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| NEWS | By LEE GORDON |
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SA’AD was the youngest looking gunman I had ever met. He was a few inches shy of five feet tall, his frame was slender and the ancient AK-47 assault rifle he proudly toted looked like an oversized cannon in his hands. His face was swathed in a kufia scarf but his eyes were lively and mischievous. He cocked his head and fixed me with a cold stare but when the scarf suddenly fell away I cracked a smile. The boy soldier eyed me angrily until, just as suddenly, the corners of his mouth lifted into a broad smile and he was just a boy again, a tangle of unruly black hair sprouting from the edges of the scarf. It took a while to coax his story from him. He said his family had fled the city of Fallujah on the eve of the assault by several thousand US Marines in April. But he had run away and with his father’s gun had volunteered to fight with the Mujahideen. He recalled how his father had first taught him to shoot when he was eight and how he had practised until he was a crack shot. “I’m a sniper,” he boasted, pointing to a large building opposite from where he took pot shots are Marine snipers positioned along the main boulevard. My translator Ghareeb, a heavily built Palestinian who had fought with Hamas, burst into raucous laughter and clapped the boy on his back. “He’s the littlelest Mujahideen I’ve ever seen,” laughed Ghareeb. Over the next few days I watched him work his sniper position firing occasional shots in the direction of the Marine sharpshooters, and carrying the wounded into the field hospital next door to the mosque. When he ate his lunch with the other men his chest swelled and he basked in the company of his new family. I saw Sa’ad again during the May street festival to celebrate the US withdrawal from the city. I noticed him eyeing a Swiss army-style utility tool I was carrying on my belt and when I offered it to him he broke into a boyish grin then strolled into the street with a new swagger, followed by a knot of orphaned street boys. It was the last time I saw him. Sa’ad never saw his family again, I learned. Perhaps they were among the civilians who never made it out of the city, perhaps they became separated somehow. Yesterday (Wednesday) morning BBC Radio 4 broadcast a report by their journalist who was embedded with the Marines during last week’s assault on the city. The reporter noted how during an attack on a house a Marine had shot and killed a boy about 10 years old. According to a doctor in Fallujah there is every chance Sa’ad was the unnamed boy shot dead by the Marine, that he is by now one of the hundreds dumped into unmarked graves as bodies are hastily removed. The US assault on Fallujah has sharpened the debate over embedded journalists. What is the value of reports by Western journalists who go in with the US forces? How can they report the war by watching an artillery battery unleash a barrage unless they can see what happens when they land? Arabic television news network Al Jazeera left Fallujah but distributed handheld cameras to civilians, including doctors, in order to record the impact of the war. “We must thank Al Jazeera,” said former BBC journalist Martin Bell as we chatted yesterday. “That’s the right idea and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do that.” Why didn’t the BBC use Arabic reporters to embed with the Fallujah civilians, or give cameras to the doctors? There might have been fewer unmarked graves and Sa’ad might have told the world the story of the Littlest Mujahideen. |
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