman, an Iraqi traffic cop on duty in Nisour Square that day, remembers vividly the moment when the Blackwater convoy entered the intersection, spurring him and his colleagues to scramble to stop traffic. But as the Mambas entered the square, the convoy suddenly made a surprise U-turn and proceeded to drive the wrong way on a one-way street.³ As Khalaf watched, the convoy came to an abrupt halt. He says a large white man with a mustache, positioned atop the third vehicle in the Blackwater convoy, began to fire his weapon "randomly."⁴

Khalaf looked in the direction of the shots, on Yarmouk Road, and heard a woman screaming, "My son! My son!"⁵ The police officer sprinted toward the voice and found a middle-aged woman inside a vehicle holding a twenty-year-old man who had been shot in the forehead and was covered in blood. "I tried to help the young man, but his mother was holding him so tight," Khalaf recalled.⁶ Another Iraqi policeman, Sarhan Thiab, also ran to the car. "We tried to help him," Thiab said. "I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was crying out, 'My son, my son! Help me, help me!'"⁷

Officer Khalaf recalled looking toward the Blackwater shooters: "I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting."⁸ He says he thought the men would cease fire, given that he was a clearly identified police officer.⁹ The young man's body was still in the driver's seat of the automatic vehicle and, as Khalaf and Thiab stood there, it began to roll forward, perhaps because the dead man's foot remained on the accelerator.¹⁰ Blackwater guards later said they initially opened fire on the vehicle because it was speeding and would not stop, a claim disputed by scores of witnesses.¹¹ Aerial photos of the scene later showed that the car had not even entered the traffic circle when it was fired upon by Blackwater, ¹² while the New York Times reported, "The car in which the first people were killed did not begin to closely approach the Blackwater convoy until the Iraqi driver had been shot in the head and lost control of his vehicle."¹³ Thiab explained, "I tried to use hand signals to make the Blackwater people understand that the car was moving on its own and we were trying to stop it. We were trying to get the woman out but had to run for cover."¹⁴

"Don't shoot, please!" Khalaf recalled yelling.¹⁵ But as he stood with his hand raised, Khalaf says, a gunman from the fourth Blackwater vehicle opened fire on the mother gripping her son and shot her dead before Khalaf's and Thiab's eyes.¹⁶ "I saw parts of the woman's head flying in front of me, blow up," Thiab said. "They immediately opened heavy fire at us."¹⁷ Within moments, Khalaf says, so many shots had been fired at the car from "big machine guns" that it exploded, engulfing the bodies inside in flames, melting their flesh into one.¹⁸ "Each of their four vehicles opened heavy fire in all directions, they shot and killed everyone in cars facing them and people standing on the street," Thiab recalled. "When it was over we were looking around and about fifteen cars had been destroyed, the bodies of the killed were strewn on the pavements and road."¹⁹ When later asked by U.S. investigators why he never fired at the Blackwater men, Khalaf told them, "I am not authorized to shoot, and my job is to look after the traffic."²⁰

The victims were later identified as Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie and his mother, Mahasin. Ahmed's father, Jawad, has a brother, Raad, who worked in a nearby hospital where victims of the shooting were being taken. "He heard the shots," Jawad recalls. "It was a battle, a fight, a war. And, of course, it didn't occur to him that my wife and my son were the victims—among the victims of the incident."²¹ Raad "went to the morgue, and the person who was responsible for the morgue told him that they received sixteen bodies as casualties from the incident that day. They were all identified, identifiable, except for two. Two bodies completely burnt. . . . They were put in black plastic bags."²² Raad suspected that it could be Ahmed and Mahasin but, he said, "my heart didn't want to believe it."²³ He and his wife drove to Nisour Square and found a badly burnt white sedan. The license plate was not on the vehicle, but Raad's wife found an imprint of the numbers in the sand. Raad called Jawad and began reading the numbers on the vehicle and confirmed his worst fears.²⁴

Jawad raced to the morgue, where he viewed the charred bodies. He identified his wife through her dental bridge and his son by the remains of one of his shoes.²⁵ In all, Jawad says, there were some forty bullet holes in their vehicle.²⁶ He said he never returned to claim the vehicle because he wanted "it to be a memorial to the painful event caused by people who, supposedly, came to protect us."²⁷

That attack on Ahmed and Mahasin's vehicle spiraled into a shooting spree that would leave seventeen Iraqis dead and more than twenty wounded.

