Iraqi police officer makes ultimate sacrifice to protect civilians

Thanks Maury for posting the link.

'As the suicide bomber clutched the detonator to his explosive belt, preparing to spray fire and shrapnel into a religious procession here, an Iraqi police officer named Bilal Ali Muhammad faced a choice between his own life and something larger.

If he ran and took cover, Mr. Muhammad, 31, had a chance to save himself, to continue supporting his widowed mother, to help put his younger brother through college and to watch his three young daughters grow up.

Instead, the officer — a Sunni Muslim — threw himself onto the bomber, blunting the explosion’s impact on the Shiite worshipers.

“He gave his soul to the country,” said his mother, Alaahin Hassan, holding two of his daughters in her lap as dozens of black-veiled women filled her living room this week with ritualized wails of grief. “He believed in God. That made him great.”

In a country fractured by sect and ethnicity, from villages like this all the way to the government that is finally forming in Baghdad, Mr. Muhammad’s last act was a burst of heroism and humanity set against the viciousness that still stalks Iraq.

Many Iraqis see the police and the army as corrupt, incompetent and brutal, still unprepared to secure the country as the Americans withdraw over the next year. But Mr. Muhammad’s death, one of thousands among Iraqi security forces, offers a counterpoint to that view.

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Muhammad was guarding the edge of an annual religious celebration of Ashura as Shiites waved green and black banners and beat drums to commemorate the killing of one of their sect’s foundational members in A.D. 680. The ceremonies have been ripe targets for Sunni insurgents, and Iraq’s leaders have deployed swarms of security forces this year to guard against attacks.

At 2:30 p.m., according to witnesses and police officials, Mr. Muhammad spotted a suspicious man approaching the crowd, his hand wedged into his pocket.

Mr. Muhammad, a police officer for five years, stopped the man and asked him, What do you have in your pocket? The man replied, It’s none of your business.

Pulling open the man’s jacket, Mr. Muhammad found an explosive belt strapped to his chest. Whether from instinct or training, or sheer lack of any other options, he acted in that instant.

Shouting warnings to the crowd, he wrapped his arms around the bomber. As both men tumbled to the dirt, the explosion ripped through their bodies and raked the street, scarring the white walls of a schoolyard.

A woman and her granddaughter sitting nearby were killed and a dozen others were wounded. But the police said the death toll would have been drastically higher had Mr. Muhammad not thrown himself onto the bomber.

“He’s a hero,” said Mr. Muhammad’s uncle, Hamza Hassan, who spent the day welcoming well-wishers to a funeral tent outside Mr. Muhammad’s family home here in this farming town near the Iranian border. “The only choice was to become a martyr.”

Since 2004, about 2,200 police officers have been killed here in Diyala, a northeastern province that is a stronghold of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and a crucible of Iraq’s volatile mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. They have been killed in broad offensives against police stations, by magnetic bombs under their cars, by pistol shots at checkpoints.

At least three of them, confronting suicide bombers, have made the extraordinary decision to wrap their arms around their killers to absorb the blast.'

The Brave Iraqi

Stephen Farrell wrote a nice post about his friend, a brave Iraqi journalist who died in the bombing of the Hamra Hotel: "Another time I was heading home from the Green Zone at the end of the day when a car filled with gunmen pulled in behind us near the Palestine Hotel. Yasser inserted his own car between ours and theirs and slammed on the brakes.

No one expected him to do that; no one would have asked him to do that. As our car hurtled off the gunmen turned on him, chasing his car along Abu Nuwas Street for the best part of half an hour while he desperately shouted a commentary to us into a cellphone that was flying about on the floor of the car, because he needed both his hands on the wheel.

It was an act of unbelievable bravery. It was not done for a salary, or to keep a job or because he somehow feared death less or welcomed it more than any of us. It was done because he was Yasser, because those were his values. And that day he eventually made it back to the safety — safety — of the Hamra Hotel."

Bravery in Saddam's Iraq

When an attendee of the execution foolishly shouted "Muqtada", Saddam responded by asking "is this your manhood?" or "is this what you consider bravery?" I didn't like hearing Muqtada's name during the execution, as if this was being done to avenge Muqtada. Sadr's was only one of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families who lost innocent loved ones to Saddam's regime. This is justice for Iraq, for all Iraqis. I would have done a few things differently if I were in charge of the execution, starting with postponing it until after the Anfal trial. But I am dismayed by Arabs and Muslims who are calling it a 'barbaric lynching'. I wonder if they have ever considered the barbarity of the insurgency in Iraq, or the barbarity of Saddam's regime.

The remark about bravery - one of Saddam's last - reminded me of what fedayeen Saddam did to a 25 year old Iraqi woman in 2000. Apparently this is an example what Saddam considered to be the mark of bravery in his Iraq:

'A woman known as Um Haydar was beheaded reportedly without charge or trial at the end of December 2000. She was 25 years' old and married with three children. Her husband was sought by the security authorities reportedly because of his involvement in Islamist armed activities against the state. He managed to flee the country. Men belonging to Feda'iyye Saddam came to the house in al-Karrada district and found his wife, children and his mother. Um Haydar was taken to the street and two men held her by the arms and a third pulled her head from behind and beheaded her in front of the residents. The beheading was also witnessed by members of the Ba'ath Party in the area. The security men took the body and the head in a plastic bag, and took away the children and the mother-in-law. The body of Um Haydar was later buried in al-Najaf. The fate of the children and the mother-in-law remains unknown.'