Iraq

Truth at a dead end

Several Iraqis say Ukrainian soldiers beat civilians and left a teen to die in a burning car after a wreck. The Ukrainians say it's a fable born of greed. Thin facts reveal no answers.

[Times photos: Kinfay Moroti]

Muter Thejil, 23, died from his injuries after an Oct. 20 car accident with coalition forces.

Muter Thejil's mother, Sabria Thejil, right, is comforted in Taji, Iraq, by her niece, Shahd Thejil, during a mourning ceremony.

Getheth Thejil videotaped the last moments of the life of his son, Muter, at the Brain and Spinal Cord Hospital in Baghdad. Muter Thejil, who suffered a broken neck in the accident, died Nov. 19.

Sabria Thejil prays aloud and chants her late son Muter's name outside the family home in Taji, Iraq. The family spent its savings on food for a three-day funeral.

Eight-year-old Raheem Nasser, right, lost his brother, Karim, 13, left, after Karim burned to death in the accident, Iraqis say.

Click here to view larger version of graphic.

ZUBAYDIYAH, Iraq - On this single point, everyone agrees: On Oct. 20, a car carrying Iraqi civilians collided with a minibus full of Ukrainian coalition troops.

Beyond that, there is bitter dispute.

Did 13-year-old Karim Nasser, trapped in the car and screaming for help, burn to death as his two uncles lay unconscious from beatings by Ukrainian soldiers? That is what the Iraqis say.

Or was the story of Karim's death a fabrication, part of a tale concocted by a poor Iraqi family to wring money out of the U.S.-led coalition? That is what the Ukrainians suggest.

Each side has its videotapes, its witnesses, its official records. Each side insists it is telling the truth and the other is lying. As is often the case when emotions run high and language is a barrier, it may be impossible to know exactly what happened between the Russian-speaking Ukrainians and the Arabic-speaking Iraqis on a quiet country road.

But human rights groups and other critics say the coalition needs to do a better job of investigating the deaths of Iraqi civilians in incidents involving foreign soldiers. Since the war began in March, some reports put the number of civilian casualties at 4,300, others even higher.

No one is certain because the U.S. military says it is impossible to keep an accurate count in this California-sized country where confusion reigns and communications are spotty at best. Until a reporter began asking questions, coalition press officers had never heard of the accident that injured several Ukrainians and claimed two Iraqi lives.

"Whether you're for or against the war, you need to look at the real cost of the war, not just in terms of money but in human costs," says Jim Naureckas, spokesman for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a watchdog group in New York. "I don't think the Pentagon is making any effort at all to keep track of Iraqis, both combatants and civilians, who have been killed."

As the Iraqis tell the story, the day began happily - two brothers off to see their sister get married in the village of Zubaydiyah, about 70 miles south of Baghdad.

Adel Thejil, 19, was at the wheel of the 1985 Chevrolet Caprice. His oldest brother, 23-year-old Muter, sat next to him. In back was their young nephew, Karim.

After leaving the chaotic traffic of Baghdad, they pulled onto a two-lane road that passes farm fields and tiny villages. Ahead were several cars carrying the bride and other members of the wedding party.

In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Adel said they were nearing Zubaydiyah about 3:30 p.m. when a military convoy approached from the other direction. A minibus suddenly broke out of the convoy, he said, and pulled into his lane as if to pass the lead vehicle. Adel said he swerved right to avoid the bus, then swerved left because it still appeared to be headed straight toward him.

The car and bus collided on the convoy's side of the road.

As Adel described it, the wreck was minor.

"We weren't injured from the accident, we were just shocked. The only thing I remember is six soldiers pulled me out of the car. They kept beating me with Kalashnikovs; they didn't leave any part of my body without beating. After that, they let me sit on my knees, and they kept beating my neck."

Adel said soldiers pulled Muter, his brother, through a window and beat him, too.

