Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death

by Jim Frederick

  Spielman, who had not heard of the plan until now, did not bat an eye. “I’d be down with that,” he said. As he packed up the cards and put them away, Cortez went out to the truck to check on Private Seth Scheller, who was the only one on guard. Scheller was also a brand-new private and he had been in the truck all morning.

  Cortez returned and said, “If we are going to do this, let’s go before I change my mind.” He and Barker started changing their clothes, putting on their black, silk-weight Polartec tops and bottoms and balaclavas to obscure their faces. They wanted to look like insurgents, they said, and ordered Spielman and Green to do the same. Green objected, saying he wasn’t changing. At least take your patches off, Cortez said, which Green did. Spielman wore only his ACU bottoms and a T-shirt, while Green kept his whole uniform on. Cortez insisted they cover their faces, so Green tied a T-shirt around his head and Spielman put on a pair of sunglasses, remarking that that was good enough.

  Green grabbed a shotgun, and Cortez and Barker snagged M4s. Barker took Howard’s because it had fewer accessories attached to it and was therefore lighter. Spielman picked up an M14, a larger, heavier rifle than the M4 frequently used as a longer-range weapon.

  Cortez briefed Howard. Cortez told him they knew about an Iraqi girl who lived nearby and they were going to go out and fuck her. To Howard, it was the most insane thing he’d ever heard. He did not believe them, but he also could not believe that they were actually leaving for somewhere, leaving him and Scheller alone. Cortez gave him the radio and told him to call if there were any patrols or Humvees coming through.

  The men, armed and disguised, headed out the back of the TCP.

  Forty-five-year-old Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi was not originally from the Yusufiyah area. The ancestral seat of his branch of the Janabi tribe was Iskandariyah, fifteen miles to the southeast. Qassim grew up in a large, poor family comprised mostly of farmers. He was a gentle and thoughtful child according to his sister, and in his early adulthood, he was a guard at the Hateen Weapons facility near Iskandariyah. During Saddam’s time, Iskandariyah was one of the capitals of the Iraqi military-industrial complex, and Hateen was one of the region’s major employers. When he was in his late twenties, his parents matched him with a cousin eleven years his junior, Fakhriah Taha Mahsin Moussa al-Janabi. They had a large wedding in 1987, even though the Iran-Iraq War was still raging and times were tough.

  Qassim and Fakhriah had dreams. They wanted to own a house, have a large family, and earn enough money to provide anything their children desired, including college educations. After the 1991 Gulf War, the UN sanctions made life even tougher. Qassim, like everyone, just struggled to make ends meet. In the mid-1990s, the couple moved to Yusufiyah, to be closer to Fakhriah’s family and to look for different work. During this period, the couple lived in several different homes and he held a number of jobs, sometimes as a farmhand, sometimes as a construction laborer. If their financial life was difficult, one part of their dream was coming true: they were building a big and handsome family.

  A daughter, Abeer, was born in August 1991. She was tall for her age, somewhat gangly, and plagued with asthma, but Abeer was nonetheless beautiful, with big doe eyes, a small mouth, and gentle features. She was a spirited child who was, in the words of her aunt, “proud of being young.” Soon after Abeer came a son, Muhammad, another son, Ahmed, and another daughter, Hadeel.

  In 2000, Qassim came into a job that provided a measure of stability. A landlord in Baghdad hired him to look after his five-acre plot of orchards and farmlands where he grew pomegranates, dates, and grapes, among other crops, in a hamlet near Yusufiyah called Al-Dhubat. The landlord paid Qassim about $50 a month to look after the grounds, but he also allowed the Janabis to live in the small, one-story, one-bedroom furnished farmhouse on the land for free. Qassim split the harvest with the landlord. Depending on the season, his half could yield Qassim an extra $30 a month.

