The massacre of 49 young army recruits in eastern Iraq yesterday is certain to remain in the annals of that country’s current tragedy for a long time to come.
The recruits had just completed their training at Kirkush as would-be members of Iraq’s renascent army, and were returning home for a brief holiday before starting active service. They were traveling in four minibuses when their convoy was ambushed by an unknown number of terrorists lurking in covert. According to eyewitness accounts pieced together so far, the heavily armed terrorists ordered the recruits to lie face down and then shot them in the back. It is clear that the terrorists intended to stage what is known as exhibition killing, a form of mass execution invented by the Nazis during World War II and widely practiced by Saddam Hussein during his reign of terror. The aim of the exhibition killing is to shock ordinary people beyond the limits of normal human reaction to the extraordinary. Saddam’s decision to kill thousands of women and children and old people in the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 was a form of exhibition killing on a grand scale. The beheading of foreign hostages in the past few weeks must also be regarded as exhibition killing.
As the Iraqi minister for security states in an interview, the terrorists and their insurgent allies are determined to raise the level of violence in the hope of affecting the American presidential election next week and, if possible, preventing Iraq’s own elections from taking place next January. By once again revealing the true nature of the terrorists, the Kirkush massacre is likely to strengthen rather than weaken the resolve of all those who wish to see Iraq stabilized and put on the path of democratization.
The massacre raises a number of questions. Why were the cadets allowed to travel unarmed? Why wasn’t their convoy given an armed escort? The claim that the attack took place in an area that had not been previously affected by violence is neither here nor there. The spot where the massacre took place is located between Mandali, a peaceful town tucked against the Iranian border and inhabited by Kurdish and Luri Shiites, and Baqubah a mainly Sunni former garrison town that has been a hotbed of insurgency for the past year.
One needs no special gift of detection to guess that the terrorists had inside information about the movement of the convoy. They could choose the place of the ambush and the time at which to carry out their dastardly deed.
The massacre raises a set of even more disturbing questions: How could the terrorists attack so close to the border without being detected either by Iranian border guards or their Iraqi counterparts? And where did the attackers go to hide after the crime? The geography of the area is such that they could not have found proper cover inside Iraq. Did they hide in the uplands of Zainalkush, a salient inside Iranian territory?
The least that the Iraqi interim government can do is to organize a proper investigation of exactly what happened.