After Ahmed and Mahasin's vehicle exploded, sustained gunfire rang out in Nisour Square as people fled for their lives. In addition to the Blackwater shooters in the four Mambas, witnesses say gunfire came from Blackwater's Little Bird helicopters. "The helicopters began shooting on the cars," Khalaf said. "The helicopters shot and killed the driver of a Volkswagen and wounded a passenger" who escaped by "rolling out of the car into the street," he said.²⁸ Witnesses described a terrifying scene of indiscriminate shooting by the Blackwater guards. "It was a horror movie," said Khalaf.²⁹ "It was catastrophic," said Zina Fadhil, a twenty-one-year-old pharmacist who survived the attack. "So many innocent people were killed."³⁰

Another Iraqi officer on the scene, Hussam Abdul Rahman, said that people who attempted to flee their vehicles were targeted. "Whoever stepped out of his car was shot at immediately," he said.³¹

"I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot," said Iraqi lawyer Hassan Jabar Salman, who was shot four times in the back during the incident. "But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about ten leaping in fear from a minibus—he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him. She jumped out after him, and she was killed."³²

Salman says as he entered the square that day he was driving behind the Blackwater convoy when it stopped. Witnesses said some sort of explosion had gone off in the distance, too far away to have been perceived as a threat. He said Blackwater guards ordered him to turn his vehicle around and leave the scene. Shortly after, the shooting began. "Why had they opened fire?" he asked. "I do not know. No one—I repeat, no one—had fired at them. The foreigners had asked us to go back, and I was going back in my car, so there was no reason for them to shoot."³³ In all, he says, his car was hit twelve times, including the four bullets that pierced his back.

Mohammed Abdul Razzaq and his nine-year-old son, Ali, were in a vehicle immediately behind Ahmed and Mahasin, the first victims that day. "We were six persons in the car—me, my son, my sister, and her three sons. The four children were in the back seat," Razzaq said.³⁴ He recalled that the Blackwater forces had "gestured stop, so we all stopped. . . . It's a secure area, so we thought it will be the usual: we would stop for a bit as convoys pass. Shortly after that they opened heavy fire randomly at the cars with no exception."³⁵ He said his vehicle "was hit by about thirty bullets. Everything was damaged: the engine, the windshield, the back windshield, and the tires.³⁶

"When the shooting started, I told everybody to get their heads down. I could hear the children screaming in fear. When the shooting stopped, I raised my head and heard my nephew shouting at me, 'Ali is dead, Ali is dead!'"³⁷

"My son was sitting behind me," he said. "He was shot in the head and his brains were all over the back of the car."³⁸ Razzaq remembered, "When I held him, his head was badly wounded, but his heart was still beating. I thought there was a chance and I rushed him to the hospital. The doctor told me that he was clinically dead and the chance of his survival was very slim. One hour later, Ali died."³⁹ Razzaq, who survived the shooting, later returned to the scene and gathered the pieces of his son's skull and brain with his hands, wrapped them in cloth, and took them to be buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. "I can still smell the blood, my son's blood, on my fingers," Razzaq said two weeks after his son died.⁴⁰