  Qassim’s family stayed in touch with his relatives in Iskandariyah and Fakhriah’s relatives in Yusufiyah, visiting on holidays and weekends. They were always poor—so poor that Qassim never paid off a motorcycle he had bought from a relative for $20. The relative was so fond of the couple that he simply forgave the debt. Despite their poverty, the family was happy, the sons said. Qassim would take the boys to the market, play soccer with them, and help them with their homework, while Fakhriah stayed at home, teaching her daughters to cook the big meals that were her specialty. The children loved the small orchards, where they would play hide-and-seek among the rows of scraggly trees.

  When the Americans invaded, people in the neighborhood and throughout the region were optimistic. The U.S. bombing campaigns had ruined what little infrastructure there had been under Saddam, but the people were sure that the Americans would bring not just peace and democracy but all of the electricity and water they would ever need, as well as new roads and sewer pipes. But soon, as they waited and waited, they realized, in fact, that was not going to happen—and that’s when the trouble started. The area began to fall apart from neglect and violence.

  “When the Americans entered the country, they dissolved the military, the police, everything,” said Abu Muhammad, Fakhriah’s cousin who lived in Mullah Fayyad then. “The borders were open and chaotic. And terrorists and Al Qaeda were ready to enter the country.” Strangers started coming to town, beating people up, killing them. “And the people accepted it, because there was no other option. Fanaticism and radicalism, things we never had before, started happening. Even the government was built on radicalism.”

  In the fall of 2005, the people of Yusufiyah started seeing a lot more Americans, but even this brought no relief. It was no exaggeration to say, in many locals’ eyes, that the Americans were as bad as the insurgents. Not only did the locals not feel protected, they felt persecuted. The patrols the Americans ran were brutish. “When they came to search a house, they would come without warning,” remarked Abu Muhammad. “They would throw a flash-bang grenade by the door, storm in, scare the whole family.” The Americans would break things or even steal money and jewelry as they upended the house looking for evidence. They’d leer at the women, point guns at the men, shout at them in English. If the homeowners were lucky, after the soldiers had found nothing, they would get an insincere apology. Qassim’s son Muhammad said whenever the soldiers came to the house, he was terrified. They would point guns straight at his father’s chest and shout at him, even though his father had done nothing, yelling, “You are Ali Baba, you are Ali Baba,” the pidgin Arabic-English phrase for “criminal.”

  Whenever the extended family got together, the relatives would talk about how bad things had gotten and what could be done. But what could be done? Nothing. Qassim’s brother-in-law was gunned down in cold blood by the Americans in Iskandariyah in early 2005, said his sister. The U.S. Army, she continued, admitted it made a mistake but never did a thing to make restitution, never did anything to the soldiers involved. Other family members got hauled off to jail for no reason, with no indication when they would ever be coming home. One member of the extended family got picked up just because there was a dead body outside his house, as if murderers dump their victims right outside their own homes. It made no sense.

  Fakhriah was particularly worried about Abeer. Now fourteen years old, she was on the verge of womanhood and had started looking beyond the boundaries of her family. She dreamed of getting an education, marrying a well-to-do man, and moving to the city, where she could escape the tedium of country life. But her fragile beauty was attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Soldiers, whenever they saw her, would give her the thumbs-up and say, “Very good, very nice.” Muhammad and Ahmed once watched a soldier run a finger down the terrified Abeer’s cheek.

  By early March, the harassment of Abeer was getting so bad that Abu Muhammad told the family to leave Abeer with him. There were more people at his house and it was less secluded. Abeer stayed there only one night, on March 9 or 10. Qassim came the next d
ay to pick her up. Abeer’s parents had decided to bring her back home. It was no problem, Qassim said, Abeer would be fine. Since they had taken the girls out of school awhile ago, Qassim was able to watch them all day. With his protection, Qassim assured Abu Muhammad, they would be fine.

  The house was only a few hundred yards to the northwest, across a couple of farm fields and dirt trails. Like the natural pathfinder he was, Barker knew the way over and under every ditch, ravine, and bridge. They hurried there, doing the half-walk, half-jog pace known as the Airborne Shuffle. Barker knew the route to that little cluster of houses so well that he had taken his Gerber hand tool. He knew they would encounter a chain-link fence en route. Halfway through cutting it, his hand got tired, so he passed the tool off to one of the others to finish the job. They passed another fence that had been cut on a previous patrol. They passed three houses, knowing from trips through the area before that one of those was abandoned and one was still being constructed.

