Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

  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.

  A Deadly Pattern

  Even though tens of thousands of mercenaries have deployed in Iraq, private security forces faced no legal consequences for their deadly actions in the first five years of the Iraq occupation. As of Spring 2008, not a single one had been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In fact, they seldom faced any public outcry from Iraqi officials. Within the Bush administration they were either praised or unmentioned. In Congress, privatized war was almost a nonissue despite the efforts of a few prescient legislators who realized the threat. The belligerent politicians who did pay attention primarily did so to win even more business for the war contractors. Media coverage of mercenary activities in Iraq was sporadic and incident-oriented. Almost no one was looking at the bigger picture. But following Nisour Square, Blackwater and other mercenary firms suddenly lost their fiercely guarded covert status.

  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 Interi
or 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 According to a memo from the U.S. Embassy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, after the shooting, Iraqi Vice President Abdul-Mahdi tried to keep the story under wraps because he believed “Iraqis would not understand how a foreigner could kill an Iraqi and return a free man to his own country.”64

  Six weeks later, on February 7, a Blackwater sniper shot and killed a guard with a bullet through the head at the state-funded Iraqi Media Network and then proceeded to snipe two other guards who responded to the initial shooting.65 The Iraqi government investigated the incident, as did the media network, which concluded, “On Feb. 7, members of Blackwater opened fire from the roof of the Ministry of Justice building, intentionally and without any provocation, shooting three members of our security team which led to their deaths while they were on duty inside the network complex.” 66 But the U.S. government, relying on information from Blackwater, concluded that the sniper’s actions “fell within approved rules governing the use of force.”67 Blackwater says its forces were fired upon, a claim contested by witnesses and the Iraqi government. Neither the U.S. Embassy nor Blackwater interviewed any of the Iraqi witnesses.68

  In May 2007, Blackwater forces engaged in back-to-back deadly actions in a Baghdad neighborhood near the Iraqi Interior Ministry, according to a report by Steve Fainaru and Saad al-Izzi of the Washington Post.69 In one incident, Blackwater forces fired on an Iraqi vehicle they said had veered too close to their convoy, killing a civilian driver. As with the September 16 shooting, witnesses said it was unprovoked. In the ensuing chaos, the Blackwater operatives reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between Blackwater and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles. It might have become even bloodier if a U.S. military convoy hadn’t arrived on the scene and intervened. A day before that incident, in a nearby neighborhood, Blackwater operatives found themselves in a nearly hourlong gun battle that drew in U.S. military and Iraqi forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. U.S. sources said the Blackwater forces “did their job,” keeping the officials alive.70

  Shortly after Nisour Square, Ambassador Ryan Crocker said, “I’m the ambassador here, so I’m responsible. . . . Yes, I certainly do wish I’d had the foresight to see that there were things out there that could be corrected.”71 By that point, however, evidence of a serious problem had become impossible to ignore.

  According to the Washington Post, by early June 2007, three months before Nisour Square, “concerns about Blackwater had reached Iraq’s National Intelligence Committee, which included senior Iraqi and U.S. intelligence officials, including Maj. Gen. David B. Lacquement, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, who heads the Interior Ministry’s intelligence directorate, called on U.S. authorities to crack down on private security companies. U.S. military officials told Kamal that Blackwater was under State Department authority and outside their control, according to notes of the meeting. The matter was dropped.”72

  Iraqi officials alleged that there had been at least six deadly incidents involving Blackwater in the year leading up to Nisour Square.73 In all there were ten known deadly shootings involving Blackwater from June 2005 to September 2007.74 Among these was a February 4, 2007, shooting allegedly resulting in the death of Hana al-Ameedi, an Iraqi journalist, near the Foreign Ministry; and a September 9, 2007, shooting during which five Iraqis were killed near a government building in Baghdad. There was also a September 12, 2007, shooting that wounded five people in eastern Baghdad.75

  “We tried several times to contact the U.S. government through administrative and diplomatic channels to complain about the repeated involvement by Blackwater guards in several incidents that led to the killing of many Iraqis,” said Kamal.76 However, U.S. Embassy spokesperson Mirembe Nantongo said, “We have no official documentation on file from our Iraqi partners requesting clarification of any incident.”77 But that statement was contradicted by another U.S. official, Matthew Degn, who served as a liaison to the Iraqi Interior Ministry until August 2007. Degn told the Washington Post that Iraqi officials had sent a flurry of memos to Blackwater and U.S. officials well before the September 16 shootings and had been rebuffed in their requests for action. “We had numerous discussions over [Iraqi government] frustrations with Blackwater, but every time [Iraqi officials] contacted the [U.S.] government, it went nowhere,”78 Degn said.

  “Blackwater Provides a Valuable Service”

  The day after the Nisour Square shootings, the U.S. State Department ordered all non-U.S. military officials to remain inside the Green Zone, and diplomatic convoys were halted. It was a stark reminder of how central Blackwater was to the U.S. occupation. As one Iraqi observer joked, the Green Zone became the “Green Zoo.”79 The Iraqi government, acting as though it was in control of the country, announced that it intended to prosecute the Blackwater men responsible for the killings. “We will not allow Iraqis to be killed in cold blood,” Maliki said. “There is a sense of tension and anger among all Iraqis, including the government, over this crime.”80

  But getting rid of Blackwater would not prove to be so easy. Four days after being grounded, Blackwater was back on Iraqi streets. After all, Blackwater is not just any security company in Iraq; it is the leading mercenary company of the U.S. occupation. It first took on this role in the summer of 2003, after receiving a $27 million no-
bid contract to provide security for Ambassador Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority from May 2003 to June 2004. Since then, it has kept every subsequent U.S. Ambassador, from John Negroponte to Ryan Crocker, alive. It protected Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she visited the country, as well as scores of U.S. Congressional delegations. From its original Iraq contract to late 2007, Blackwater had won $1 billion in “diplomatic security” contracts through the State Department alone.81

  Blackwater’s presence on Iraqi streets days after Maliki called for its expulsion served as a potent symbol of the utter lack of Iraqi sovereignty. Maliki quickly found himself under heavy U.S. pressure to back off his initial demands of expulsion and prosecution. While Rice immediately called the Iraqi prime minister to apologize, she made a point of emphasizing publicly that “we need protection for our diplomats.”82 A few days later, Tahseen Sheikhly, a representative of Maliki’s government, stated, “If we drive out this company immediately, there will be a security vacuum. That would cause a big imbalance in the security situation.”83 Given the carnage of September 16, it was a difficult statement to wrap one’s head around.

  In a telling 180-degree turn, Maliki swiftly agreed to withhold judgment on Blackwater’s status, pending the conclusion of a “joint” U.S.-Iraqi investigation. But he was also under intense pressure from Iraqis, with leading political and resistance figures demanding that Blackwater leave immediately. Clearly aware of this, while visiting the United States a week after the shootings, Maliki went so far as to call the situation “a serious challenge to the sovereignty of Iraq” that “cannot be accepted.”84