In all, the melee reportedly lasted about fifteen minutes.⁴¹ In an indication of how out of control the situation quickly became, U.S. officials report that "one or more" Blackwater guards called on their colleagues to stop shooting.⁴² The word "cease-fire" "was supposedly called out several times," a senior official told the New York Times. "They had an on-site difference of opinion."⁴³ At one point a Blackwater guard allegedly drew his gun on another. "It was a Mexican standoff," said one contractor.⁴⁴ According to Salman, the Iraqi lawyer who was in the square that day, the Blackwater guard screamed at his colleague, "No! No! No!" The lawyer was shot in the back as he tried to flee.⁴⁵

As the heavy gunfire died down, witnesses say, some sort of smoke bomb was set off in the square, perhaps to give cover for the Blackwater Mambas to leave, a common practice of security convoys.⁴⁶ Iraqis also said the Blackwater forces fired shots as they withdrew from the square. "Even as they were withdrawing, they were shooting randomly to clear the traffic," said an Iraqi officer who witnessed the shootings.⁴⁷

Within hours, Blackwater would become a household name the world over, as news of the massacre spread. Blackwater claimed its forces had been "violently attacked"⁴⁸ and "acted lawfully and appropriately"⁴⁹ and "heroically defended American lives in a war zone."⁵⁰ "The 'civilians' reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies."⁵¹ In less than twenty-four hours, the killings at Nisour Square would cause the worst diplomatic crisis to date between Washington and the regime it had installed in Baghdad. Though Blackwater's forces had been at the center of some of the bloodiest moments of the war, they had largely operated in the shadows. Four years after Blackwater's first boots hit the ground in Iraq, it was yanked out of the darkness. Nisour Square would propel Erik Prince down the path to international infamy.

While the shooting in Nisour Square put the issue of private forces in Iraq—and Blackwater's name specifically—on the front pages of newspapers around the world, this was hardly the first deadly incident involving these forces. What was new was that the pro-U.S. Iraqi government responded powerfully. Within twenty-four hours of the shooting, Iraq's Interior Ministry announced that it was expelling Blackwater from the country; Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called the firm's conduct "criminal." ⁵² For the Iraqi government it was the final straw.

The Baghdad government's anger would be understandable even if the only incident involving Blackwater were Nisour Square. But this was a four-year pattern, one that had intensified in its lethality the year preceding the killing of the seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad. And, particularly enraging to the Iraqis, there had been no consequences for the company's actions. Contractors in Iraq reportedly had a motto: "What happens here today, stays here today."⁵³ As one armed contractor informed the Washington Post, "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night."⁵⁴

That is what apparently happened after another fatal Blackwater incident. On Christmas Eve 2006, inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, Andrew Moonen,⁵⁵ an off-duty Blackwater operative, had just left a holiday party. Witnesses said he was drunk as he walked through the "Little Venice" section of the zone,⁵⁶ where he encountered Raheem Khalif, an Iraqi bodyguard of Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi.⁵⁷ "Between 10:30 and 11:30 p.m., the Blackwater contractor, carrying a Glock 9 mm pistol, passed through a gate near the Iraqi Prime Minister's compound and was confronted by the Iraqi guard, who was on duty," according to a U.S. Congressional investigation. "The Blackwater contractor fired multiple shots, three of which struck the guard, then fled the scene."⁵⁸

Blackwater officials confirmed that within days they whisked the contractor safely out of Iraq, which they say Washington ordered them to do.⁵⁹ Iraqi officials labeled the killing a "murder."⁶⁰ Blackwater said it fired the contractor, but as of early 2008, he had yet to be charged with any crime. A year after the incident, Erik Prince would say that Blackwater had gotten Moonen's security clearance revoked, which Prince said meant Moonen would "never work in a clearance capacity for the U.S. government again," or that it would be "very, very unlikely."⁶¹ But weeks after the fatal shooting, Moonen was rehired by a Defense Department contractor and was back working on a U.S. government contract in the Middle East.⁶²

Representative Dennis Kucinich, a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, suggested that by facilitating Moonen's secret departure from Iraq, "There's a question that could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate officers accessories . . . in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who's committed a murder."⁶³