Then, Adel said, the Ukrainians asked him to open the trunk. Adel told them he couldn't walk; they took the keys from the ignition, searched the trunk and found no weapons or explosives. Karim, possibly injured in the collision, was still in the car, Adel said:

"I shouted, and they saw the boy in the back seat. After that, I passed out and three days later I woke up in hospital."

At this point, the story is picked up by other Iraqis who say they were at the scene. Among them is Naim Khanzer, a relative also headed for the wedding.

Khanzer, 33, said a Ukrainian armored vehicle shoved the Caprice, with Karim still inside, onto the side of the road. That apparently ruptured the gas tank and started a fire.

"There was a small fire in back at the tank; it kept increasing," Khanzer said. The boy screamed for help, but "the Ukrainians saw him and they didn't do anything."

As other motorists stopped and nearby villagers ran to the road, soldiers ordered them to keep their distance, Khanzer said: "People saw him but they could do nothing because nobody could get close enough."

Within minutes, the Caprice was fully ablaze. The screams died away.

Bystanders took the injured brothers to a clinic in Zubaydiyah. Hassan Nassir, another uncle of Karim's, said he lifted his nephew's charred remains from the car.

"He became like this size" - Nassir held his hands two feet apart - "and I put him in a bag."

The Ukrainians' account could hardly be more different.

With 1,200 troops in Iraq, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine has one of the biggest contingents in the coalition. The Ukrainians, who serve under Polish command, patrol an area southeast of Baghdad to the Iranian border a few hundred miles away.

So far, the Ukrainians say, they have had good relations with the Iraqis. There have been no fatal attacks against them like those on their U.S, British, Italian, Polish and Spanish counterparts.

On Oct. 20, several Ukrainian vehicles were in a convoy headed to Baghdad to pick up equipment to take back to their base at Kut, two hours south. An armored personnel carrier led; a soldier inside videotaped their progress.

A portion of the tape, which the Ukrainians made available to the Times, shows the convoy passing through a village as kids wave. Then the camera shakes violently.

The next scene shows a serious accident: a white Kia minibus on its side and flames shooting out from under the front of a car.

Among the 14 Ukrainians on the bus - the second vehicle in the convoy - was Lt. Col. Yuriy Gaistruk. He said they were going about 40 mph when the Iraqi car careered into the dirt on its side of the road, then headed straight toward them.

"The wheels went off the side of the road because it was going at a very high speed," Gaistruk said in an interview at the coalition's Kut offices. "The driver lost control, and the car began to move in the direction of this car."

The collision knocked the minibus into the air and onto the driver's side, smashing the windshield and trapping several soldiers inside, some with broken bones. Gaistruk, only slightly injured, crawled through a window; the videotape shows him walking, somewhat dazed, in front of the bus as several other soldiers try to right it.

Also on the tape are two people lying motionless several yards away. Gaistruk said they jumped or were thrown out of the car before it hit the minibus.

"During the impact there was nobody in the car," he insisted. Gaistruk said he and other soldiers looked carefully in the Caprice after the accident, and again saw no one.

The videotape does not show anyone looking in the car, but it does show a Ukrainian soldier in front of it, trying to put out the fire with an extinguisher. He fails; flames billow up from the right side of the Caprice.

In the final scene on the tape, a Ukrainian armored vehicle pushes the car, now nearly hidden by dense black smoke, off the pavement. No Iraqis are visible except for the two bodies on the road.

The Ukrainians say the tape proves their account is true and that the Iraqis are lying:

- The Iraqis claim the accident was minor; the tape clearly shows major damage to both vehicles.

- An Iraqi who claims to be a witness says the fire started after the car was pushed off the road; the tape shows the fire started on impact, or almost immediately after.

- Adel, the car's driver, said the Ukrainians searched the trunk; the tape shows them only trying to put out the fire and moving the car to the side.

The Ukrainians contend Adel and his relatives fabricated the story of the beatings and even Karim's death in hopes of getting compensation from the coalition.