  Sneaking up on the dingy home, Cortez and Barker broke to the right around a small shack in the front. Spielman and Green broke left. Spielman and Green found the little Hadeel and father Qassim in the driveway. Green grabbed the man and Spielman grabbed the girl and they marched them inside. Barker and Cortez cleared the house, checking the foyer, the hallway, and moving past the kitchen, where Cortez stopped to grab the woman, Fakhriah, and Abeer. Green and Spielman entered the house while Barker continued with the sweep, checking the bathroom and the toilet room, the bedroom and the living room. Then he headed up the stairs to the roof, checked the roof, and went back down the stairs.

  The others had corralled the whole family into the bedroom. After they had recovered the family’s AK-47 and Green had confirmed that it was locked and loaded, Barker and Cortez left, yanking Abeer behind them. Spielman pulled the bedroom door shut and then set up guard in the doorway between the foyer and the living room while Cortez shoved Abeer into the living room. Cortez pushed Abeer down on the ground and Barker walked over to her and pinned her outstretched arms down with his knees.

  In the bedroom, Green was trying to get the man, woman, and child to lie down on the floor. They were scared, screaming in Arabic. Green was shouting back, “Get down, get down now!”

  Back at the TCP, Howard was trying to get Cortez on the radio, each time saying there was a convoy coming and they needed to come back. They never responded. No Humvees actually came during the ten to fifteen minutes that they were gone, but Howard was panicked. Scheller and he were out there all alone.

  In the living room, Cortez pulled Abeer’s tights off. She was crying, screaming in Arabic, trying to struggle free as Barker continued to hold her in place. Cortez was masturbating, trying to get an erection. He started to make thrusting motions. “What the fuck am I doing?” he later recalled thinking at the time. “At the same time, I didn’t care, either. I wanted her to feel the pain of the dead soldiers.”

  In the bedroom, Green was losing control of his prisoners. They weren’t getting down on the ground. Terrified, they were yelling, and they weren’t responding to Green’s orders. The woman made a run for the bedroom door. Green shot her once in the back and she fell to the floor. The man, agitated before, now became unhinged. Green turned the AK on him and pulled the trigger. It jammed. He tried to clear it several times, but it kept sticking. Panicking, as the man started advancing on him, Green switched to his shotgun.

  Green couldn’t remember if there was anything in the chamber, so he pumped once and a full shell ejected. Then, Green said, “I shot him the way I had been taught: one in the head and two in the chest.” The first shot blasted the top of the man’s head off. He dropped backward to the floor as buckshot from the following shots continued to riddle his body.

  Then Green turned toward the little girl, who was spinning away from him, running for a corner. Green returned to the AK and tried to clear it again, and this time it worked. He raised the rifle and shot Hadeel in the back of the head. She fell to the ground.

  “I was hyped up, the adrenaline was really high,” Green remembered later. “But as far as the actions of doing it, it’s something that I had been through a million times, in training for raiding houses. It was just eliminating targets, and those were the targets that they had told me to eliminate. It wasn’t complicated.”

  Spielman ran over to the locked bedroom door and pounded on it. Green opened the door. Spielman asked if he was okay and Green said he was. Spielman looked at the carnage in the room and was furious. He spotted the unexpended shotgun round, picked it up, and said, “What the fuck is this?” Green explained that the AK had jammed. Spielman asked Green how many shotgun blasts he had fired and began searching the room for the casings.

  As Green was executing the family, Cortez finished raping Abeer and switched positions with Barker. Barker’s penis was only half hard. Despite all her squirming and kicking, Barker forced himself on Abeer and raped her.

  Green came out of the bedroom and announced to Barker and Cortez, “They’re all dead. I killed them all.” Barker got up and headed toward the kitchen. He wanted to look outside the window, see if anything was happening outside. As he did that, Green propped the AK-47 he was carrying against the wall, got down between Abeer’s legs, and, as Cortez held her down, Green raped her.

