Even before the United States began its attacks against Sadr, there were serious rumblings across Iraq of a national uprising of Shiites and Sunnis. Two days before Bremer shut down Al Hawza, U.S. forces had raided a neighborhood in Fallujah, killing at least fifteen Iraqis in an incident that enraged many Sunnis.20 By the time the four Blackwater contractors were ambushed in Fallujah on March 31, the south of the country was already on the brink, with tens of thousands of Shiites pouring into the streets. On April 2, during Friday prayers, Sadr declared, “I am the beating arm for Hezbollah and Hamas here in Iraq.”21 As U.S. forces prepared to lay siege to Fallujah, Bremer poured gas on the volatile situation by ordering the arrest of Sadr’s top deputy, Sheikh Mustafa Yaqubi, who was taken into custody on Saturday, April 3, 2004.22 For Sadr, it was the final straw. He urged his followers to openly and fiercely rise up against the occupation.
After Yaqubi’s arrest, thousands of outraged Sadr followers boarded buses from Baghdad heading for their leader’s spiritual headquarters in Kufa, next to the holy city of Najaf,23 where many believed Yaqubi was being held by occupation forces. Along the way, they encountered jam-packed roads filled with thousands of men preparing to do battle. “We didn’t choose the time for the uprising,” said Fuad Tarfi, Sadr’s Najaf spokesman. “The occupation forces did.”24 Shortly after dawn on Sunday, April 4, the Mahdi Army began to take over the administrative buildings in the area. Local police commanders immediately relinquished their authority, as did administrators in another government building. But then the massive crowd began moving toward its actual target—the occupation headquarters in Najaf, which was guarded by Blackwater.
04/04/04
On the morning of April 4, 2004, as the sun was rising over the Shiite holy city of Najaf, a handful of Blackwater men stood on the rooftop of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters they were tasked with protecting. At the time, the actual U.S. military presence in Najaf was very limited because of negotiations with Shiite religious leaders who had demanded that U.S. troops leave. As part of its contract in Iraq, Blackwater not only guarded Paul Bremer but also provided security for at least five regional U.S. occupation headquarters, including the one in Najaf.25 Like most of the world, the Blackwater guards in Najaf were well aware of the fate of their colleagues a few days earlier in Fallujah. Now, with a national uprising under way, they watched as an angry demonstration of Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers reached Camp Golf, formerly the campus of Kufa University, which had been converted to an occupation headquarters. Blackwater had just eight men guarding the facility that day, along with a handful of troops from El Salvador. By chance, there were also a few U.S. Marines at the complex.
U.S. Marine Cpl. Lonnie Young had been in Iraq since January 2004. The twenty-five-year-old native of Dry Ridge, Kentucky—population two thousand—was deployed in Iraq as a Defense Messaging System administrator. On the morning of April 4, he was in Najaf to install communication equipment at Camp Golf. “While entering the front gate, I noticed a small group of protesters out in the streets,” Young recalled in an official Marine Corps account of the day.26 “As we proceeded onto the base there were numerous coalition soldiers in ‘riot gear’ near the front gate.” Young and his colleagues met with the local occupation commander, a Spanish official, and then proceeded to the roof of the building to install the communications equipment. About twenty-five minutes later, Young had finished his task. Despite the beginnings of a protest at the camp, Young tried to catch a quick ten-minute nap in the back of his truck, “since we were about twenty-minutes from chow time.” But a few moments later, a colleague of Young’s woke him up and told him the equipment was not working properly. “I told him that I would be right in to help,” Young said. “I got dressed, grabbed my weapon, and was about to get out of the truck when I heard the unmistakable sound of an AK-47 rifle fire a few rounds out in the street in front of the base.” Young said he quickly grabbed his gear and headed into the CPA building, eventually making it to the roof, where he joined eight Blackwater mercenaries and the Salvadoran troops. Young assumed a position on the roof and readied his heavy M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. He peered through the scope of his gun, watching the action unfold below and awaiting orders. “After what seemed like an eternity, which was maybe just a few seconds, I could see people getting out of [a] truck and start running,” Young recalled. “One of the Iraqis quickly dropped down into a prone position and fired several round[s] at us. I started yelling that I had one in my sights and asking if I could engage.” But there was no commanding officer on hand from the U.S. military. Instead, Cpl. Lonnie Young, active-duty United States Marine Corps, would be taking his orders that day from the private mercenaries of Blackwater USA.
“With your permission Sir, I have acquired a target,” Young recalled yelling out. “Finally, the Blackwater Security guys gave the call [to] commence firing.” Young said he then “leveled the sights on my target and squeezed the trigger. I could see that the man had on an all white robe and was carrying an AK-47 rifle in his right hand. He seemed to be running as hard as he could when I fired off a short burst of 5.56 mm rounds. Through my sights I could see the man fall onto the pavement. I stopped for a second, raised my head from my gun, to watch the man lay in the street motionless.”
“I had a weird feeling come over me,” Young recalled. “I had many emotions kick in at once. I felt a sense of purpose, happiness, and sorrow, which all hit me at once.”
