Sydney Morning Herald

Handicapped boy who was made into a bomb
 

By Paul McGeough, Chief Herald Correspondent, in Baghdad
February 2, 2005
 

Amar Ahmed Mohammed was 19 years old. But the fact that he had the mind of a four-year-old did not stop the

Mind of a four-year-old ...
a family photograph of Amar Ahmed Mohammed,
who was killed on polling day in Iraq.

 insurgency's hard men as they strapped explosives to his chest and guided him to a voting centre in suburban Al-Askan.

Before dawn yesterday in Baghdad, his parents strapped his broken remains to the roof of a taxi to lead a sorrowful procession to the holy city of Najaf. There, they gave him a ceremonial wash and shrouded him in white cotton before burying him in the shadow of the shrine of Imam Ali, the sainted founder of their Shiite creed.

Unlike the hundreds of others in the region who knowingly volunteered for an explosive death, Amar died because he did not know. He had Down syndrome.

On most days, Amar would slip out of his parents' house and wander the streets of the Al-Askan neighbourhood until dusk when, usually, a friend or neighbour would bring him home. On Sunday, when his parents, Ahmed, 42, and Fatima, 40, went to vote with their two daughters, they left him at home as usual.

Al-Askan is a dangerous and mixed area. When the Herald attempted to visit it yesterday the police allowed us to advance only a few blocks into the area before ordering us out - the immediate area of Amar's home was the centre of a running gunfight between Shiites of the Al-Bahadel tribe and Sunnis of the Al-Ghedi.

One of Amar's cousins, a 29-year-old teacher who asked not to be named, claimed the insurgents must have kidnapped him. "He was like a baby," he said. "He had nothing to do with the resistance and there was nothing in the house for him to make a bomb. He was Shiite - why bomb his own people?

"He was mindless, but he was mostly happy, laughing and playing with the children in the street. Now, his father is inconsolable; his mother cries all the time."

After voting at 7.30am, Amar's parents joined the extended family for a celebration that became a lunch of chicken and rice, soup and orange juice at the home of one of his relatives.

The sound of the blast interrupted the party. But it was assumed to be a mortar shell, Amar's cousin said, a follow-up to a mortar barrage across the city in the first hours of voting. "Everyone was very happy and excited, but news came that a mongoli had been a bomber. Ahmed and Fatima became distressed and they raced home," he said. "They got neighbours to search and one of them identified Amar's head where it lay on the pavement. His body was broken into pieces.

"I have heard of them using dead people and donkeys and dogs to hide their bombs, but how could they do this to a boy like Amar?"

Apparently, Amar triggered the bomb before he got to the intended target. No one else was hurt or killed. But he was not the only one in Baghdad to make a mark on the election. A dirty pair of sneakers were all that remained of another suicide bomber who tried to make his way to another polling station.

A police colonel, Salam Alak al-Asadie, told how his neighbour stopped the bomber. "There was a Sudanese man with a bomb. He looked odd and Naiem Hamoudi Jacobi jumped on him, grabbing at his arms and trying to stop him exploding the device hidden in his clothes. He was so brave. Two policemen who were nearby died, but had Naiem not acted when he did the bomb might have killed a hundred people.

"Voting had been slow till then. But people were so angry they poured out of their homes - even the Sunnis who had said they would not vote."

Naiem Jacobi, 35, was the father of three children. His brother-in-law, Mohammed Bakir, said: "This is the price we have to pay for freedom. But this family has paid too much - 14 of my brothers and relatives were hanged by Saddam during the 1991 rebellion in Najaf. I was advised to flee the country and I did. So did my brother, Salam - he now lives in Sydney, Australia."

Unconfirmed reports of insurgents co-opting two other people with Down syndrome (both plots were foiled) suggest that Amar's death was part of a deliberate city-wide plan, rather than the action of a rogue unit.