Bombed Iraqi sheikh vows to fight on against Qaeda
BASSAM, Iraq (AFP) — The bomb planted under his car may have shredded his left leg and seared his flesh but it has not shattered Iraq tribal leader Zeydan Khalaf Mohammed's determination to rout Al-Qaeda from his area.
Nor, apparently, has it dampened the quick-to-smile 55-year-old Sunni sheikh's natural good humour.
"I'll fight them even if I have to crawl," Sheikh Zeydan said, grinning through excruciating pain while lying bandaged on his bed in rural Bassam village about 25 kilometres (16 miles) west of Baghdad.
The bomb exploded on February 3 while the grey-haired sheikh was driving along the rough dirt tracks next to a newly-replenished canal that is allowing his parched fields to turn green for the first time in four years.
At about 8:40 am he was on his way with his cousin Adnon Zeydan to collect the wages from the US military for members of the area's anti-Qaeda "Awakening" front, which he leads and helped found.
The car was blasted skywards then rolled about 20 metres (yards). Three windows were blown out and the vehicle filled with smoke. Adnon pulled himself out and then dragged his uncle free.
Adnon suffered superficial cuts but Sheikh Zeydan's left leg bore the brunt of the blast. Doctors extracted the remnants of his shredded calf muscle that afternoon.
Now only days later, lying on his bed with with exposed tibia and tendon, burns and bruises covering his limbs and body, he counts himself lucky to have survived.
US commander Brigadier General Mike Milano, who had dropped in to visit the sheikh during an operational tour of the area, was sympathetic, telling him to lie still and not to try to raise himself to shake hands.
"It's ok," quipped the sheikh, "My legs hurt whether I move them or not."
Growing more serious, he told the general the Awakening members in the village were feeling insecure.
"This accident has created distrust," he said, but begged Milano, deputy commanding general on coalition forces in Baghdad province, not to raid his village.
"I know all the people here. They are my uncles, my nephews and my cousins," he said. "They would not do this to me."
US military commander in the area, Colonel Robert McAleer believes, however that some families in the village are Al-Qaeda members and are indeed likely behind the attack, no matter what Zeydan may say.
To the sheikh, however, he replied diplomatically: "I will follow where the evidence takes me. Inshallah (God willing) it will take me far from here."
Out of earshot of the sheikh, he was more forthright.
"There's a lot of evidence pointing to the tribes here," McAleer told AFP.
Many of the villagers are battle-hardened Sunni insurgents who spent bitter months fighting Shiites alongside Al-Qaeda when Bassam, near Abu Ghraib, was being torn apart by sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007, he explained.
Though there has been no fighting for nine months, suspicions still run as deep as the newly ploughed furrows in the rich brown earth in this fertile farming area fed by waters of the nearby Tigris.
With Sheikh Zeydan not only at the forefront of a new fight against former allies Al-Qaeda but also leading attempts to effect reconciliation with the village's Shiite neighbours, he was an obvious target.
Situated on what the US military terms a "fault line" -- a sharp divide between rival Sunni and Shiite areas -- Bassam still bears the scars of fierce fighting. It was eventually taken over by Al-Qaeda on the one side and the Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on the other.
Ruined and deserted houses tell of bitter battles while hundreds of displaced Shiites living in makeshift housing deep within a zone controlled by the Mahdi Army give a glimpse of the human cost of the warring.
Villagers tell of three days during the blistering heat of July in 2006 when Sunni insurgents besieged a small Shiite settlement in the area, preventing the 190 or so inhabitants from reaching food supplies or, more crucially, water.
After three increasingly-parched days, on July 19, the Shiites families surrendered and negotiated a settlement -- they would be given safe passage provided they left the area never to return.
Women, children and some men boarded a convoy of minibuses and trucks and began a slow journey out along the rutted tracks. Not far along the route, the convoy was stopped by gunmen. Five men were ordered out the vehicles.
The convoy headed off. Shots were heard. The men have not been seen since.
Eighteen months down the line, with Zeydan's Awakening fighters having put most Al-Qaeda die-hards to flight and the Mahdi Army observing a ceasefire, a measure of calm has returned to the once-thriving farmlands.
Water pump stations have been repaired and crops have been planted.
For real peace to return, McAleer believes, however, two matters have to be settled.
The bodies of the five men gunned down on that white-hot July day in 2006 have to be located and handed over to their families for burial.
And those who tried to blow away Sheikh Zeydan and his reconciliation efforts have to be found and punished.
