The Independent
by Robert Fisk

There’s the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans - if you are lucky.

Yassin al-Sammerai was not. On 14 July, the second grade schoolboy had gone to spend the night with two college friends and - this being a city without electricity in the hottest month of the year - they decided to spend the night sleeping in the front garden. Let his broken 65 year-old father Selim take up the story, for he’s the one who still cannot believe his son is dead - or what the Americans told him afterwards.

“It was three-thirty in the morning and they were all asleep, Yassin and his friends Fahed and Walid Khaled. There was an American patrol outside and then suddenly, a Bradley armoured vehicle burst through the gate and wall and drove over Yassin. You know how heavy these things are. He died instantly. But the Americans didn’t know what they’d done. He was lying crushed under the vehicle for 17 minutes. Um Khaled, his friends’ mother, kept shouting in Arabic: “There is a boy under this vehicle.”

The Independent
by Robert Fisk

It was the same lunatic corkscrew landing in the same little Lebanese plane, barrelling down into the sandstorm of Baghdad airport. Piloting his 20-passenger twin-prop aircraft - from Flying Carpet Airlines, no less - Captain Hussam has three things on his mind: American helicopters, pilotless reconnaissance drones and incoming missiles. So we all scan the dun-coloured runway and terminals and the grotty slums beside the airport road for the tell-tale pink flame surviving pilots have sometimes caught sight of.

But we landed safely and a scruffy bus took us to the terminal where I bid the customs officer Salaam Aleikum and he cheerfully asked me if I was a Muslim. “English,” I replied, which seemed to be good enough to him. He couldn’t break the airline security string on my bag so he waved me through. Then there came The Airport Road. We all need to put this in capitals these days. As my Iraqi fixer put it very well: “It’s really just a matter of luck.” Sometimes you glide safely across to the city, sometimes you get caught up in a firefight, sometimes - like poor Marla Ruzicka, the American girl who tried to count casualties - you are too close to a suicide attack. “I’m alive,” she cried just before she died.

The following is the transcript of Milan Rai’s recent interview on Democracy Now! If you would like to listen to this segment please visit Democracy Now!

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005
Before London Bombing, Leaked UK Memo Warned Iraq War a Key Cause for Growth of “Extremism” in Britain

By Milan Rai, Justice Not Vengeance

13 July 2005: The Bombers Identified, The Report Censored

1) Censoring Crucial Information

Now that the police have identified at least three of the four bombers who struck London last Thursday as young British Muslim men, the question of how British Muslims could become so alienated as to carry out such a horrific attack has come to the centre of political and public attention.

In this context, it is absolutely extraordinary that the most authoritative source of information about this crisis, the joint Home Office and Foreign Office report, ‘Young Muslims and Extremism’, which was leaked to the Sunday Times and published with a front-page headline three days ago, has been entirely censored from today’s coverage and commentary in the serious British newspapers.

DAY ONE: 8 July 2005

The atrocities in London have shocked the world, and the world demands answers. Unfortunately, the answers being given in the British media are often highly misleading. (A brief analysis is here.)