While Young and Blackwater contend that the Iraqis initiated the shooting that day, other witnesses interviewed by journalists on the scene said it went down differently; they claimed the battle began when the forces guarding the occupation headquarters fired percussion rounds from atop the roof as the protesters assembled. “Alarmed to see the throng still moving toward them, [the forces on the roof] fired percussive rounds designed to break up the crowd, which instead enraged it,” wrote Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid. “They may then have switched to live fire. Armed men in the crowd returned fire with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars.”27 Estimates of the crowd size outside the occupation headquarters that day ranged from seven hundred to more than two thousand.
Regardless of how it started, once the shooting began, Blackwater’s men, the Salvadorans, and Corporal Young were unloading clip after clip, firing thousands of rounds and hundreds of 40 mm grenades into the crowd.28 They fired so many rounds that some of them had to stop shooting every fifteen minutes to let their gun barrels cool.29 Sadr’s men responded with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s.30 Shadid reported, “At one point, witnesses saw a vehicle carrying four Salvadoran soldiers caught outside the gate. Demonstrators overwhelmed the terrified occupants, seizing and executing one prisoner on the spot by putting a grenade in his mouth and pulling the pin. Two of the other soldiers, their faces bruised from recent beatings, were [later] seen being led by armed men into the mosque.”31
In the midst of the fighting, several active-duty military police officers joined the force on the roof being managed by Blackwater’s men. During the battle, which would rage on for nearly four hours, a Blackwater contractor began videotaping the action. That video would make it onto the Internet and provide remarkable historical documentation of the events of April 4, 2004.32 The home video opens with a deafening barrage of outgoing gunfire, as Blackwater’s men, Corporal Young, and at least two other soldiers dressed in camouflage fire round after round. “You’re aiming too high buddy,” one contractor yells at the soldiers.
“You see a guy on the ground?” the voice yells. “RPG!”
“Where?”
“Right in front of the truck, right on the wall!”
Boom boom, rat-a-tat-tat. Explosive gunfire rips for thirty seconds. “Got more ammo?” someone yells. Then: “The truck’s empty, the truck’s empty.”
The shooting stops as the men assess the situation below them. “Hold what you got, hold what you got right there,” a voice commands. “Just scan your secto
rs. Scan your sectors. Who needs ammo?”
“We got mags, we got mags right here.”
“Fuckin’ niggers,” says another voice as the men begin to reload their weapons. The camera then pans to what appears to be the cameraman—a goateed Blackwater contractor wearing sunglasses—who looks into the camera and smiles. As the camera pans back to the action, he quips laughingly, “What the fuck?” The camera then turns to a man who appears to be a U.S. soldier, and the cameraman asks him about his weapon, “That shit fuckin’ hot, dude?”
“I spent all this time [unintelligible] in the fucking Marine Corps—never fired a weapon,” the soldier replies. Another voice yells, “Mark your target!”
Men who appear to be Salvadoran troops can also be seen on the roof; a Blackwater contractor wearing a blue T-shirt and a baseball cap apparently instructs one Salvadoran on how to position the heavy weapon. “Hang tight, hang tight, hang tight,” says another goateed man wielding a machine gun and wearing a T-shirt, bulletproof vest, and a blue baseball cap.
“Hey, all these fuckers right here,” says another voice.
“Yeah, Mahdi ass!”
With that, the heavy firing once again begins as the men unload from the rooftop. Along with machine-gun fire, there is the methodical boom, boom, boom from heavier weapons. “Hey, get some!” someone yells as the deafening rip of gunfire explodes over Najaf. One of the Blackwater men appears to be directing three camouflaged soldiers firing from the roof.
As the battle raged on, Iraqi snipers hit a total of three of the men protecting the occupation headquarters. According to Young, a Blackwater contractor got hit and blood spurted five feet out from his face. “I could see a quarter-sized hole in his jaw,” Corporal Young remembered. “By this time, the guy had lost about a pint of blood. I tried to press on the wound and stop the bleeding that way, but the blood was squirting out between my fingers.” Young said he reached into the wound and pinched the man’s carotid artery closed. He then picked him up and got him to Blackwater’s medic before returning to his rooftop post. A picture taken that day shows Young on the rooftop aiming his SAW at the crowd with heavily armed Blackwater men in sunglasses positioned directly behind him and alongside him. “I gazed over the streets with straining eyes, only to see hundreds of dead Iraqis lying all over the ground,” Young said. “It was an unbelievable sight; even though there were so many lying dead, the Iraqis were still running towards the front gate. I opened fire once again. Emptying magazine after magazine, I watched the people dressed in white and black robes drop to the ground as my sights passed by them. All I could think about at that time was that I had to either kill or be killed. It felt as if we were losing ground. In many senses we were, but that feeling just made me fight harder.”
