RAMADI, Iraq, 26 June 2003 — “Terrorist” or just a teenager, Sahar Jamil appears shy for her 13 years, but US soldiers swear they saw her carrying an AK-47 assault rifle with the barrel still hot from firing.
The story lays bare the confusion and nervousness which has overtaken US troops and ordinary Iraqis as resistance to coalition occupation galvanizes into a growing number of armed attacks.
Lt. Noah Hanners of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment is categorical.
He was leading a patrol on Monday round the town of Ramadi, about 100 km west of Baghdad, when he spotted the slight girl after hearing “five or six small arms detonations”.
“Behind the market, I saw a 12 to 14 years old, long-haired girl with a red dress with roses.
“She jumped a wall,” carrying the Kalashnikov, Hanners tells AFP at the army base in Ramadi where US forces came under attack on Monday.
“We proceeded and searched the house,” the girl had entered.
“We found an AK-47 still hot wrapped in the red dress,” he insists, adding that bullets were missing from the magazine.
“Maybe somebody shot and gave her the AK-47,” Hanners admits, but the evidence appears incriminating.
“We found three (rifle) magazines, $1500 and a small amount of drugs,” the lieutenant lists.
Three men were arrested and the money confiscated, but in Ramadi, the rumor ran through the quarter that a girl had been killed by US soldiers. Sahar offers AFP a totally different version of events from Hanners. Surrounded by the men of the family and a flock of children at her home, the teenager is on the verge of tears.
“There were no men in the house and when I saw the patrol coming I took the gun to hide it on the balcony. I was afraid the soldiers would search,” she says.
Sahar agrees that she did wrap it in the red, flowered dress.
“I did not fire” the gun, “I did not leave the house,” she says. The three arrested men, all cousins of the girl, were released by coalition forces on Tuesday. And the AK-47? It belongs to an uncle who was in the police, the family says.
The small arms detonations? Just fireworks that children let off all the time when soldiers go by.
Sahar’s father, Jamil Ibrahim, aged 57, accused the US troops of theft. He said he ran a small transport firm under the former oil-for-food program which allowed Iraqi to export crude in return for essential goods.
The $1,500, as well as 600,000 dinars (about $400), came from the business, he said. “They kept it,” Jamil charges.
US troops in the center and north of Iraq have come under frequent attack by Iraqis since the fall of Baghdad on April 9 and on Tuesday six British military police were killed and eight other soldiers wounded in southern Iraq.