  The men were starting to get antsy. Spielman returned from the bedroom with several shells. The group had been there several minutes now.

  “Come on, come on, hurry up,” Cortez said, “hurry up and finish.” Green stood up and zipped his fly as Cortez pushed a pillow over her face, still pinning her arms with his knees. Green grabbed the AK, moved Cortez’s knee out of the way, pointed the gun at the pillow, and fired one shot, killing Abeer.

  The men were becoming extremely frenzied and agitated now. Spielman lifted Abeer’s dress up around her neck and touched her exposed right breast. Barker brought a kerosene lamp he had found in the kitchen and dumped the contents on Abeer’s splayed legs and torso. Spielman handed a lighter to either Barker or Cortez, who lit the flame. Spielman went into the bedroom and found some blankets to throw on the body to stoke the fire. As the flames engulfing Abeer’s body grew, Green, hoping to blow up the house, opened the valve on the propane tank in the kitchen and told everybody to get out of there.

  The four men ran back the way they had come. When they arrived at the TCP, they were winded, nervous, and scared. Howard was relieved to see them. They were out of breath, manic, animated. But as the elation accompanying their safety took hold, they started celebrating. They began talking rapid-fire about how great that was, how well done. Green was jumping up and down on a cot and they all agreed that that was awesome, that was cool.

  Barker and Cortez took off their long-underwear outfits and scrubbed down their genitals and bodies with bottled water. They collected their clothes to burn in the pit behind the TCP. Cortez told Spielman and Green to burn their clothes, too, but Green resisted, saying what he was wearing was the only uniform he had. Cortez then handed the AK to Spielman and told him to get rid of it. Spielman walked over to the canal and heaved it in.

  Once their adrenaline started to wear off and they began to calm down, as they were standing around the burn pit, Cortez told everyone that they could never speak about what had happened. They agreed that if it ever came up, they would say that they didn’t know anything about it. Green said that if it ever went beyond that, just to blame everything on him. He would say he and he alone did it.

  It was getting close to dinnertime. Barker started to grill some chicken wings. Spielman tried to go to sleep and Green relieved Scheller on guard. Green asked Scheller if he had heard any shots or anything suspicious. Scheller said he hadn’t.

  Several hours later, as Yribe was walking back to TCP2 after investigating the crime scene, he mulled over what he had seen. The house was ghastly for sure, but it wasn’t the worst thing ever. And yet, there were a couple of things about it that were odd. You don’t see a lot of girls that little murdered
in Iraq, he thought to himself. It happens, but it’s not common. Maybe the killers didn’t expect the house to be filled with females? Maybe they were disturbed mid-crime and panicked? And the burning of the other girl’s body, that was strange too. Burning was a huge desecration, so big, Yribe knew, that Hadjis usually saved that insult for the rare American corpse they could get their hands on. And then there was the shotgun shell. Shotguns are not common in Iraq. The shotgun is almost exclusively an American weapon, mostly to shoot open doors and gates. The shell was locally made, green with a brass tip, called a “Baghdad round” because it had “Baghdad” stamped on it. Soldiers sometimes traded them with contractors on the larger FOBs for their novelty value. God knows, contractors can get pretty lawless themselves, but there were no contractors in the area; they were too scared to go down here.

  As Yribe approached TCP2 along the canal road to drop off Spielman and Cortez, Green was waiting in the street. He didn’t have any armor on, and he was looking up and down the street expectantly, nervously. He pulled Yribe aside and asked him what was going on, what he saw. Yribe gave him a twenty-second rundown, saying it was pretty ugly, especially with kids and all getting whacked, but other than that, it was just another murder like all the other murders. They had a phrase for it: “Yusufiyah happens.”

  “I did that shit,” Green said.

  “What?” Yribe said.

  “I killed them,” Green repeated. Barker was standing next to Green, but didn’t say a word.

  “What?” Yribe asked again. “What are you talking about?”