Blackwater later said that throughout the battle, its men tried to make contact with U.S. military commanders but were unsuccessful. A senior Blackwater executive, Patrick Toohey, told the New York Times that at one point the crowd was moving in fast on the compound, and Blackwater’s men “were down to single digits of ammo, less than 10 rounds a man.”33 The besieged men eventually contacted Blackwater’s headquarters in Baghdad. Within moments, Paul Bremer’s staff gave the go-ahead for Blackwater to send in three company helicopters—known as “Ass Monkeys,” the very ones used for Bremer’s security—to deliver more ammunition.34 The helicopter crews also rescued Corporal Young after he was wounded.35 “We ran outside and I saw three Blackwater helicopters sitting there,” Young recalled. “I ran to the farthest helicopter and got inside the front passenger seat. I felt very nervous as we took off from the ground. I didn’t have any body armor at all, nor did I have a weapon. I looked all around the base and saw that everybody was firing their weapons. . . . I felt almost helpless sitting there.” In the end, the Blackwater helicopter transported the Marine to safety. “It was OK with [Bremer] if they went out and saved some American lives,” said Toohey.36
In another video filmed on the CPA roof in Najaf, Blackwater helicopters can be seen dropping off supplies.37 The video then cuts to a closeup of what appears to be a Blackwater contractor aiming a large sniper-style weapon. “He slipped into a building,” a man says off camera. “Guy on the wall runnin’?” asks the sniper. Before the man off camera says, “Yep,” the sniper calmly pulls the trigger. Three shots ring out. He reloads his clip.
“We got a group of three. They’re all runnin’ now,” says the man off camera. “Wow, we’ve got lots of—see the guy in white? He’s goin’ too fast—now they’re haulin’ ass.” The sniper adjusts his scope. “We got a big group comin’. On the wall, squeezin’ off,” he calmly announces. Three more shots are fired off. “Wow, you got a whole group of ’em,” says the man off camera, who appears to be acting as a spotter.
Another shot.
“We got a bunch of bad guys at twelve o’clock, 800 meters,” says the man off camera into his walkie-talkie. “We’ve got about fifteen of ’em on the run up here.” The spotter is asked for the location of the “bad guys” from a voice on the other end as the sniper continues firing. It was unnecessary, though. “Negative,” he replies. “He cleaned ’em all out.”
A short while later, the sniper indicates that U.S. forces have joined the battle, dropping a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM)—a GPS-controlled air-to-surface missile, sometimes referred to as a “smart bomb”—in the vicinity. The sniper asks his colleague, “Who dropped the JDAM?”
“Marines.”
“Yeah,” the sniper says. “We were flyin’ in right as that JDAM was hittin’.” The sniper’s reference to “flyin’ in” as the JDAM missile was hitting indicates that in addition to ammunition, Blackwater also deployed more of its men to Najaf during the fighting.
“Another car haulin’ ass out—blue Mercedes,” the sniper says, firing a shot. “OK, I hit the car right in front of him.” Another shot. The video then cuts to bursts of shooting and then back to the sniper again. “That guy with a green flag?” he asks. “Yeah. There you go,” says his partner. A shot rings out. “That’s Mahdi Army. Green flag is Mahdi Army—they’re to be engaged at any opportunity.” Three more shots. “OK, you see the road that goes straight out like that? That road right there?” asks the spotter.
“Yeah.”
“Follow it out—straight out—about 800 meters,” he instructs the sniper. As the sniper reloads, his partner exclaims, “Holy shit—look at all them fuckers.” Then to the sniper: “All right, you’re on ’em.” The sniper begins picking people off. “You guys are dead on,” says the spotter. Three more shots. As he shoots, the sniper declares, “Jesus Christ, it’s like a fucking turkey shoot.” Two more shots. “They’re taking cover,” says the spotter. Another shot. The Blackwater men then say they are receiving return fire and begin accelerating their firing pace. The video then cuts to a scene of heavy outgoing fire. “Smoke that motherfucker when he comes around the corner! Hit him now!” someone yells. Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.
Blackwater contractor Ben Thomas—the man who admitted to killing an Iraqi with the unapproved “blended metal” bullets in September 200338—said he was on the roof in Najaf that day. Two years after the Najaf shootout, when the home videos had circulated widely around the Internet, Thomas lashed out at critics of the conduct of the Blackwater forces that day. “You wanna know what its like to be shoulder to shoulder with 8 teamates while 1,200 Mahdi troops hit the wire at 300 meters on three flanks? And then criticize the actions of my teamates based on a grainy video?” [sic] Thomas wrote in a posting on a private military contractor Web forum to which he is a frequent contributor.39 “My seven teamates and our El Salvadorian [SFODA] who fought with us are the only people who saw what happend. War is chronicaled and studied. Najaf is just another small battle in history but for us it was a place of alot of killing and dying. Its not a light dinner topic” [sic].40 As for the man on the tape heard using the word “nigger,” Thomas wrote: “My Teamate who had never been in direct combat and rarely swore can be heard making a
racial slur. This is not his character. Its a man who has just killed 17 enemy troops who had slipped to within 70 meters of our Alamo. When my friend stopped the advance cold, alone and under direct fire, the worst word his mind could muster to yell at the dead bastards was ‘nigger’. When he saw the video he cried. He isn’t a racist. What you hear is a man terrified and victorious. But you don’t see that in the video”41 [sic].
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