"This is confirmed by the fact there wasn't any body or any corpse on the place of the road accident," said Maj. Gennadiy Rzohkov. "The temperature during the burning of the car couldn't destroy all the body. If there was a victim, the first wish of this man (Adel) would be to save the boy, but he didn't even say anything about it. As a lawyer, I'm not seeing any details (to prove) another person was there."

In fact, there is strong evidence that Karim not only burned to death in the car, but that the Ukrainians knew about it.

Lt. Mohammed Hindi of the Zubaydiyah police department said he learned of the accident when Karim's uncles were brought to the town's clinic. He immediately left for the scene with five police officers and arrived about an hour after the collision.

By that time, a U.S. helicopter had taken the injured Ukrainians to a hospital. Some of the remaining soldiers were in their vehicles holding Kalashnikovs, Hindi said, while others kept bystanders away from the Caprice.

Hindi looked in the car and saw a body on the back seat floorboards. A Ukrainian nearby spoke broken Arabic, and Hindi asked him, "Why didn't you take this body out of the car?" The Ukrainian replied that soldiers were afraid the Caprice was a suicide bomb and might explode.

A few minutes later, a car carrying other relatives to the wedding pulled up. At Hindi's direction, a policeman helped Karim's uncle put the remains in a flour sack the uncle had in his trunk.

Hindi said several Ukrainians were near the car and "absolutely" knew a body had been removed from it. "I'm 100 percent sure they saw," he said.

Karim's body was taken to the morgue in Baghdad for an autopsy, as is routine in Iraq. Hindi has a copy of the report, which lists the cause of death as "burns."

He said the Ukrainians also photographed his own report stating Karim had died in the accident.

If the Ukrainians didn't realize someone was in the Caprice when it burned, Hindi said, they must have known after seeing the body removed, or after photographing the report listing a fatality.

The Ukrainians' account raises other questions.

Although the videotape appears to support their version, there is no date and time. Thus it is impossible to tell whether parts were edited out.

Adel and Muter, for example, are only seen lying still although Gaistruk, the Ukrainian officer, acknowledged that at one point Adel was sitting up and "crying." An hour after the accident, the Ukrainians were still videotaping when Lt. Hindi arrived, suggesting there is more footage than the two minutes the Times was shown.

And it remains unclear how the brothers ended up outside their car before the collision. How could they have "jumped" or even been thrown out if the Caprice didn't hit anything or overturn when it initially ran off the road?

"Please be logical - how can I be out of the car before the accident?" Adel asked, wearing a cervical collar and walking with a limp weeks later. He insists that his injuries - and the broken neck from which his brother died Nov. 19 - came from beatings, not injuries suffered in the accident itself.

Earlier this month, a judge found Adel "100 percent" at fault because the Caprice was in the wrong lane. The Ukrainians have immunity from legal action, the judge ruled.

Still, Adel's father, Getheth Thejil, feels he is entitled to compensation.

The family's income came from the now-ruined Caprice, which Muter and Adel took turns driving as a taxi in Baghdad. While Muter was in the hospital, his father often bought extra medicine for him; when he died, the family spent all its savings on food for the three-day fataa, or funeral, that draws relatives and friends from all over.

"I don't have anything," Thejil said, fingering prayer beads in his mud-walled house. "There is an Arabic saying, "We are sitting on poor carpet."'

A few days after the accident, another son borrowed $60 to rent a videocamera. He went to the scene - the Caprice is still there - and taped residents of nearby villages who claimed to have witnessed the beatings and Karim's cries for help. The family hopes to show the tape to L. Paul Bremer, head of coalition reconstruction efforts.

In a case with so much contradictory evidence, Lt. Hindi is careful to stick to the irrefutable facts, scarce as they are. Does he think the Ukrainians beat two adults and did nothing to save a 13-year-old boy? Or did the Iraqis deliberately make up a disturbing tale?

"I don't know," he says, "I wasn't there."

- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

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